Saint Ghetto of the Loans reissues a legendary but little seen masterpiece of French book art from 1950, by the Lettrist Gabriel Pomerand. The prose poem text appears in segments on left-hand pages (bilingually, in this edition), and its French words and syllables are represented visually by dazzling pictographs—rebuses—on pages facing.

Michael Kasper is the author of several books including The Shapes and Spacing of Letters, All Cotton Briefs, and Plans for the Night and has translated work by Felix Feneon and Louis Scutenaire. He is a Reference Librarian & the Collection Development Group Coordinator at Amherst College's Frost Library

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"Every 20th century art movement has certain works that acquire mythic status by their combination of idiosyncratic oddity and rarity. This fascinating work has mainly been known through reproduction of a handful of its pages and this exciting republication will finally bring attention to this amazing piece of graphic experimental writing."

—Johanna Drucker
Robertson Professor of Media Studies, University of Virginia

"...the bi-lingual appearance this year of Gabriel Pomerand’s legendary and very rare 1950 visual rebuses/textual booklength prose poem Saint Ghetto of the Loans [is] a truly major event. It provides a kind of physical Rosetta Stone (in a doubled way) for each reader’s further anarkeyological researches into the past and living world of Lettrism, as well as inspiration for artists/poets in many media to do verbivisivoci work in and outside the range of media the Lettrists continue very much to work in. Ugly Duckling Presse couldn’t have picked a better book, in an excellent translation by Michael Kaspar and Bhamati Viswanathan, to begin its Lost Literature Series with."

—Galatea Resurrects