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No One Is Safe by Susan Tepper
The Life and Death of a Literary Legend by Martin Golan
Streets Of Flowers by Martin Golan
When Annie Fell Off The Mountain by Martin Golan
Gilgamesh by Martin Burke
I Ching by Martin Burke
Near Love Stories by J. B. Hogan

New Release: WordinEdgeWise by Brad Rose

WordinEdgeWise by Brad Rose Červená Barva Press, 2024

Brad Rose was born and raised in Los Angeles, and lives in Boston. He is the author of five collections of poetry and flash fiction: Lucky Animals, No. Wait. I Can Explain, Pink X-Ray, de/tonations, and Momentary Turbulence. Seven times nominated for a Pushcart Prize and three times nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology, Brad's poetry and fiction have appeared in Los Angeles Times, The American Journal of Poetry, New York Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Clockhouse, Folio, Cloudbank, Baltimore Review, 45th Parallel, Best Microfiction 2019, Lunch Ticket, Sequestrum, Unbroken, Right Hand Pointing, and other publications. Brad is also the author of seven poetry chapbooks, among them Democracy of Secrets, Collateral, An Evil Twin is Always in Good Company, and Funny You Should Ask. His website and blog can be found at bradrosepoetry.com.

The poems and microfiction of WordinEdgeWise, are predominately surreal and playful. Many are unified by the quirky voices of hardscrabble speakers who have experienced social and economic turmoil, and a resulting psychic instability. Via interior monologues and uncanny dialogues, speakers take liberties with standard colloquial speech, invent unusual similes, and employ unconventional variants of American idioms. They also offer startling insights and unexpected moments of wisdom. Both in spite of, and because of, speakers' peculiarities, the poems and microfiction of No. Wait. I Can Explain. seek to offer keen, if unsettling, glimpses into the darker—and often darkly humorous—underlying dimensions of contemporary American life.

Brad Rose's WordinEdgewise displays the madcap features that readers have come to relish in his work—fast-talking, unreliable narrators and surreal situations depicted with brittle sympathy and manic humor. When it comes to prose poetry, Brad Rose plays, to borrow his own phrase, "first violin in the orchestra of the absurd."
—Howie Good, author of Famous Long Ago and The Bad News First

WordinEdgewise, poet Brad Rose's most recent collection, is as high energy as the title advertises. This language-driven tour de force leaves the reader breathless, from line to line and poem to poem, as the speaker explicates on everything from blind dates to mobile homes, from lightning to ghosts. In this world, blind dates are lightning and mobile homes and ghosts, as the author makes expert use of such literary devices as chiasmus and zeugma to bring it all together. Each poem is a glittering tautology, each line disparate in its sameness. The pace of this book is addicting, and you will pick it up over and over again to the delight of your senses.
—Ralph Pennel, author of A World Less Perfect for Dying In, and fiction editor of Midway Journal

Brad Rose: master of the synaptic leap. He unearths suppressed premises (hidden in stark sight thanks to our jones for consensus reality), leading us to the inevitable across no matter how many unexpected ceiling tiles. Multiple vectors are at subcutaneous work here, clause by clause. These paragraphs are like incognito erasure poems, extended family trees with insoluble fan charts. "When I was counting backward in dog years, the judge sentenced my jury to another week of hard labor." Yes, ordinary life is exactly like this. We just need reminders.
—David P. Miller, author of Bend in the Stair and Sprawled Asleep

Cover: Hannah Rose

$19.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-69-7 | 108 Pages

New Release: In the Absence of Birds by Ruth C. Chad

In the Absence of Birds by Ruth C. Chad Červená Barva Press, 2024

Ruth C. Chad is a psychologist who lives and works in the Boston area. Her poems have appeared in the Aurorean, Connection, Psychoanalytic Couple and Family Institute of New England, Constellations, Ibbetson Street, Montreal Poems, Muddy River Poetry Review, Lily Poetry Review, Amethyst Poetry Review, Writing in a Woman's Voice, and others. Her chapbook, "The Sound of Angels," was published by Červená Barva Press in 2017. Ruth was nominated for a Pushcart prize in 2021.

The lyrical and powerful poetry in this book addresses the complexity of family life, grief, loneliness and communion. Many of the poems convey the poet’s urgency to notice and appreciate the richness of nature and the sadness of watching its demise. "In the Absence of Birds" brims with personal and universal poetry, offering insight and solace.

