Blue Birds and Red Horses

Blue Birds and Red Horses

by Inna Kabysh

translated by Katherine E. Young

 

39 pages, paper, staple bound

cover image is a detail from a photograph of a Children's World department store in Moscow, taken during the Soviet period.

Toad Press, 2018. $5.00

You can purchase a copy of Blue Birds and Red Horses at Asterism.

Inna Kabysh is the author of seven collections of poetry. She was born in Moscow in 1963. Her first collection, Lichnye trudnosti, was awarded the 1996 Pushkin Prize of the Alfred Toepfer Fund (Hamburg, Germany); she has also won the 2005 Anton Delwig Prize; the 2014 Moskovsky schet Prize; the 2016 Anna Akhmatova Prize; and the 2016 Deti Ra Prize. In 2011 Katherine E. Young’s translation of Kabysh’s poem “Yuri Gagarin was a great Russian poet” was awarded joint third prize in the Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender international translation competition; individual poems have appeared in English translation in Tupelo Quarterly, Trafika Europe, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Subtropics, and many others. A digital chapbook for the iPad, Two Poems, appeared in 2014. Several of Kabysh’s poems have been made into short films by Russian and American directors; many have been set to music. Kabysh currently lives and teaches in Moscow.

Poet and translator Katherine E. Young is the author of Day of the Border Guards, 2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize finalist, and two chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, Subtropics, and many others. Young is also the translator of Farewell, Aylis by Azerbaijani political prisoner Akram Aylisli and Two Poems by Inna Kabysh. Her translations of Russian and   Russophone authors have won international awards and been widely published in such venues as Words without Borders, Asymptote, The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, and 100 стихотворений о Москве: Антология (100 Poems about Moscow: an Anthology), winner of the 2017 Books of Russia award in Poetry. Young was named a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts translation fellow and currently serves as the inaugural Poet Laureate for Arlington, Virginia.

Read "Cat and Mouse," a poem included in Blue Birds and Red Horses, online in Trafika Europe, and visit Katherine E. Young's site for more information about her translations on Inna Kabysh.

 

2018 Chapbook Series

We are delighted to share that the Toad Press International chapbook series will publish three new translations this year:

Two-Step, a play by Jacques Jouet & Olivier Salon

translated by Emma Ramadan & Chris Clarke

houses / stripped, poems by Paola Loreto

translated by Lawrence Venuti

Blue Birds and Red Horses, poems by Inna Kabysh

translated by Katherine E. Young

Look for these titles coming your way in Summer / Fall 2018.  

Thank you to all who submitted your work --we feel lucky to have had the opportunity to read so many wonderful translations during our recent open reading period, and we wish we could bring more of these titles out into the world!

Poet Blood

Poet Blood

by Kim Kyung Ju

translated by Jake Levine

33 pages, paper, staple bound

cover image courtesy of the author

Toad Press, 2017. $5.00

You can purchase a copy of Poet Blood at Asterism.

Kim Kyung Ju was born in space. He arrived on earth in the late 1970s in Korea. He stayed there and wrote poems and some say he became the most important poet of his generation. He won the Kim Soo Young prize and a whole bunch of other prizes. He was blacklisted by the government though, so sometimes he writes using a pen name.

 
Jake Levine ended up in Korea and started translating poems there. Which is strange. There is no logic or reason. It was just something to do, so he did it. Kim Kyung Ju liked radiohead and he likes radiohead and they met at the radiohead fan club after Kim Kyung Ju translated Radiohead philosophy. He misses Tucson and his family at Spork Press.

"i was so enthralled and puzzled. i was terrified and brave. i’d close the book and open it. i opened it more than i closed it. for me, at times, it was more important than anything else and i’d delay life just to read it a fifth time.
i liked it when reindeer crawled across my lips the most." -John Thompson

shadowslongshoreman

shadowslongshoreman

by José Daniel García

translated by Jesse Tangen-Mills

28 pages, paper, staple bound

cover image is from Thomas Geminus's "Tertia ossium tabula [Skeleton in aiming position]," available from the New York Public Library's Digital Collections

Toad Press, 2017. $5.00

You can purchase a copy of shadowslongshoreman at Asterism.

