Good & Safe

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 Mayrocker, 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 boheme.