Ruth Chad's In The Absence of Birds relates on many levels. It cuts to the chase. She is fragile yet blunt, as she draws us into her world with poetry that exudes emotion and expresses her lamentations. With the keen sensitivity of a psychologist she delves beneath the surface of family life, death and nature. She opens herself to the reader in the manner of other fine women poets: Plath, Oliver and Dove. Ruth Chad is a poet worth careful reading.
—Zvi A. Sesling, Author of War Zones and the Lynching of Leo Frank

In the Absence of Birds is a breakthrough work, imbued with a relevance far beyond the usual audience for 21st century poetry. The poet's commitment to authenticity shines through in her creative approach to grief; her persistent theme of nature-as-solace; and a gentle, dark wit that finds something enviable in wildness. If there is an opposite of "overwrought," that is Ruth Chad's style: her beautiful, clean syntax and simple lines create a welcoming space, inviting the reader to linger, and fill in the spaces with feeling.
—Eric Hyett, Poet and Translator

Ruth Chad chooses her words with great care to create gem-like poems—although gems are cool and hard, her poems are warm and full of heart. They are also full of sensual detail, ranging across life experiences from peeling a ripe plum to watching her mother fade away in a nursing home. Whatever the situation, simple or profound, Ruth draws us right into it with her, generously sharing what she sees, hears, smells, tastes and feels, compelling us to experience it with her. In the Absence of Birds is a feast.
—Lawrence Kessenich, Winner of Ireland's Strokestown International Poetry Prize

Cover Image: Ruth Chad

$19.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-98-7 | 102 Pages

New Release: WINDOW OF BABEL by Borche Panov
Translated from the Macedonian by Daniela Andonovska-Trajkovska

WINDOW OF BABEL by Borche Panov Translated from the Macedonian by Daniela Andonovska-Trajkovska Červená Barva Press, 2024

Republic of North Macedonia
Borche Panov was born on September 27, 1961 in Radovish, Republic of North Macedonia. He graduated from the "Sts. Cyril and Methodius" University of Skopje, Faculty of Filology in the filed of Macedonian and South Slavic Languages in 1986. Panov has been a member of the Macedonian Writers' Association since 1998. He published 15 poetry books and 8 plays in Macedonian language. He has also published poetry books in other languages: "Hematite particles" (2016 - in Macedonian and Bulgarian and "Photostiheza" 2019, Bulgaria), "Vdah" in Slovenian (2017, Slovenia), "Shaving balloon" in Serbian (2018, Serbia), "Blood that juggles 8000 poetic thoughts" in Croatian (2021, Croatia), "Underground Apple" in Arabic language (United Arab Emirates, 2021), "Underground apple" in English (Netherlands, 2021), "Dandelion Cadence" in English (co-author, India, 2021), "Sculpture of Breathing" in Italian and English (2022, Italy), "The Morning Line" in Romanian (2023, Romania). His poetry has been translated into 40 languages and published all around the world. He received many literary awards such as the following: Premio Mondiale "Tulliola-Renato Filippelli" in Italy for his book "Shaving the Balloon" (2021), "City of Galateo- Antonio De Ferraris" (Italy, Rome, 2021), Premio "Le Occasioni" in Italy, the Sahito World Literary Award in 2021, Predrag Matvejevic in Croatia for his book "Shaving Balloon," Naji Niman Award in 2022. He has edited many poetry books and poetry anthologies and has launched many authors and books published in Macedonia. He also translates poetry from Macedonian into Serbian and Croatian language and vice versa. Panov works as a Counselor for Culture and Education at the Municipality of Radovish, and he is also a president of the program board of the "International Karamanov's Poetry Festival" for more than 20 years.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Daniela Andonovska-Trajkovska (1979, Bitola, Republic of North Macedonia) is a poetess, author, scientist, editor in chief of two literary magazines in North Macedonia, literary critic, doctor of pedagogy, university professor at the University "Kliment Ohridski" Bitola (Faculty of Education), a member of the Macedonian Writers' Association; Macedonian Science Society - Bitola; Slavic Academy for Literature and Art in Varna - Bulgaria, and Bitola Literary Circle. She was president of the Macedonian Science Society Editorial Council and now - a head of the Linguistics and Literature Department at the Macedonian Science Society - Bitola. She has published two books of stories, 9 poetry books, one book for children, a book of literary criticism in Macedonian and 3 academic and scientific books that are part of the curriculum at the university where she works, and over 100 scientific articles. She has also 6 poetry books published in English, Italian, Arabic and Romanian language in India, United Arab Emirates, Italy, and Romania. She has also published her translations from English into Macedonian and vice versa in North Macedonia, Italy and Netherland (7 poetry books and many articles). She has won several important awards for literature: "Krste Chachanski" (2018); "Karamanov' for "Electronic Blood" (2019); Macedonian Literary Avant-garde for "House of Contrasts" (2020); "Abduvali Qutbiddin" (2020, Uzbekistan); Premio Mondiale "Tulliola-Renato Filippelli" in Italy for "Electronic Blood" (2021); Award of excellence "City of Galateo - Antonio De Ferrariis" (Italy); Award for Literary Criticism in 2022, Poetry Award "Dritero Agioli" (Albania, 2023); Poetry Award "Mihai Eminescu," a Golden Medal and a recognition as ambassador of culture in Romania by the Mihai Eminescu Academy (2023) and "Aco Shopov" for poetry (the most important national poetry prize by Macedonian Writers' Association in 2021). Her poetry has been translated and published into more than 40 world languages.

