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New Release: This Side of Utopia poems Thad DeVassie (Chapbook)

This Side of Utopia poems Thad DeVassie Červená Barva Press, 2023

Thad DeVassie is a poet and writer who pivots between traditional line breaks of poetry and a linear love of prose poetry, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction. In 2020 he was named a winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize for his manuscript Splendid Irrationalities (SurVision Books). In 2021, his project Year Of Static, containing 11 original paintings with accompanying micro prose, was published by Ghost City Press. It evolved into the art exhibition Love Your Neighbor in 2022. A lifelong Ohioan, Thad writes and paints from the outskirts of Columbus.

This Side of Utopia straddles a fine line between how we think things should go and how they ultimately play out. With equal parts heartfelt longing and comic absurdity, these poems move effortlessly from the mundane to the magical, toggling between lined and prose poems. With a voice all his own, Thad DeVassie taps the haunting playfulness of Charles Simic, the otherworldly surprises of Russell Edson, showing this collection to be one continuous balancing act. Utopia might be an untenable idea, but subtle comforts and a few silver linings still exist in the here and now.

Cover art: "Before the Fall" by Thad DeVassie

$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-67-3 | 31 Pages

New Release: An Alphabet of Last Rites by Marc Vincenz (Chapbook)

An Alphabet of Last Rites by Marc Vincenz Červená Barva Press, 2023

Marc Vincenz is a poet, fiction writer, translator, editor, musician and artist. He has published over 30 books of poetry, fiction and translation. His more recent poetry collections, include A Brief Conversation with Consciousness, The Little Book of Earthly Delights, There Might Be a Moon or a Dog, 39 Wonders and Other Management Issues, The Pearl Diver of Irunmani, A Splash of Cave Paint, and The King of Prussia is Drunk on Stars.

Marc's work has been published in The Nation, Ploughshares, Raritan, Colorado Review, Washington Square Review, Plume, Fourteen Hills, Willow Springs, Solstice, World Literature Today, The Notre Dame Review, The Golden Handcuffs Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books and many other journals and periodicals.

He is publisher and editor of MadHat Press and publisher of New American Writing, and lives on a farm in Western Massachusetts where there are more spiny-nosed voles, tufted grey-buckle hares and Amoeba scintilla than humans.

"Marc Vincenz knows how to ‘strain the essence...’ of life. His cinematic lures are full of vim and drama. This is is an heroic epic distilled into short passages- where wit and experience thrust and parry in a perpetual hazing rite-an utterly innovative work of discovery. It bores into the soul drop where we find what we’re made of. In An Alphabet of Last Rites, a mutable feast of prose poems, Marc Vincenz grapples with those reckonings. As the title implies, he ponders our destination while reveling in the journey, mixing the quotidian and the quixotic with his trademark quicksilver facility. Wondrous. Wry. Incredibly novel. An affirmation of what it means to be alive."
-Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

"‘Emboldened, empathetic, empowered, emphatic’: Marc Vincenz's An Alphabet of Last Rites has a cast of characters ranging from Catherine the Great and Eva Peron to minotaurs to "thieves, pirates, dastardly characters you've only seen on the silver screen." As you sip your fourth martini, enjoy this cornucopia of unceasing poetic imagery and relentless conceits, and be captured by the seemingly limitless fecundity of language, which these last rites offer."
-Larissa Shmailo

"This book concerns a character, a linguistically nationless and particular internationalist poet’s language. It’s also a prose-poetry sequence in the form of a primer. Marc Vincenz’s An Alphabet of Last Rites is spoken by the personification of language, while the person consistently addressed, a reader, a listener, is actually the poet himself. Gradually, this personification goes completely out of his head with embraced eccentricity, and you are thinking maybe this is a job for Robert Browning. The reader wins with this alphabet of short prose poems that are beautiful and funny and weird, all style, yet generous and tolerant of our faults."
-David Blair

$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-94-9 | 42 Pages

New Release: MEMORY OF THE SPECIES Selected Poems Margara Russotto

MEMORY OF THE SPECIES Selected Poems Margara Russotto translated from the Spanish by Peter Kahn Červená Barva Press, 2023

Note on the Author | Margara Russotto
Venezuelan poet, scholar and translator born in Italy. PhD in Comparative Literature, University of São Paulo. Professor of the Universidad Central de Venezuela where she founded the Women's Studies. Translator of poetry and essays by Italian, Venezuelan and Brazilian writers, such as Antonia Palacios, Enrique Bernardo Núñez, Oswald de Andrade, Antonio Candido, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Claudio Magris, among others. She has received award for her poetry and her literary research, including the Poetry Award "José Antonio Ramos Sucre" (Venezuela, 1995), a Fulbright Scholarship (USA, 1998), and the LASA Award (USA, 2007) for editing the volume La ansiedad autorial. In 2010 she was a writer-in-residence at the Chateau de Lavigny International Writer's Residence. Currently, she is a Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she also teaches Creative Writing in Spanish. Recent book (selected essays): Cantabile. Celebración de la poesía latinoamericana (Madrid, 2020).

Note on the Translator | Peter Kahn
Peter Kahn is a professional translator living in Vermont (USA). He has translated works of fiction and nonfiction by numerous Latin American and Spanish writers, including Tununa Mercado, Elvira Orphée, Esther Cross, Javier Moreno, Hugo Clemente and Gwendolyn Diaz. His fiction and poetry translations have appeared in various publications, including Grand Street, Gastronomia, Santa Barbara Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Massachusetts Review, and several anthologies. In 2015, he was awarded the Massachusetts Annual Chametzky Prize for his translation of Margara Russotto's poem "Of Useless Knowledge."