José Daniel García was born in Córdoba, Spain in 1979. With his first book, El sueño del monóxido (DVD, 2006), García won the Andalucía Youth Poetry Award. His second collection, Coma (Hiperión, 2008), was awarded the prestigious Hyperion Prize. The cannibal notebook Estibador de sombras (Cangrejo Pistolero Ediciones) was released in 2010.  From 2008-2010, García was a fellow in the iconic Residencia de Estudiantes-CSIC in Madrid. Last year he published his first novel, Fundido a rojo (ediciones En huida, 2016). Included in numerous national and foreign anthologies, his poems have been translated into Italian, Danish and German.

Jesse Tangen-Mills was born in Manhattan, New York. His chapbook of prose poems Alienating Space was released by Publishing Genius. He has written for various anglophone magazines and journals including Guernica, The Believer, and The Times Literary Supplement. His translations have appeared in Letras Libres, Spoila and MAYDAY (forthcoming). He lives in Bogotá, Colombia, with his family.

• "Serge Gainsbourg’s 1958 song “Le poinçonneur des Lilas” narrates the distress of the anonymous ticket-puncher who gradually loses his mind in the bowels of the Métro, trailing “a carnival of confetti” back to his bed and seeing only transfer maps shine in his “earthenware sky.” Like Gainsbourg’s ticket-puncher, Cordoban poet José Daniel García’s chapbook shadowslongshoreman also participates in a sort of subterranean affect-labor relation in which the speaker invites damage into body and psyche as a means of generating the unproductive expenditure that is poetry." - Zack Anderson reviews shadowslongshoreman at American Microreviews and Interviews.

 

Wreckage

Wreckage

by Roberta Iannamico

Translated by Alexis Almeida

31 pages, paper, staple bound

cover image based on the drawing "Cow II" by Arthur Dove

Toad Press, 2017. $5.00

You can purchase a copy of Wreckage here

+ read a few of the poems in Wreckage, first published in Quarterly West, here 

+ read more poems and a short review in Today's Book of Poetry, here

+ add this book to your Goodreads list here

Roberta Iannamico has published many books of poetry, including El zorro gris, el zorro blanco, el zorro colorado (Vox, Bahía Blanca, 1997), Mamushkas (Vox, 1999), Tendal (del Diego, Buenos Aires, 2000), El collar de fideos (Vox, 2001), Celeste perfecto (Crudo, Buenos Aires, 2005), Dantesco (Vox, 2006), Muchos poemas (Voy a salir y si me hiere un rayo, Buenos Aires, 2008), Un día nuevo (edición de autora, 2013) Nomeolvides (Vox, 2015), and Qué lindo (Zindo & Gafuri 2015). She has also published various children’s books. She is a singer-songwriter, and conducts poetry workshops as well as song composition workshops for children and adults.

Alexis Almeida grew up in Chicago. Her poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming Gulf Coast, The Brooklyn Rail, Prelude, TYPO, Dusie, and elsewhere. She is an assistant editor at Asymptote and a contributing editor at The Elephants. Her chapbook of poems, Half Shine, is recently out from Dancing Girl Press, and her translation of Florencia Castellano's Propiedades vigiladas [Monitored Properties] is recently out from Ugly Duckling Presse. She has received fellowships and residencies for Yaddo and the University of Colorado, where she completed her MFA. She recently spent the year living in Buenos Aires on a Fulbright research grant, where she has been compiling and co-translating an anthology of contemporary female poets living in Argentina. 

• "We live in a world where the barriers between languages are fast falling away" - read a short discussion of Wreckage and contemporary translation over at Marie Lecrivain's blog Al-Khemia Poetica.

Small Press interview at Entropy Magazine

We're working on our 2017 titles and will have some beautiful chapbooks to show you very soon! For now, though, you can go behind-the-scenes with Toad Press by reading our interview as part of Entropy Magazine's Small Press Database: https://entropymag.org/toad-press/