Cover Art: "Tower of Babel" by Witold Zakrzewski

$21.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-83-3 | 118 Pages

New Release: HOUSE OF CONTRASTS by Daniela Andonovska-Trajkovska

HOUSE OF CONTRASTS by Daniela Andonovska-Trajkovska Červená Barva Press, 2024

Daniela Andonovska-Trajkovska (1979, Bitola, North Macedonia) holds PhD in Education. She is an awarded poetess, writer, scientist, literary critic, translator, editor, full professor at the University "St. Kliment Ohridski" in Bitola, co-founder of the Center for Literature, Art, Culture, Rhetoric and Language at the Faculty of Education in Bitola, a member of the Macedonian Writers' Association, Slavic Academy for Literature and Art in Varna, and a head of the Literature and Linguistic Department (Macedonian Science Society in Bitola). She has authored 16 books in Macedonian (poetry, prose, literary criticism, scientific books), 6 poetry books in English, Arabic, Italian, and 9 poetry books of renowned world poets in her translation. Her poetry is translated into 40 languages.

DESCRIPTION BY BORCHE PANOV, literary critic, poet, editor:
"In the poetry book "House of Contrasts" by Daniela Andonovska-Trajkovska somewhere at the beginning we can read that "a tear without metaphysics has no aesthetics." This discourse completely determines the poetics of this very well-known and notorious Macedonian poetess. She is awake in each word and in this book, she creates her poetic alphabet by freezing the moment and by claiming that her alphabet was born on the knife with which the umbilical cord was cut. Although, she writes about things that are not so perfect or beautiful, such as the pain and the loss, she is always on the bright side by using the poem as the most subtle defense of life. At the same time, she stands in front of the vertical mirror of love and she confronts us with the naked truth by showing us the finest lines on our faces from which time rises like a wall between us and the world. She makes us to be aware that we live in a room of the autistic time, and even when insomnia speaks loudly, no one can hear the fractures of the day that assembles in us piece by piece like in an X-ray image, and no one can see our nakedness and our vulnerability. We hide behind the image that we show to the world wanting to be accepted and appreciated. In the poetry book "House of Contrasts" we see for a moment the world in which every night, humans made of paper return to the keyhole of their houses cursing the day that does not last long enough so they could find themselves. But that is precisely why the day in this book lasts long enough to see how the poetess Daniela Andonovska-Trajkovska shows us that the paramecium of the meaning develops into a multicellular organism breathing with human lungs in the chest of the readers."

DESCRIPTION BY SLAVICA GADZOVA SVIDERSKA, PhD, literary critic, poetess, editor, publisher:
"The poetry of Daniela Andonovska-Trajkovska is powerful and striking example of Écriture feminine, which is essentially atypical and non-classical, because the prism of this author goes beyond the classical framework of the so-called writing from the womb. Searching for the perfect and most appropriate way of expressing her view and thinking about the world, the author playfully moves between the forms and ways of poetic expression: from short elliptical poems reduced to simple but semantically layered poetic images, through lyrical poems that are thought provoking, to poems where the verse hybridizes with the narrative tone. At the beginning, the lyrical subject searches for itself (in the world, through the Other and in the Other, in the rational and the irrational, in the real and the oneiric), and the most appropriate form to express this search is the paradox. Furthermore, the search is an endless attempt to find harmony and balance amidst the noise of a world that is becoming increasingly chaotic, illogical, and sometimes nightmarishly phantasmagoric. At the end the search for the metaphysical vertical takes place, a search for the eternal, for the Absolute, for God. The decadence, the downward movement and the erosion of the values are constantly semantically emphasized: the images are broken, the words are crashed, the breathing is trapped, the woman is a doll with winded up steps, the face is a salt mosaic, ethics is "Cain-ethics," that is, the world is "on red alert." Nevertheless, the lyrical subject knows how to find meaning even in the era of meaninglessness, living its search for itself, for a perfect understanding with the Other, for a home without contrasts and for the Absolute. Andonovska-Trajkovska's poetry brings fresh and original voice that carries the archetypal one, thick semantics, explosions of meanings, feminine wisdom and aesthetics that ennoble the "collapsing world" so that it does not collapse. For that reason, the poetry book "House of Contrasts" deserves a special place in the contemporary world literature.”