$19.95 | ISBN 978-1-950063-22-2 | 106 Pages

New Release: FRACTURED LENS by Vijaya Sundaram

FRACTURED LENS by Vijaya Sundaram Červená Barva Press, 2023: Vijaya Sundaram is the Poet Laureate of Medford, Massachusetts (2023-2025). Originally from India, Vijaya Sundaram is a poet, musician, singer-songwriter, and educator. Her work has appeared in the Rising Phoenix Press, the Stardust Review, and TELL Magazine. This is her first collection of poems in print. She lives in Medford, Massachusetts with her husband, daughter, and Holly, their standard poodle.
$16.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-66-6 | 52 Pages

New Release: Heavenly Bodies at the MET by Ellen Devlin (chapbook)

Heavenly Bodies at the MET by Ellen Devlin Červená Barva Press, 2023

Ellen Devlin is the author of two chapbooks, Rita, (2019) and Heavenly Bodies at the MET (2023). Her poems can be found in The Cortland Review, Ekphrasis, Lime Hawk Review, PANK, The New Ohio Review, The Sow's Ear and Women's Studies Quarterly Review. and other journals, most recently Beyond Words, 2023, Muleskinner 2023, and The Westchester Review, 2023. She lives in Irvington, New York with her husband, Charles.

"Heavenly Bodies at the Met explores the ecclesiastical garments created by well known designers inspired by Catholic liturgy. In this collection, Ellen Devlin describes the various gowns and garments with the descriptive eye reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop. Many of the garments become reflective journeys through the poet's own life. Each supplies an emotional awareness that is rendered in vivid, concise language. This a deeply human collection, a personal confrontation and examination of the poet's life and as you read perhaps your own."
-Kevin Pilkington, author of Playing Poker With Tennessee Williams

"This is my body / my silken birthright. / sieve me for sin / and fragrant apples fall from / bee-studded trees," writes Ellen Devlin in Heavenly Bodies at the MET, her gorgeous, glowing testament to the costume exhibit of that name. Speaking to how the exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art exalted the female form in haute couture gowns inspired by Church history, Devlin embraces the divine and the quotidian, the elegant sweep and the stunning detail, reminding us, as "silver roses abundant bloom / from her shoulders /cross breasts and hips / with botanical precision-" that each dress, each poem, in its innermost essence, holds the true grace of the numinous feminine: "the casing of her holiness / the beating heart of a living woman." Reader, come and let your senses be clothed in such beauty.
-Gillian Cummings, author of The Owl was a Baker's Daughter

$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-57-4 | 28 Pages

New Release: Natural Tendencies by James B. Nicola

Natural Tendencies by James B. Nicola Červená Barva Press, 2023

James B. Nicola's poems have appeared in the Antioch, Southwest and Atlanta Reviews; Rattle; and Barrow Street. His seven full-length collections are Manhattan Plaza, Stage to Page, Wind in the Cave, Out of Nothing: Poems of Art and Artists, Quickening, Fires of Heaven, and Turns & Twists. His nonfiction book Playing the Audience won a Choice award. He has received a Dana Literary Award, two Willow Review awards, Storyteller's People's Choice award, one Best of Net, one Rhysling, and ten Pushcart nominations-for which he feels both stunned and grateful. A graduate of Yale, he hosts the Hell's Kitchen International Writers' Round Table at his library branch in Manhattan: walk-ins are always welcome.

This latest of James Nicola's themed collections celebrates the natural world in all its beauty, power, and complexity, from the smallest grain of sand to the vastness of the heavens. Whether expressing a child's rapturous awe or an adult's sober contemplation-or the other way around-the poems are characterized by precise observation, vivid description, and technical ingenuity. Among them are lyrics of such delicacy and finish, including "The Succulent" and "Ivy," that any true poet would be happy to have written them.
-Michael Palma, author of Begin in Gladness

Some very wild jumps herein, from the sacred to the profane and back to the literal earthly mundane. I did like these poems. Rather off beat from the generally incomprehensible poems you see.
-John Hanson Mitchell, author of Following the Sun

In James B. Nicola's Natural Tendencies, we "can still taste the wild and green aroma" of his landscapes-both of the interior and the natural world. His robust imaginative intelligence is honed, his touch is lyrical, and his tone is adept. These poems address "This wonderment, / This universe" in an age when green space is vanishing and the climate is warming. In response, there is a solace and a resonance to be found in Natural Tendencies, demonstrated in the poems' adept craft and uniquely adroit voice.
-Wally Swist, author of Taking Residence

"Welcome to my world," says Nicola at the portal to this book, and "world" is the right word for rich realm into which we're invited, that of nature, in all its manifestations. The verse is beautifully evocative throughout, the evocation being informed by a mystical, zen-like appreciation that repeatedly crystallizes in aphorism. The book ends with one of the most memorable such moments: "And one lone soul might likewise warm my way / to light and God. It won't be one I've met, / but you, whom I have not imagined yet."
-Dan Brown, author of Taking the Occasion

Cover art: "Springtime on Grant Creek" by Monte Dolack

$18.00 | ISBN:978-1-950063-61-1 | 101 Pages

New Release: Secret Behind the Gate by Zvi A. Sesling (Fiction)

