The second edition of Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems is a co-publication with Ugly Duckling Presse and includes a new preface by Ron Silliman who chose the first edition for the 2008 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. (Complete Minimal Poems was originally edited by Primary Information’s James Hoff and published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2007.) Long-cherished in out-of-print editions, anthologies and text books, and more recently celebrated on the internet, Aram Saroyan’s groundbreaking concrete and minimalist poems of the 1960s are gathered together here in a single, much-needed volume. Complete Minimal Poems includes the entire contents of Aram Saroyan (Random House, 1968), Pages (Random House, 1969), The Rest (Telegraph, 1971), as well as Saroyan’s contribution, “Electric Poems,” to the anthology All Stars (Goliard-Grossman, 1972), and a sequence, “Short Poems,” which hasn’t appeared previously. With ties to the work of such writers and artists as e.e. cummings, Andy Warhol, Gertrude Stein, Donald Judd, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Steve Reich, Complete Minimal Poems confirms Aram Saroyan’s place among the most daring and engaging figures in modern poetry.

“This beautifully designed collection contains a poetry that shivers with itself, like something just born. Anyone interested in art made from words should have it.” —Richard Hell, The New York Times Sunday Book Review

“…one of the most important works of avant-garde literature… published this century. These harrowingly-spare poems, often highly visual, frequently humorous and/or profound in their contravention of linguistic and literary presuppositions, are quite possibly capable of entirely rewriting a brain’s learned attunement to workaday semiotics… Saroyan should be the very starting point for a young poet’s exploration of the Art, not an afterthought… this collection is in its own class — a masterpiece. —Seth Abramson, Huffington Post

“Aram Saroyan’s minimal poems were … a scandal when they first appeared in the 1960s, foretelling not one, but several of the directions that American poetry would take in their wake, even as they too went out of print and stayed that way for over thirty years until Ugly Duckling Presse of Brooklyn seized the opportunity to make them available again…. These poems are works of great optimism, and are as radical and strong in 2008 as the day they were written.” —Ron Silliman (Judge’s Citation, 2008 William Carlos Williams Award)