"Daniela Andonovska-Trajkovska's poetry brings fresh and original voice that carries the archetypal one, thick semantics, explosions of meanings, feminine wisdom and aesthetics that ennoble the "collapsing world" so that it does not collapse. For that reason, the poetry book "House of Contrasts" deserves a special place in the contemporary world literature."
—Slavica Gadzova Sviderska, PhD, literary critic, scholar, poetess, editor, publisher

"In "House of Contrasts" by Daniela Andonovska-Trajkovska the silence is not silent, but dramatical and loud. It seems that here is a compromise and an awareness that the antonymies are compatible contradictions like the day and the night, the sky and the earth, the angel and the devil, the cosmos and the chaos. Like ying and yang. Like life."
—Jordan Stojanoski, PhD, literary critic, university professor of literature

Cover art: Ljupka Galazkava-silev

$19.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-84-0 | 92 Pages

New Release: The Unfinished Family Poems Barbara E. Murphy

The Unfinished Family Poems Barbara E. Murphy Červená Barva Press, 2024

Barbara E. Murphy's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Green Mountains Review, Threepenny Review, Barrow Street, and New England Review. She is a recipient of a Vermont Arts Council Fellowship and twice-nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Murphy served as a faculty member at the New England Young Writers Conference and is a board member of Sundog Poetry. A collection of her poems, Almost Too Much was published by ČervenÁ Barva Press in 2015. Her essays and reviews have been published in several venues including The New York Times, Plume Poetry, Full Grown People, and Green Mountains Review. She lives and writes in Burlington Vermont.

Description:
Barbara E. Murphy's compelling The Unfinished Family comes to terms with the notion that families can ever be "finished.' The poems in this brave and provocative collection explore the impulses of duty and loyalty, love and fear and compulsion for perfection as the speaker comes to embrace the mistakes that are inevitable in every family. These poems are as honest as they are hopeful in their insistence that we return again and again to the messy work of being with our people and starting again.

In The Unfinished Family, Barbara Murphy offers a master class on the compressed narrative and the withheld detail. Whether she turns a discerning, critical eye on her birth-family—a troubled father, a mother born into "the wrong era, wrong marriage, wrong life"—or her own made family she brings a wealth of memorable phrases, smart insights, and emotional yearning as well as an empathetic eye and forgiving mind that "lets a little light in too."
—Neil Shepard, author of The Book of Failures

Part of our human beauty is that we live in a state of being unfinished. This is why memory is so powerful. Barbara Murphy's exquisite, beautiful poems are a series of finely etched portraits that enact how our moments accumulate into meaning as they move toward another world we will never know yet help create. Muscular, lyric language and an agile form makes these powerful poems tap us on the shoulder and awaken us from our delirium and into the transcendent. Murphy's poems show us how personal history and time intersect leaving behind a memory that never vanishes. These poems claim life and life claims these poems. This book is a treasure.
—Elizabeth A.I. Powell, author of Atomizer

Barbara Murphy's The Unfinished Family is haunted by the archetypal ghost of a perfect family against which the speaker holds memories—brilliantly precise and unequivocally rendered—and finds them wanting. Yet, the honesty, bravery and fidelity with which she acknowledges her disappointments burnish these poems with love, humor and pathos. We should read her.
—Nancy Mitchell, author of The Out of Body Shop

Photo: Karen Pike

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-92-5 | 58 Pages

New Release: Lunch in Chinatown poems by Mary Bonina

Lunch in Chinatown poems by Mary Bonina Červená Barva Press, 2024

A fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Mary Bonina was finalist for the Goldfarb Fellowship and awarded several residencies, including one at the VCCA retreat, Moulin a Nef, in Auvillar, France. Previous publications include My Father's Eyes: A Memoir and two poetry collections—Living Proof and Clear Eye Tea, all from ČervenÁ Barva Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Lowell Review, Hanging Loose, Poets and Writers, Salamander, Mom Egg, Ovunque Siamo, Adelaide, and many other journals, and her work has been included in several anthologies, including Entering The Real World, VCCA Poets on Mt. San Angelo from Wavertree Press. Her completed novel, My Way Home, is on submission to publishers. Her poem "Drift" won Boston Contemporary Authors/Urban Arts prize and is carved in a granite monolith, a permanent public art installation in the City. Bonina has collaborated with composers of arts songs and new music, a sculptor, and her work has been translated into Japanese. She received a full fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. A voiceover artist, she has recorded fiction, non-fiction, and poetry for blind readers. She offers classes, workshops, conference presentation, and individual coaching for writers. Bonina has been a long-time member of the Writers Room of Boston, where she served on the Board for more than a decade. She earned her M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her website is www.marybonina.com

Description:
New from Mary Bonina—and particularly timely—LUNCH IN CHINATOWN is a poetry collection inspired by the poet's work teaching the English language to immigrants from Haiti, China, Poland and other European countries, Central, Latin American, and African nations, and others. The poems highlight, as Patrick Sylvain, Professor of Global Studies, states in his introduction, "the universal nature of human connection, understanding, and a sense of shared humanity in the face of cultural and linguistic differences" Bonina sees her classes as offering survival skills, and compares her necessarily improvised lessons to the act of writing a poem, "that familiar process of one word, one thought, leading to another, often unanticipated one, recognizing endless possibilities, and finally settling on the right one in a moment of revelation."