Secret Behind the Gate by Zvi A. Sesling Červená Barva Press, 2023

Zvi A. Sesling, Poet Laureate Emeritus of Brookline, MA (2017-2020) has published flash fiction and poetry in numerous magazines both in print and online in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, France, Cyprus, New Zealand, Australia, India, Canada and Israel. He was awarded First Prize in the Reuben Rose International Poetry Competition. He was selected to read his poetry at New England/Pen "Discovery" by the late Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish. His poetry was selected for the Spring Rain Poetry Festival on Cyprus and his Hay (na) ku poetry is part of a display at the San Francisco Library. In addition, he has a Hay (na) ku, two poems and four flash fiction stories in Stanford University's Life in Quarantine project. Sesling was twice a featured reader in the Jewish Poetry Festival in Brookline, MA and is a regular reviewer for the Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene. Sesling is Editor of 10By10 Flash Fiction Stories and Muddy River Poetry Review. He has been a featured reader in various venues in the Boston area, San Diego, the Massachusetts Poetry Festival and the Boston National Poetry Festival. He has also read on local radio and cable television programs. He is author of four books of poetry, War Zones, The Lynching of Leo Frank, Fire Tongue and King of the Jungle and and three chapbooks, Simple Game, Baseball Poetry; Love Poems from Hell and Across Stones of Bad Dreams. He is the author of the recently published flash fiction chapbook Wheels. Sesling taught at Suffolk University, Emerson College and Boston University. He lives in Brookline, MA with his wife Susan J. Dechter.

Read Zvi Sesling's musings in Secret Behind the Gate and you’ll be instantly transported into zany, oftentimes ironic, journeys traversing the narrow alleyways, backroads, and main streets of Zvi's vivid imagination. His delightful nuggets are easily digestible but, oh so hard to put down!
-Phil Temples, author of The Allston Variant and Uncontacted Frontier

It takes an exceptionally rich imagination to conceive over two hundred truly distinctive pieces of short fiction. While microscopic in length, Zvi Sesling's tales are macroscopic in their ability to entertain and provoke. You laugh, you cry, and you think... really think--no small achievement in such attenuated works. I had several favorites in Secret Behind the Gate, foremost among them, "Nowhere Man," "The Bride Wears Black," and "What We Can Hope For." Indeed, these made me chuckle, tear up, and ultimately ponder the meaning of their message. They all had something of value to convey--maybe none more so than the book’s namesake. It's no secret that Zvi is an original raconteur of the highest order, a storyteller par excellence, possessing enormous wit and empathy.
-Michael C. Keith, author Insomnia 11 and Stories in the Key of Me

When reading Zvi Sesling's Secret Behind the Gate, which I highly recommend, don't just cram a bunch of its tasty morsels into your mouth at once. They must be individually chewed, savored, and digested to be completely appreciated. They range from short fiction to flash fiction to micro fiction to something dangerously close to poetry, from profoundly funny to ironic to wistful to deeply sad, so you'll never know what's coming next.
-Rob Dinsmoor, author of Toxic Cookout

$19.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-68-0 | 223 Pages

New Release: AMERICAN QUEERS poems by Jesse Mavro Diamond

AMERICAN QUEERS by Jesse Mavro Diamond Červená Barva Press, 2023

Jesse Mavro Diamond has been writing poetry since childhood, when at 7, she was the proud and delighted author of her first published poem, "Summer is Over." Throughout the next six decades, her writing has explored issues of deep interest to her including identity, gender politics and the diverse societal influences that shape our lives. Mavro Diamond's experiences as a Jewish woman, feminist, martial artist, and teacher of English Language Arts at both the secondary and college level has informed every aspect of her writing. She is the author of four plays and six volumes of poetry, including Swimming the Hellespont, whose title poem was chosen to be honored by the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival. Most recently, she developed and taught the first Creative Writing Course in Boston Latin School's 364-year History. Her work has been published and performed within the United States and internationally.

In 2004, when same-sex marriage was legalized in Massachusetts, Mavro Diamond married her partner of 27 years. They reside in the Boston area.

Jesse Mavro Diamond's poetry in AMERICAN QUEERS Impresses with historical vision and authenticity. Poems move seamlessly between contemporary and mythic worlds. Diamond's poetry combines a keen resistance to heteronormative culture with a lyric eroticism that evokes Sappho. The book will hit a nerve for anyone whose personal history is entrenched in the early gay rights movement but will equally resonate for those learning about the period through the nuance of its of its insights.
-Judson Evans, co-author of Chalk Talk and Professor of Liberal Arts at Berklee College of Music

In AMERICAN QUEERS: Poems Celebrating Mid-Century Gay Activists, Jesse Mavro Diamond imagines a metaphoric kingdom inhabited by four relatively unknown gay and lesbian royal champions. With sharp wit and whole-hearted empathy, the poet extols and elegizes Stormé Delarverie, Richard Leitsch, Pat Parker and Charley Shively. Appending the poems with well researched biographical notes on each activist, diverse readers, students and teachers will discover the work is compelling and informative. AMERICAN QUEERS "impresses with historical vision and authenticity."
(Judson Evans)

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-77-2 | 54 Pages

New Release: THEM! by Gary Fincke

THEM! by Gary Fincke Červená Barva Press, 2023

Gary Fincke's books have won The Flannery O'Connor Prize for Short Fiction, the Robert C. Jones Prize for Nonfiction Prose, and what is now the Wheeler Prize for Poetry. His latest collections are Nothing Falls from Nowhere: Stories (Steven F. Austin, 2021) and The Mussolini Diaries (Serving House, 2020). His new collection of essays The Mayan Syndrome will be published later this year by Madhat Press. Its lead essay, "After the Three-Moon Era," was selected to be reprinted in Best American Essays 2020.

Cover artist Shannon Rae Fincke is also an Art Educator and Art Administrator living and working in Los Angeles, CA. Her work has been exhibited at museums and galleries internationally, and has been featured in print, film, and television. She is the Founder/ Director of Institute for Visual Arts, mother of three children, and daughter of Gary Fincke.

