CHRISTOPHER SOTO ON TOMAŽ ŠALAMUN’S ON THE TRACKS OF THE WILD GAME

Ugly Duckling Presse is celebrating our 25th anniversary this year! To mark this milestone, Sara Wintz is inviting artists and writers to write about their favorite UDP titles for our new backlist blog series From the Vaults. Our first contributor is poet, activist, and editor Christopher Soto, with an appreciation of Tomaž Šalamun’s On the Tracks of Wild Game (UDP, 2012).

Oh Lord! I have been so hungry for a poetry book to shake my spirit awake for months! And this book has left me wide eyed!!! This was my first encounter with Tomaž Šalamun and it will definitely not be my last. On the Tracks of Wild Game is one of the best collections that I’ve read all year. Nearly every page in this book is dog-eared and marked by me. I keep wanting to return to Tomaž Šalamun’s voice — his voice is so chaotic, so urgent, sonic, repeating and turning on each repetition, emotional and intelligent and introspective and outwardly. His word pairings are so odd, like a no-legged-cat seen running across the sky. He makes me want to grab a pen or a laptop and write, write, write. In the poet’s own words, “I was shot up a few times and wanted / to immediately crawl to my typewriter but there was no / typewriter.” And the book as a physical object is so beautiful to hold too — small and soft and dotted with subtle blue. Great production work by Ugly Duck Duckling Presse too.

Christopher Soto (b. 1991, Los Angeles) is a poet based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of Sad Girl Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016) and the editor of Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat Books, 2018). He cofounded the Undocupoets Campaign and worked with Amazon Literary Partnerships to establish grants for undocumented writers.