In this vivid, wonderfully empathetic book of poems, Lunch In Chinatown, Mary Bonina is an inquisitive seeker, not only set to teach English but also to learn about the lives of her immigrant students. There’s the student who worked with the very ill and the job did not allow wearing jewelry “without that ring on her finger/her hand felt too light, made her think/that she wasn’t in the world anymore,” another puzzled over the same abbreviation for Saint and Street, a young man recalled his young love in Port au Prince. In her masterful telling Bonina has given us glimpses of their worlds, both before and after the immigration. These poems celebrate the common human language, of disappointments and loss, aspirations and love, and also how poetry and the resolve of students and their teacher can make all the difference in the world.
—Pui Ying Wong, author of Fanling in October

In Lunch in Chinatown "Mary Bonina's eloquent verses breathe life into the seemingly mundane, turning lunchtime into an exploration of the extraordinary moments hidden within our daily routines."
          from the Introduction
          Patrick Sylvain, P.H.D., M.F.A
          Author, Unfinished Dreams/Rev San Bout (bilingual poetry)

Cover photo: Abbi Sauro
Author photo: Christopher Collyn

$16.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-88-8 | 27 Pages

New Release: MARBLE DUST Poems by Gary Metras

MARBLE DUST Poems by Gary Metras Červená Barva Press, 2024

Gary Metras was appointed the inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Easthampton in 2018. His essays, reviews, and chiefly poems have appeared in hundreds of journals since the 1970s, including America, American Angler, Boston Review of Books, The Common, Connecticut Poetry Review, Gray's Sporting Journal, Poetry, Poetry East, Salzburg Poetry Review, and Yankee Magazine. He has taught high school English and college writing. A master letterpress printer, he ran Adastra Press for forty years, publishing poets from all over the country.

From Izmir, Turkey to Stonehenge, England, these are poems of adventure, revelation, and enlightenment. The history, mythology, and ruins of ancient Greece and Rome are newly experienced and newly interpreted for the modern reader. The lives and achievements of Francis d'Assisi, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Beethoven, John Keats, and Oscar Wilde are given new meaning, while a belly dancer, a butcher, a taxi driver, and a waiter and a waitress are elevated beyond their typically mundane jobs and lives. Join the author as he walks the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, rides a cable car up an Austrian alp, contemplates the paintings in the Sistine Chapel, a Christmas in Paris, lunches in the café atop the Euromast in Rotterdam, and so much more.

Marble Dust is like a travelogue in four parts. It is a paean of geography, actual, spiritual, historical, mythological as well as a special place in our collective hearts. From Greece to Italy and the rarified air and memories of mountains in Austria, Switzerland and the mysteries of Stonehenge. Marble Dust merges all these into a seamless literary tapestry. It also encompasses themes pertaining to art, artists, poets and architecture. This collection places the enraptured reader in the center of this journey as time bends backwards and forward. All places blend into the external and internal worlds. Poem after poem is replete with breathtaking imagery and proven mastery of the written word. Reading Marble Dust is a memorable, exhilarating and a highly recommended experience.
—Harris Gardner, Poetry Editor, Ibbetson Street, author of No Time for Death

Cover photo: "Ionic column capital, 5th-4th century BCE, the Acropolis, Athens. Photo by the author."

$19.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-95-6 | 102 Pages

New Release: I REALLY LIKE LOVERS OF POETRY by Grzegorz Wróblewski

I REALLY LIKE LOVERS OF POETRY by Grzegorz Wróblewski Translated from the Polish by Grzegorz Wróblewski & Marcus Silcock Slease Červená Barva Press, 2024

Grzegorz Wróblewski was born in 1962 in Gdansk and grew up in Warsaw. Since 1985 he has been living in Copenhagen. English translations of his work are available in Our Flying Objects (trans. Joel Leonard Katz, Rod Mengham, Malcolm Sinclair, Adam Zdrodowski, Equipage, 2007), A Marzipan Factory (trans. Adam Zdrodowski, Otoliths, 2010), Kopenhaga (trans. Piotr Gwiazda, Zephyr Press, 2013), Let's Go Back to the Mainland (trans. Agnieszka Pokojska, Červená Barva Press, 2014), Zero Visibility (trans. Piotr Gwiazda, Phoneme Media, 2017), Dear Beloved Humans (trans. Piotr Gwiazda, Lavender/Dialogos Books, 2023) Asemic writing book Shanty Town (Post-Asemic Press, 2022).