Gary Fincke's chapbook Them! is packed with poems prompted by films that range from the lowest of the B-Movies of the 50s to A-list horror to Biblical epics. In tones varied from satirical to serious, he finds significance in the absurdities of rubber-suited monstera and cavorting snake women as well as man-made catastrophes that foreshadow the horror of ecological disasters. Them! will make readers laugh and cringe and think, often in the same cleverly constructed poem.

$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-52-9 | 36 Pages

New Release: The Tavern of Lost Souls by Alan Britt

The Tavern of Lost Souls by Alan Britt Červená Barva Press, 2023

I grew up in southeastern Florida where hot summer days sizzled and summer nights’ humid lips of jasmine pressed against my frosted bedroom jalousies. An aspiring athlete, I wanted to play for the Milwaukee Braves-I thought Hank Aaron was poetry in motion. Well, songwriter for a garage band, later I found myself a college sophomore writing poetry and a founding member of a group of poets and artists known as the Immanentists. Though somewhat eclectic, we were a blend of European Surrealism with a Native American sensibility who believed that through language and paint we could attain spiritual fusion with the natural world. After reading The Immanentist Anthology, the great French poet, Yves Bonnefoy, said that Immanentism was the most exciting poetry he had seen from the US in decades. What a thrill! I remained in contact with Yves until his death in 2016. Eventually, I drove a yellow Ryder truck from West Palm Beach to Baltimore to attend the graduate Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University where I made a beeline to the National Gallery in DC to marvel at the wondrous creations by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Monet, Manet, and Odilon Redon. Baltimore became my heaven with snow. Inspired by Andrew Marvell, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Eunice Odio, Sandor Kanyadi, Kristina Ehin, plus hundreds of others, I now write poems about anything and everything. Along the way I've learned that to write poetry is to love, and to love is to write poetry.
-Alan Britt

Alan has published 25 books of poetry.

"When thunder becomes symbolic again, / then and only then we'll discover / the true nature of existence." Not true. We know it right here in this book-this prism-this kaleidoscope of the soul bursting with imagination. And the poet's everyday world is never lost, even while tethered to high-flying multi-imaged phrases and clauses. Alan Britt's literary personality is here, precise in every note. The poetic will of each line, urgency and flair, teaches us the game.
-Grace Cavalieri, Producer/Host of Public Radio's "The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress" and Maryland Poet Laureate

In The Tavern of Lost Souls, each poem rises through the reader like wine, filling the mind with the intoxication of life viewed from this unique and humanitarian perspective. Alan Britt combines elements of sensuality and subtle humor with a depth of feeling "thick with the aroma of fresh imagination." About Baudelaire he writes, "Sifting his way through human frailty, / paying attention to things lesser poets buried / beneath the borrowed sentiments of their age . . ./" These words could apply to his own work as well, as reality and fantasy walk through these pages together, creating an addictive book one finds difficult to put down.
-Patty Dickson Pieczka, Author of the novel Finding the Raven and winner of the 2012 Library of Poetry Book Award from The Bitter Oleander Press for Painting the Egret's Echo

$18.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-26-0 | 83 Pages

New Release: A STEP INSIDE by Denis Emorine
Translated from the French by Phillip John Usher

A STEP INSIDE by Denis Emorine (Fiction) Translated from the French by Phillip John Usher Červená Barva Press, 2023

Denis Emorine is a French writer. He was born in 1956 in Paris. He has an emotional attachment to English because his mother was an English teacher. He is of Russian ancestry on his father's side. Writing, for Emorine, is a way of harnessing time in its incessant flight. Themes that re-occur throughout his writing include the Doppelganger, lost or shattered identity, and mythical Venice (a place that truly fascinates him). He also has a great interest for Eastern Europe. His theatrical output has been staged in France, Canada (Quebec) and Russia. Many of his books (short stories, plays, poetry) have been published in Greece, Hungary, Romania, South Africa, and the United States. His first novel La mort en berne, 5 Sens éditions, was published in Switzerland, in 2017. An English translation Death at Half-Mast is available in the USA https://www.experimentalfiction.com/ In 2015, Denis Emorine was awarded the Naji Naaman Literary Prize Lebanon (honor prize for complete work) For more information, visit his website at: http://denis.emorine.free.fr/ul/english/accueil.htm

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Phillip John Usher is Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature. His book Errance et cohérence: essai sur la littérature transfrontalière à la Renaissance (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2010) deals with the topic of Renaissance border-crossing and globalization. As a translator, he is the author of the first English-language version of Ronsard's epic La Franciade (1572) (New York: AMS Press, 2010) and of Denis Emorine's No through world (Edmonds, WA: Ravenna Press, 2004). He has also translated various academic and non-academic articles and works. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in the Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, La Revue des Amis de Ronsard, L'Esprit Créateur, French Forum, and elsewhere. Educated at the University of London (UK) and Harvard University (Cambridge, MA), he regularly lectures in the United States and Europe and has held a visiting position at Boston University (fall 2009). He regularly organizes lectures in the "Translation Across the Disciplines" series and is the webmaster for the Barnard Center of Translation Studies.

