Ugly Duckling Presse

In this debut collection by Terrence Arjoon, various characters people the text, from historical personages to actors in hastily paper-mache’d masks, each peeking onto stage from the wings. Composed of partial translations from Gérard de Nerval, pastoral pastiches, slant rhymes, off-sonnets, and malapropisms, The Disinherited inhabits a world spanning the olive groves of old Europe to spills of ink in the renegade printing studios of New York, as Arjoon and his merry wanderers take a meandering stroll through diaspora and exile, the Romantic and surreal, reaching towards something richer, denser, and stranger.

A previously-untranslated classic of the queer canon, SMALLTOWNNOVELLA follows b, a teenaged, working-class communist who falls in love with leif, a popular jock. When leif becomes fearful of the consequences of their affair, he instigates a community-wide assault. Written in a brilliant, all-lowercase, stream-of-consciousness, Schernikau’s novella is a radical reimagining of the German Bildungsroman.Originally published in West Germany in 1980, Lucy Jones’ clear-sighted translation brings SMALLTOWNNOVELLA to English readers for the first time.

At a house party with as many antipsychotics as party drugs, Danilo—bakla, schizophrenic, and heartbroken—is tracing the disintegration of a recent relationship. Dancing and stumbling with his Filipina nurse friends, Danilo traverses a Chicago apartment filled with gay ghosts and broken Tagalog. Outside the window, the lake is too big and crashing.In a hybrid of drama and poetry, Rob Macaisa Colgate writes in rigorous and experimental verse to upend our understandings of desire, race, disability, and care: “That’s so like me, to treat my body / like a gun: either he doesn’t want / to touch it or uses it to make me / stay. I knew he would run.”

By the time of his death at twenty-nine, bruno darío had already left a surprising and indelible mark on Mexican poetry with Lantana or, the indissoluble exhalation, a trilogy comprising the three full-length books he published in his lifetime. By turns sardonic and lyrical, scathing and irreverent, the hallucinatory sequence centers on the relationship of a young man (the Inconsolable) and an older woman who unexpectedly takes her own life (Lantana/Anfitriona). Across the three books, darío seamlessly code-switches between registers and genres: soliloquies from people, places, and things; the Inconsolable’s notes, poems, and letters; the discourses of Lantana’s buried corpse as gravity pulls her deeper into the soil. Lantana is a kaleidoscopic assemblage of texts that experiments with centuries of poetic tradition and firmly establishes darío as one of Mexico’s most daring poets.This bilingual edition, featuring a biographical translator’s introduction by Kit Schluter, marks the first appearance of darío’s complete trilogy in a single volume.

The poems of Mikael Johani’s second collection Mongrel Kampung are mixed, mutated utterances of a heteroglossic headspace, a home at once familiar and foreign, backwards and forwards, I and another. Sometimes a poem is in English but refers to a world in which English is never spoken. It may contain a phrase in Javanese or Greek or Arabic or Aussie, but is intended for an audience who will never understand what it means. It may retell a dialogue in multiple languages, but in the poet’s hands all languages blur into one language. These poems are translingual mini-tomes—tirades, historiographic treatises, love letters, protest songs, errant tweet threads. The spritz, spritz of cosmopolitan intimacies sprayed from an heirloom perfume atomizer beside an open sewer. In nomine patris et filii et spiritus cap tikus.