Marcus Silcock Slease is a (mostly) surreal-absurd writer from Portadown, N. Ireland. He is the author of Puppy (Beir Bua Press), Never Mind the Beasts (Dostoyevsky Wannabe), The Green Monk (Boiler House Press), and Play Yr Kardz Right (Dostoyevsky Wannabe), among others. His poetry has been translated into Polish and Danish and has appeared or is forthcoming in various magazines and anthologies, including: Tin House, Poetry, The Lincoln Review, Bath Magg, New World Writing, Tupelo Quarterly, and in the Best British Poetry series. He lives in Sitges, Spain. Find out more at: Never Mind the Beasts (www.nevermindthebeasts.com)

"I REALLY LIKE LOVERS OF POETRY" is the latest book of poetry by Grzegorz Wróblewski. The English versions of the poems are the author's work in collaboration with Marcus Silcock Slease. The author was born in Poland in 1962 and has lived in Copenhagen, Denmark, since 1985. Grzegorz Wróblewski is translated into many languages. The current book raises existential issues concerning the paradoxes of human functioning, loneliness and human isolation. The poetic works in this book are often minimalistic, devoid of the metaphorical structure typical of European lyric poetry. They may sometimes be associated with Zen poetry. The poems from the volume "I REALLY LIKE LOVERS OF POETRY" are also a criticism of the modern world full of consumerism. They try to draw the reader's attention to issues that are lost in a world full of ruthless materialism.

Polish writer and visual artist Grzegorz Wróblewski has written I Really Like Lovers of Poetry directly in English with assistance of his friend and fellow writer Marcus Slease. A translation, a collaboration, certainly an experiment, it is above all a collection of mordant parables about humans — and occasionally nonhumans too. A moralist at heart, like Bertolt Brecht, Wróblewski demystifies and clarifies: "Everyone is looking for the truth. / The only truth is the rumbling / of our stomachs."
—Piotr Gwiazda, translator of Dear Beloved Humans: Selected Poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski

In his latest book of poems, Grzegorz Wróblewski delivers what readers have always loved him for: his take on not just the personal, but the condition of human beings and all creatures (I would like to wake up someday/among people who respect both/wolves and pigs) in the often mysterious planet we live on. Sometimes the take is acerbic, sometimes the take has a dark absurdity to it, sometimes the take is full of genuine wit, sometimes the take has a forbearance of humanity that even surprises the poet, but at all times these poems ring true in their brilliance, even if a bit of hurt must be endured for posing those truths: Listen to the silence of heaven./You won’t understand any of it. But at least you’ll be closer/to the silent clouds./Closer to where you got here/by a mistake. But there's no mistaking Wróblewski's poetic gifts and the lovely rigor of his challenging mind.
—Tim Suermondt, author of A Doughnut And The Great Beauty Of The World

Cover art: "50 x 50 The Boys from Amager II" by Grzegorz Wróblewski

$16.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-93-2 | 38 Pages

New Release: The Chronicler of Indifference Poems translated from Arabic by by Hussam Jefee-Bahloul & Samantha Kostmayer-Sulaiman

The Chronicler of Indifference Poems translated from Arabic by: Hussam Jefee-Bahloul & Samantha Kostmayer-Sulaiman Červená Barva Press, 2024

Bahloul (A.k.a Hussam Jefee-Bahloul) is a poet, musician and psychiatrist. He was born in Syria in 1983 and currently practices and teaches at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He writes poems and essays both in Arabic and English. He has two books of poetry published in Arabic, and has published essays in both languages. Bahloul is also a musician and songwriter. His project "Ta'sheeq" aimed at dovetailing the elements of poetry, music and visual arts together. The project toured many cities and performed around the US between 2015-2018. His current musical project Souq El-Jum3a (Friday Market) is a musical collective that aims at making original Arabic music keeping up the spirit of classical songs.

Samantha Kostmayer is a writer, editor, educator, and translator from New York City. She graduated from Columbia University, CUNY, and the American University in Cairo with degrees in history, forced migration, and law; Samantha is currently completing her Ph.D in philosophy. She is writing a volume of short stories and her translations have appeared in various literary journals and anthologies. Her poetry has appeared in English, Swedish, and Croatian.