Denis Emorine's short-stories reflect the misunderstanding that separates human beings, the gap between the words and their meaning. For the author, the language, far from facilitating the exchanges among us, makes all communication almost impossible. Man is trapped by his feelings whatever these feelings may be. In this way an individual is thus doomed to deceive others and to deceive oneself and manages to do it all in good faith. Denis Emorine's characters are often overwhelmed by a situation they are unable to control or they are victims of fatality as it happens in a Greek tragedy. According to the Russian literary critic Dimitri Zadkine, it is "the romantics condemned to failure who make of their existence a tragedy, the artists lost in a dreamlike dimension, where their hypersensitivity prevents them from taking flight. They are always on the borders of madness and death. »

Cover Art: "Autoportrait" by Tatiana Samoïlova

$16.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-03-1 | 53 Pages

New Release: The Thing About Men: Stories by Gregory J. Wolos (Fiction)

The Thing About Men: Stories by Gregory J. Wolos Červená Barva Press, 2023

Having raised two children and spent more than three decades as an educator in upstate New York, Gregory Wolos currently resides with his wife of forty-two years in a small town not far from Boston, Massachusetts. Gregory's daily regimen includes writing, running, and tending grandchildren. He holds a doctorate from the University at Albany.
Over one hundred of Gregory's short stories and reviews have been published in journals and anthologies like Glimmer Train, Georgia Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, descant, Florida Review, The Pinch, Post Road, Baltimore Review, Los Angeles Review, PANK, Superstition Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Southern Humanities Review, and many others.
Gregory’s work has won awards sponsored by Solstice, descant, Gulf Stream, New South, the Rubery Book Awards, Emrys Journal, Gambling the Aisle, and the White Eagle Coffee Store Press.
Gregory has published three other story collections: Women of Consequence (Regal House Publishing, 2019), Dear Everyone, (Duck Lake Books, 2020), and The Thing About Men, (Cervena Barva Press, 2023). For full lists of Gregory’s publications and commendations, visit www.gregorywolos.com.
More often than not Gregory's stories reflect Kafka's assertion that a literary work "should be an ice axe to break up the frozen sea inside us."

The thing about men is that there is no single "thing." The men featured in this story collection are fathers, sons, grandfathers, husbands, lovers, and loners. They are (or have been) teachers, models, gigolos, hypnotherapists, school superintendents, tattoo artists, lawyers, crematory workers, and casino employees. Some are victims; others are victimizers. All struggle to find stability or, at the very least, comfort in a world that challenges their assumptions about manhood as they search for footing in the rubble of a crumbling patriarchy. There are kindnesses and cruelties in these stories; there are successes and failures. But pull back the curtain on the central characters in The Thing About Men, and you will find that they are all men you know.

These unique stories include humans and other animals—from dogs to pandas to animal tattoos—that serve as characters to reveal the mongrel, spotted, sometimes loving relationships between men and women. Many of these stories have won awards, some are premise pieces, all are interlaced with dry humor. Here is a gifted collection that probes into our animal nature and, once read, it will not be forgotten.
—Lee Hope, Founding Editor-in-Chief, Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices and author of Horsefever, a SPD best-selling novel

"Injuries and afflictions abound in The Thing About Men. Gregory Wolos keeps his compelling collection attuned to complications of recovery, while illuminating, with care and craft, the wounds most in need of wary monitoring: those that persist beneath 'the usual top layer of things.' In story after fine story, Wolos urges all of us to delve deeper."
—Matthew Pitt, author of These Are Our Demands, Midwest Book Award winner, and Attention Please Now, Winner of the Autumn House Prize

$19.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-58-1 | 224 Pages

SAYING GOODBYE by Andrew Stancek (Flash-Fiction)

SAYING GOODBYE by Andrew Stancek Červená Barva Press, 2023

Brief Description of Saying Goodbye
A year in the life of a six-year-old Slovak boy being brought up by his grandparents in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia. In this flash story of childhood and self-discovery, filled with heartbreak and joy, betrayal and love, Adam must invent who he will become.

Andrew Stancek describes his vocation as dreaming - clutching onto hope, even in turbulent times. He has been published widely, in SmokeLong Quarterly, FRIGG, Hobart, Green Mountains Review, New World Writing, New Flash Fiction Review, Jellyfish Review, Peacock Journal and The Phare, among others. Among his contest wins are the London Independent Story Prize, the Reflex Fiction contest, and the New Rivers Press American Fiction contest. His work has appeared in Best Microfiction 2021, the Bending Genres Anthology and Bath Flash Fiction anthologies. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Saying Goodbye is the story of a family reckoning with loss, loyalty, disappointment, devotion, and at the center our narrator, a child as unforgettable as any Dickens hero. Abandoned by his mother, rescued by tenderness, he loses his innocence and finds his courage in a world both unapologetic and lit with the fiercest sort of love. This gorgeous story will break your heart open.
-Nancy Stohlman, After the Rapture and Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction

Some boys get a layer cake, others get abandonment. When young Adam's unstable mother drops him off at his grandparents' Bratislava home prior to his sixth birthday, he knows she is not coming back. Instead he must stitch together a new life, of neighborhood bicycle rides, local shopkeepers, warm strudel smells, and fresh family pain. Andrew Stancek's Saying Goodbye is at once a story of longing and grief, and one of resiliency and tender connection between a grandfather and a boy. "Something good always grows out of something awful, like mushrooms out of manure," Adam says. This is a spare, effective novella-in-flash of one year in a boy's life, beautifully written, memorably told.
-Sara Lippmann, author of Doll Palace

$16.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-75-8 | 52 Pages

Bathed in Moonlight by Vassiliki Rapti
Translated from the Greek by Peter Bottéas

Bathed in Moonlight by Vassiliki Rapti Translated from the Greek by Peter Bottéas Červená Barva Press, 2023

About the Author
Vassiliki Rapti was born and raised in Greece, and studied Comparative Literature and Media in Greece, France, and the United States. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with an Emphasis in Drama from Washington University in St. Louis, and is the author of several books, including Ludics in Surrealist Theatre and Beyond (Ashgate, 2013), the co-edited volume Ludics: Play as Humanistic Inquiry (Palgrave/MacMillan, 2021), and the bilingual poetry collection Transitorium (Somerset Hall Press, 2015). Her translation publications include Greek surrealist author Nanos Valaoritis, and her poetry and translations have been published in various international journals. She received a Parnassos Literary award in Greece in 1998.

