UCR Press ~ California
(University of California Riverside)

Metaphysical Sketch
By Christopher Buckley
Riverside, California: University of California, Riverside, 2010.
Edition of 100.

12.25 x 15.75"; single sheet. Letterpress printed in Palatino. Hand-inked reduction linocut illustration. Artwork design and printing by Michael Haight. Printed on an Asbern Petko Press.

This is the second in the UCR Poets in Print broadsides.

Christopher Buckley teaches creative writing at UC. Riverside. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry for 2007-2008. His fifteenth book, Modern History: Prose Poems 1987-2007, was published in 2008

Something familiar as the moon
                                  with a washed out edge
climbing the plain air
                        of afternoon,
                                           starry leaves of the liquidambars,
ascending past the apex
             of our terra cotta roof inclined against the blue….

$25

MLB: Massachusetts
By Milosz Biedrzycki
Translated from the Polish by Frank L. Vigoda [Ann Frenkel and Gwido Zlatkes]
Riverside, California: University of California, Riverside, 2010.
Edition of 99.

12.5 x 19.25"; single sheet (broadside). Letterpress printed on a no. 1 Asbern press. Hand-set in Weiss Extra Bold. Designed and hand-set by Franck Wygoda.

Gwido Zlatkes: "The poem is by Milosz Biedrzycki who signs his poetry with his initials MLB. It comes from the volume 69, published by Zephyr Press in 2010. It has been translated from the Polish by Frank L. Vigoda who is a composite character of myself and Ann Frenkel. The broadside is signed by the three of us: MLB, AF and GZ. Franek Wygoda who designed and printed it is essentially the same as Frank Vigoda, it is just how you would write it in Polish."

Polish Cultural Institute New York: "Milosz Biedrzycki (known by his pen name MLB), was born in Koper, Slovenia in 1967 to Polish and Slovenian parents. He grew up and was educated in Poland, obtaining a master's degree as a geophysical engineer from the University of Mining and Metallurgy in Krakow, Poland, a field in which he remains active.

"MLB debuted in 1989 becoming a leading member of a group of Polish poets disdainfully labeled the 'O'Harists.' Inspired by new Polish translations of New York School poetry by Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsburg, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch, they welcomed this moniker and began publishing their iconoclastic verses in the underground journal bruLion during the last years of Communism. ...Since the bruLion era, MLB has published over six volumes of verse."

Ann Frenkel is a research librarian at the University of California, Riverside. Her translations of Polish verse have been published in a variety of journals including Chicago Review and Lyric Poetry Review. Her literary publications are published with a co-translator under the pen name Frank L. Vigoda.

Gwido Zlatkes was a poet working in Poland's experimental theater movement in the months before widespread strikes paralyzed the nation in the summer of 1980. A leader in the draft resistance Freedom and Peace Movement – the first independent peace group in the communist world – Zlatkes was arrested several times in the days before the opening of an international peace conference in Warsaw in May 1987. He wrote at various times for publications of resistance and later briefly worked as a foreign desk editor for Gazeta Wyborcza. Currently he lives and works in California, where he is Special Collections Librarian at University of California, Riverside.

pass me a tubajfor, creampuff
hey you're soft as water,
like melting butter, a total softie
I was ripping out sajding for these eyetalians
when you were still in diapers back in Poland
have you ever seen a house made of tubajfors, creampuff? ...

$50