"...What surprises me is the liberty in which he [Hussam] writes his poems; creating new images, shoving new vocabularies in the ancient dictionary of poetry...Not only a buffoon bird, but also pain, disappointments, sadness, and futureless horizons. Thank you Hussam for this fearlessness and sensitivity."
—Maram Al-Masri, acclaimed Syrian-French poet, author of (A red cherry on a white-tiled floor) (2003)

"The opening line of the Arab Surrealist manifesto of 1975 proclaimed: “With disgust we shove aside the dregs of survival and the impoverished rational ideas which stuff the ash-can-heads of intellectuals.” While the author may or may not bear the direct or conscious influence of that movement begun in the 1930s, the tone and imagery of these eminently readable poems, ranging from the flippant to the wistful, with an updated pinch of post-modernist irony and self-referentiality thrown in, fashion poetry, and succeed in finding a universalism, out of the same rejection of the dual illusions of nationalism and rationalism."
—Alex Cigale, poet, editor, translator, lecturer in Russian Literature at CUNY-Queens College

Cover art and design: Kevork Mourad (The Offering, 2015, ink on paper, 114 x 241 cm) by Khalil Younes

$18.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-85-7 | 80 Pages

New Release: POSTMORTEM SAY poems by Amanda Newell

POSTMORTEM SAY poems by Amanda Newell Červená Barva Press, 2024

Amanda Newell is the author of I Will Pass Even to Acheron, a 2021 winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize, and Fractured Light (Broadkill River Press), winner of the 2010 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Gargoyle, Rattle, Scoundrel Time, and elsewhere. A graduate of The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, she has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and The Frost Place as well as a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is an associate editor at Plume.

"Love and death, poetry's immortal themes, are interwoven throughout Amanda Newell's Postmortem Say. Death is everywhere—in the fields and forests, on darkened roads, in the delivery room—but there is also love, the kind that defies convention and outlasts death itself. These poems confront, without flinching, hard truths about what it means to be a woman, a mother, a wife, and a lover. Like "the clink of brass bullets as they spill from your pockets in the spin cycle," there are images here that continue to resonate long after the page has been turned."
—Sue Ellen Thompson, Winner of the Maryland Author Award and author of Sea Nettles: New & Selected Poems

"Amanda Newell's Postmortem Say is a collection of urgent and truthful self-revelations about marriage, motherhood, the life cycle of a love affair, all written within the maelstrom of our modern American violence. Blood is everywhere: the blood of birth, death, desire. Newell's language throughout is precise, viscerally arresting, yet always in touch with the pulse and breath of the vernacular. The poems whisper in the reader's ear of pain while providing the consolations of insight and compassion. For all the wounds suffered and remembered in Postmortem Say, this is a book that heals."
—Dan O'Brien, author of Our Cancers and Survivor's Notebook

"The poems in Amanda Newell's Postmortem Say are distinguished by driving intensity and subtle expertise. Even as this poet comes to terms with violence, loss, and absence, she remains utterly precise in her attention to her subjects, and lionhearted in her refusal of easy answers. These poems are vividly embodied. Amanda Newell is a dynamo of poetry, and nothing can stop her."
—Peter Campion, author of One Summer Evening at the Falls

Cover art: by Nancy Mitchell

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-82-6 | 57 Pages

New Release: I Tell You This Now by Daniel Lawless

I Tell You This Now by Daniel Lawless Červená Barva Press, 2024

Daniel Lawless is the author most recently of The Gun My Sister Killed Herself With. Recent poems appear in FIELD, Barrow Street, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Poetry International, Los Angeles Review, upsteet, SOLSTICE, Manhattan Review, Massachusetts Review, JAMA, and Dreaming Awake: New Prose Poetry from the U.S., Australia, and the U.K., among others. A recipient of a continuing Shifting Foundation grant, he is the founder and editor of Plume: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry, Plume Editions, and the annual Plume Poetry anthologies.

Daniel Lawless' extraordinary new book I Tell You This Now dazzles with poetry's strange power—"negative capability"—the courage to be vulnerable even in the moment of insight, to work at the threshold where the self ends and the street begins, to be the animal that knows it will die. It's an anarchic power that subverts all authority, including the speaker's. Adamant in their modesty, generosity, and ferocity, these poems can critique the absolutes—the giving of names ("Daniel"), the arc of time ("Sleek Green Car"), emptiness itself ("Ullage"). Always these poems speak to the real, the loved, the broken. Always the work is haunted by the injustices we suffer and inflict in a world which is collapsing inwards—"your dead father who is beautiful like Quang Duc setting himself aflame." Lawless' poems are wild, but search for a way to be responsible in a time of chaos. They live on the breath, but they bear the charge of a lifetime. Lawless is a visionary, a craftsman, and a terrific poet.
—D. Nurkse

When I read Daniel Lawless's poetry, I feel as if I am in the presence of an understated visionary. Deeply personal, his poems move on two levels— they are both in the world and looking down at it, as from above. They are poems of the ordinary and of a soul seeking redemption. They are poems of memory and suffering, longing as well as of celebration, insight and blessing. I am in awe of this poet and of this ingenious and luminous collection, I Tell You This Now.
—Nin Andrews