Her poetry is fueled by surrealist imagery, a pursuit of playfulness in artistic expression, and a desire to capture wonderment in everyday life. She is Chair of the Ludics Seminar of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, where she founded the Advanced Training in Greek Poetry Translation and Performance Workshop, and currently teaches World Literature and Digital Culture at Emerson College. She is the founding director Citizen TALES* Commons, an international collective of scholars and artists.

The poetry collection that forms the core of this volume was published in Greek in Athens in 2021. In November 2022, the Voice of Greece, the radio arm of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (EPT), featured Vassiliki as its Poet of the Week, with twice daily readings of her poetry throughout the week.

About the Translator
A native of Toronto, Canada, Peter Bottéas holds a Master's degree in Translation from the Université de Montréal and worked for many years as a translator, revisor, editor, and educator in French Canada. After a twenty-year detour as a psychotherapist in Boston, he recently returned to one of his first loves, literary translation, and is currently the primary translator of Greek Boston-based poet Vassiliki Rapti. The author and translator have done several poetry readings together in New York and Boston, as well as in on-line forums. He is a member of the multidisciplinary think-tank and creative forum Citizen TALES Commons and, along with Vassiliki, is co-host of the podcast series Borders Unbound: Hellenic Poetry of the Diaspora and Beyond. Peter is also an occasional voice-over artist, an infrequent poet, and an aficionado of French and Greek poetry set to music.

Ever since an insomniac, lovelorn Sappho looked up at the moon, Greek lyric poetry has echoed her register of gluko-pikron: the sweet-bitterness of longing. We open our mouths because we desire. Open Bathed in Moonlight to any page and you'll find the language of desire suffused by the tender, intensely focused erotic glow of Vassiliki Rapti's rapturous gift. Yet the moon, and Sappho, are not the only presiding spirits of illumination in this magical collection. Rapti has struck the Sapphic note in a new key by fusing it with the voices of some of the great surrealist Greek poets of the twentieth century. The result is a felicitous mix of mournful eloquence and expressionist imagination, delicate inwardness and evocative power-a testament to the "Perpetual Perseverance" of a disciplined and formidable imagination:

      you were cast among myriad
      multicolored peacocks
      so that you might learn the skill
      of perseverance
      dragged out, freed after aeons
      flung, whirling, whirling
      into the embrace of the moon.

In the pitch-perfect registers of Peter Bottéas's beautiful translation, Bathed in Moonlight is pristine.
-George Kalogeris, author of Winthropos, Associate Professor of English Literature and Classics at Suffolk University, Boston

As it moves back and forth over time, Bathed in Moonlight explores the ambiguity of what is lost and what is gained in poetry. While Vassiliki Rapti's poems certainly engage with the voices of her native Greek tradition they would also seem to be in dialogue with poetries beyond the borders of the western world. She tends to locate individual experience in the collective. And so, with intense lyricism and transformative, vivid expression, each poem creates its own separate world of emotional strength. These poems are fluent, vibrant, reflective, sensitive, open and brilliantly sensory. They reflect Rapti's wonder at the world, the cyclic nature of life and language. Her voice spins, floats, and whirls from spiral shells, floating lakes, the ever vigilant moon and calls through fragments of memory, the depths of the underground and the unspoken that hides between each line.
-Gonca Özmen

Vassiliki Rapti's luminous, capacious poems are journeys arising from hope and fears; aching and searching, they seek kinship and reconciliation with nature which is the true home for the restless, solitary self. Sensuous yet balanced, sparse yet containing multitudes, Bathed in Moonlight illuminates the life of the mind where remembrance and unbridled thoughts run together, where human yearnings are an enduring life force, where words, written from the innermost place resonate and affirm the power of poetry. This marvelous collection of poems is a balm in our fractured and chaotic time.
-Pui Ying Wong author of The Feast

$16.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-76-5 | 66 Pages

Heaven with Others by Barbara Molloy

Heaven with Others by Barbara Molloy Červená Barva Press, 2023

Barbara Molloy is a writer, artist, and jazz vocalist who makes her home in Coupeville, Washington on beautiful Whidbey Island. A previous book of poems, In Favor of Lightning, was published by Wesleyan University Press. Ms. Molloy's work has been nominated for Pushcart prizes and has won awards from The Pen Foundation. Her poems have appeared in a variety of literary journals.

Barbara Molloy's new collection Heaven with Others is a feast for the senses, as well as an elegiac reminder that all we have is the present. These poems study mortality: "As if it was not her at all,/dying,/abut to die,/being dead,/or returned to life..." (“Gift of Sunflowers”). In the hands of this accomplished lyricist even the most sordid past is rendered as fine art and gifted with visceral re-birth in organic images not easily forgotten: "Leaves strewn about the yards-/the exact color of church and rectory bricks..." (Breeze). Molloy's voice brings down the high-brow and lifts up the colloquial. We are the beneficiaries of her vision.
-Judith Skillman

