[10/16/25] Ujvary, Liesl / Cotten & Dinwoodie (trs.): Good & Safe

World Poetry, paperback

Publication Date: October 16, 2025

Publisher Marketing: Liesl Ujvary’s groundbreaking 1977 debut concocts a potent and volatile concrete poetry of structuralist social satire disrupted by flares of poetic whimsy drawn from the depths of the subconscious. A generation after H.C. Artmann and the Wiener Gruppe, alongside Ernst Jandl, Elfriede Jelinek, Elfriede Gerstl, and Friederike Mayröcker, Ujvary was a central force in shaping contemporary Austrian writing. In her ludic and rigorous poems, experimental techno music, photography and digital art, she combines austere formalism with the anarchy of the human body and mind. The first of Ujvary’s books to be translated into English, Good & Safe employs minimalist techniques in a raucous, empathetic takedown of 1970s Austrian society: the stuffy Umwelt of Tyrol at the height of ski-industry expansion, the proliferation of wurst and futurist furnishing, the chatter and violence of the Viennese bohème.

“Liesl Ujvary renders the machinic lyrical, the algorithmic incantatory. In repetition, substitution and modulation, she discovers a whole poetics.” —TOM McCARTHY

“Reading these sardonically whimsical poems with their unsparing humor, it’s hard to believe they were written decades ago and not just this year, since they speak so directly to our current season of malaise. I laughed out loud with these fiercely translated takedowns of complacent bourgeois faith in our social institutions. Tautology rules, and Austria is everywhere.” —SUSAN BERNOFSKY

“I would even say it’s the book of the hour. Dialectic objects are listed out like in a grammar book or laboratory; we are shown language’s power and its divestment of power, as well as its function as a generator of ideology.” —MONIKA RINCK

“‘This Is Right!’” states Liesl Ujvary in Good & Safe, Ann Cotten and Anna Dinwoodie’s timely translation of the Austrian poet’s 1977 collection. The satirical semi-manifesto provides tautological explanations for every one of our modern conditions, from war to work, through delightful instructions, scores, and rhythmic descriptions of the sky. Good & Safe demands earnest engagement and semi-serious reflection: ‘Do you know any married couples with children?’ ‘How long does a real party last?’ The highly sonic and visual tome is full of urgent poetry. If Gertrude Stein, Ben Vautier, Eugene Ionesco, and Yoko Ono collaborated on a Surrealist game, they could only dream the resulting work would turn out like this.” —SOPHIA LE FRAGA