In this new collection, Barbara Molloy Olund keeps a sharp focus on the chaos of discarded objects and lives while tracking surprising moments of humor. "Who said 'cherish the moments' and/ 'life gives you a lemon; make lemonade?'/ Are they tired yet?..." asks the narrator (Of Ghosts). These poems respect the hard work of living. There's an intention here, almost a promise, to never let go of what matters, no matter how seemingly unimportant an object or detail, how elusive a relationship-what prevails is the intention to continue searching for what's real and what's not. "I will not love the past./ Let it glitter. Let it sit forward..." (Decision). I admire how this work confronts the spiritual labor of care giving, birthing, struggling with addiction, negotiating with ghosts, and parenting. And I'm touched by the ongoing, archetypal process running through these pages-the sorting-out of wisps of beauty from the detritus of life.
-Christianne Balk

"Sometimes," Barbara Molloy writes "the most impossible/variables line up." And in her poems, they do. Her poems leave me breathless, off kilter, bewildered (in the archaic sense of being lured into the wilds). In these wilds, grief is a force of gravity. The vision here is uncanny-the familiar is strange, the strange familiar. The seemingly ordinary embodies the unforeseen, what Stanley Plumly called in her first book "a kind of clairvoyance."
-Eric Pankey

The poems in Barbara Molloy's new book, Heaven With Others, don't rest quietly in the realm of the familiar and quotidian. Nor do they keep to the territory of the uncanny and mysterious. Molloy's poems travel in the shifting borderlands between those irreconcilable worlds. That's the rocky, unmapped terrain that her fiercely moving poems lead us through. I'm reminded of Jean Valentine's sudden leaps into unforeseen light, and also of C.K. Williams's earthbound acknowledgement of the grit underfoot. These beautiful, memorable poems are compassionate, honest testaments to what it is to walk here alone and in company, as a mortal body inhabited by spirit and dream.
-Jennifer Atkinson

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-54-3 | 56 Pages

UN-SILENCED poems by Elizabeth Lund

UN-SILENCED poems by Elizabeth Lund Červená Barva Press, 2023

Elizabeth Lund is the award-winning host of Poetic Lines, which features in-depth interviews with established and emerging poets. She also covers poetry for major publications, including The Christian Science Monitor, where she edited poetry for ten years. From 2015 through 2019 she wrote a monthly poetry column for The Washington Post. Her own poems have appeared in the US, the UK, and Canada. She has read and appeared at a variety of festivals, most recently the Gaithersburg Book Festival, where she served as the final judge for the 2020 high school poetry contest.

Long before 2020, when the world began grappling with a pervasive pandemic that resulted in widespread personal isolation, another type of malevolence locked many women inside their homes. These poems address the devastating effects of domestic violence and seek to restore one victim’s voice, allowing her to speak to and through another generation of women.

Poetry is one of the few art forms that enables us to approach extremely difficult and complex human experiences without having to turn to didacticism or preaching. Lund’s poems do this exquisitely as they grapple with the intense emotions of a woman trapped in an abusive relationship. Each poem is a compelling piece of a much larger puzzle - one that explores the effects of toxic masculinity and the debilitating fallacy that a woman can free her abuser from his own darkness.

With the concision of Emily Dickinson who taught us to "tell all the truth but tell it slant -," and a stream of consciousness narrative, Lund creates the perfect modality to convey an intense and painful journey that generations of women have experienced.

The result, Un-Silenced, is an absolutely stunning, heart-rattling read that implores us to open our hearts and minds.
-Michael S. Glaser, Poet Laureate of Maryland 2004-2009

A gunshot is fired. Police are called. One could say the sky/turns a deaf ear. In this powerful collection, Elizabeth Lund, the omnipresent speaker, honors a beloved aunt and casts light on other women who have suffered domestic abuse. Through poignant narrative and lyric fragments, Un-Silenced takes us deep into a culture that perpetrates violence against women. Lund gives these women the dignity they deserve while finding solace and closure to her own familial pain. This is a major debut of an authentic, compassionate voice! May all who have been harmed or are in harm's way, directly or indirectly, be blessed by this book's presence in the world.
-Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Bad Harvest and Silvertone

Elizabeth Lund has captured the sorrow and malevolence of our times in lyrics that are unsparing, mysterious, and defiantly beautiful. I was captivated from first page to last.
-Hilary Holladay, author of The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-79-6 | 60 Pages

Ash by Gloria Mindock from Glass Lyre Press

Ash by Gloria Mindock Glass Lyre Press, 2021

Gloria Mindock is the author of I Wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me (Nixes Mate Books), Whiteness of Bone (Glass Lyre Press), La Portile Raiului (Ars Longa Press, Romania) translated into the Romanian by Flavia Cosma, Nothing Divine Here, (U Šoku Štampa), and Blood Soaked Dresses (Ibbetson). Widely published in the USA and abroad, her poetry has been translated and published into the Romanian, Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Spanish, Estonian, Albanian, bulgarian, Turkish, and French. Gloria has been published in numerous literary journals including Gargoyle, Web Del Sol, spoKe, Constellations: A Journal of Poetry and Fiction, Ibbetson, The Rye Whiskey Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Unlikely Stories, Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing and Nixes Mate Review and anthology. Gloria has been awarded the Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award and was the recipient of the Allen Ginsberg Award for Community Service by the Newton Writing and Publishing Center. She received the fifth and fortieth Moon Prize from Writing in a Woman's Voice. Gloria was the Poet Laureate in Somerville, MA in 2017 & 2018.

In Gloria Mindock's powerful new book, the flames of love die out and the ashes linger until they dissolve into air. The body is hostage, in charred relics of failed intimacies—The burnt-out ends of smoky days (T.S. Eliot). There's beauty in the truth of Mindock's words and images: Things got smokier, battling the embers with//false waters. And there's hope: Not everyone believes in destruction.// All the heart wants is to beat. Above all, these poems radiate feeling, compassionately aware, attuned to a world of broken love that is burned beyond recognition, the ashes drifting and settling: how much sorrow can this heart take?// There is never an answer. Ash sears and sings.
—Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Bad Harvest

In Ash, Gloria Mindock writes a gritty, beautifully haunting collection of poetry. Ash is what remains behind after destruction, ruin, death, and burning. Similarly, the poems in this collection are what will remain. Fight the shadows and wade through the darkness on a path paved by Mindock's vivid imagery, stark language, and dynamic voice, all of which, make for a most memorable experience. Now more than ever, we need these poems. With the utmost economy of words, skillful syntax, and emotional connections, each poem reverberates into the depths of your consciousness. Dark, intense, and wholly unique, Ash, by Gloria Mindock is what you've been waiting for—a collection of poetry that consumes and smolders. Are you ready?
—Renuka Raghavan, author of Out of the Blue and The Face I Desire

Gloria Mindock is a poet with singular vision: in Ash, a human heart is rolled out, then baked, then thrown to the birds; broken crucifixes are shoved into junk drawers and gather dust; a spurned/murdered woman turns into a beautiful plant that gives her ex-lover a rash. With mordant, Pinter-esque wit, Mindock explores just how far love, and even human decency, can unravel—to the point of arson, to the point of war.

Ash begin with a series of poems about lethal house fires that may be literal or metaphorical ("my skin was burned by your compulsion to be famous"), then expands to pinpoint the similar essence of human cruelty that enables soldiers to kill. As the narrator of "Doomed by the Numbers" explains: "the fact is people will still go on brutally/killing each other./Who will take my place and write about it?"

Ash concludes with an engaging, Rabelaisian roundelay of voices—mini-plays, summed up in just two stanzas, about complicated relationships between two people.

Once again, with Ash, Mindock proves herself to be unafraid of the dark. She is truly a leading, contemporary master of the edgy.
—Karen Friedland, author of Places That Are Gone and Tales from the Teacup Palace

Passionate and observant, Gloria Mindock is a tragic poet. Her books are wounds revisited. She knows that nothing, never heals.

"With a rolling pin in my hand, I roll your heart out flat... stop it from beating. The redness of blood turns to wax, sticky while wet." (Baked)

She senses the pain of the world in her being.

"The void looms deep, scorched like the desert blowing aimlessly." (Exit)

As her latest book Ash attests without doubt, Gloria is both a warrior and a martyr. Her words are swords that slowly transform into tears.

Her anger at life's injustice is mighty, but mighty is her generosity and her openness towards repair, harmony and universal peace. A must-read Ash conducts the reader through thorny labyrinths of pain and despair, allowing now and then a glimpse of ultimate resolve and liberation in verses of a rare beauty:

"...but gravity is about to free me into space... People will look at me day and night and ask, "what is it?" There is no control over what happens. The cathedral is high and my freckles fell on the floor as I left. Paleness now, that no one sees, but in the universe, I will be a prism." (Gravity)

"...A hunger surrounds us, dust gathers, and is wiped off, space evading all this as songs of the wind come through the window and we all hum." (Room)
—Flavia Cosma, author of In the Arms of the Father, Val-David, QC

$16.00 | ISBN: 978-1-941783-75-7 | 71 Pages

New Release: Our first children's book! Little Brown Mouse
by Jack Mindock, Gloria Mindock, and Kellis Mindock Dryer

Little Brown Mouse (Children) by Jack Mindock, Gloria Mindock, and Kellis Mindock Dryer Illustrations by William J. Kelle Červená Barva Press, 2020

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Jack Mindock (b. 1926), author of Little Brown Mouse, spent sixty years of his life as an educator. He was a junior high language arts teacher and K-12 principal in Illinois. He is a World War II Navy veteran and historian who frequently has speaking engagements about his knowledge and experiences. He started telling Little Brown Mouse stories to his children when they were young. They were oral stories, made up as he went along. It was Jack's desire to have some new Little Brown Mouse adventures in print and published for future generations of children to enjoy.

Kellis Mindock Dryer, daughter of author Jack Mindock, is a pianist and piano teacher in Cary, NC. She enjoyed composing the two Little Brown Mouse songs in the book. They can be sung with or without the piano accompaniment. If the children and parents reading this book cannot read music, they are welcome to recite the lyrics as poetry or make up their own melodies.

Gloria Mindock is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, I wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me (Nixes Mate books, 2018). She is the founding editor of Cervena Barva Press and one of the USA editors for Levure Litteraire (France). Widely published in the USA and abroad, her poetry has been translated and published into eight languages. Gloria has been awarded the Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award and was the recipient of the Allen Ginsberg Award for Community Service by the Newton Writing and Publishing Center. She also has been awarded the fifth and fortieth Moon Prize by Writing in a Woman's Voice. She was the Poet Laureate in Somerville, MA in 2017 & 2018.

NOTE
When I was three, four, and five years old, my Dad, "Daddy Jack," would make up bedtime stories every night about the adventures of “Little Brown Mouse.” He would leave me in suspense nightly. I couldn’t wait to hear what happened next to Little Brown Mouse. Why Little Brown Mouse? Because Little Brown Mouse did come to my house! This book, Little Brown Mouse, was written for mothers, fathers, and others to read to young children at bedtime.
-Gloria Mindock

PREFACE
Welcome to the land of curiosity and adventure! Little Brown Mouse is a bedtime story to make you think, be curious, and ask questions. Here are a few questions to get you started: Have you ever seen a mouse? What color are mice? What do they eat? Where do they live?

$13.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-35-2 | 28 Pages