The poems in Daniel Lawless' I Tell You This Now evoke the photos of Diane Arbus in that they might make you want to turn away, but then only to turn back and go deeper, as he does, to find the humanity in this complex, difficult world. He mines photographs both real and imagined to create fresh, startling insights that sustain us, like the small daily joys of "...lumbering the cha-cha as she boiled the green out of Thursday cabbage." The collection unspools in one long, magnificent section-nothing to slow down or stop the accumulating momentum of these brilliant flashes. They're like old flashbulbs that briefly blind us as they sear into our consciousness. Death and illness hover over this book, as they hover in our lives, even as we hurtle ourselves forward. As Lawless writes, "how the dead live on/These scraps of memory we feed them like dogs./Always hungry, come-calling us by their name." There's a brilliant darkness to these poems that are full of light.
—Jim Daniels

Cover Art: Barn, Lake George (1936) by Alfred Stieglitz. Original from The Art Institute of Chicago.

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-80-2 | 55 Pages

New Release: PILLARS OF MAGYAR POETRY Hungarian poems selected and translated by Paul Sohar

PILLARS OF MAGYAR POETRY Hungarian poems selected and translated by Paul Sohar Červená Barva Press, 2024

Paul Sohar (born 1936, in Hungary) found his way as a 1956 refugee to the United States where he continued his studies in philosophy and chemistry. The latter subject secured for him a day job in a research lab, but at night he immersed himself in literature. After early retirement on disability, his sporadic publications grew to an avalanche of poetry, prose, and translations. His own poetry has appeared in three books, one of them a prize winner Wayward Orchard (Wordrunner Press, 2011), and the latest being In Sun's Shadow (Ragged Sky Press, 2020). His nineteen volumes of translations have earned him four prizes, most recently the Balassi Literary Translation Grand Prize (2021, Budapest, Hungary). His writings and translations have appeared in hundreds of periodicals such as Agni, Kenyon Review, Rhino, Writers Journal, and others.

This brief anthology covers six centuries and contains some of the most popular Hungarian poems in addition to many of the translator's favorites.

Cover art: Jan Ten Broeke (1930-2019)

$21.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-86-4 | 171 Pages

New Release: HERE'S PLENTY poems by David Radavich

HERE'S PLENTY poems by David Radavich Červená Barva Press, 2023

David Radavich is the author of two narrative collections, America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (2007) and America Abroad: An Epic of Discovery (2019). Among his lyric volumes are Slain Species (London, 1980), By the Way: Poems over the Years (1998), Greatest Hits (2000), and Canonicals: Love's Hours (2009). Middle-East Mezze (2011) focuses on a troubled yet enchanting part of our world, while The Countries We Live In (2014) explores inner and outer geographies. Unter der Sonne / Under the Sun (2022) features Radavich's German poems with English translations. Here's Plenty celebrates the sometimes searing yet ultimately redemptive richness of our planet and human experience.

Radavich's plays, both serious and comic, have been performed across the U.S., including six Off-Off-Broadway, and in Europe. He has published scholarly and informal essays and presented in such far-flung locations as Canada, Egypt, England, France, Germany, Greece, and Iceland. He has served as president of the Thomas Wolfe Society, Charlotte Writers’ Club, and North Carolina Poetry Society and currently administers the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet Series.

The poems in David Radavich's Here's Plenty come in seamless variations of splendor. The whole shapes a music lyrical and beautiful as the morning rain.
—Shelby Stephenson, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina

The title of David Radavich's remarkable collection is apposite. Here’s Plenty characterizes a broad panoply of states of mind and feeling that are in process of change, leaving alterations that may be new problems. Chaos is held in check only by means of will power, a duty to one's own humanity. "Prometheus on the Crag" shows Everyman as a figure whose duty is to suffer. Many poets are strong but few are tough in this necessary way. "Be generous / in your hatred: // You never know / what you’ll become."
—Fred Chappell, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina

Sometimes when we pick up a book of poems, we want it to feel like we are calling an old friend on the phone who understands and accepts us; Here's Plenty is that kind of book. From the opening lines of the first poem "Sun Blanched," which turns out to be a poem about the acceptance of loss, Radavich announces: "This is the fertile / garden I never knew." Here is a poet at peace with himself and the life he has made in this garden. There's an honesty about family, aging, history and place that is comforting. Rooted in the South, "A place where old water / draws back / and memory / and pain are blended," Radavich's poems pave "the way / into the bright darkness."
—Marjory Wentworth, former Poet Laureate of South Carolina

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-31-4 | 84 Pages

New Release: WORDS UNWHISPERED Ghazals in the Time of the Pandemic, 2021
by Pamela L. Laskin

WORDS UNWHISPERED Ghazals in the Time of the Pandemic, 2021 by Pamela L. Laskin Červená Barva Press, 2023

Pamela L. Laskin is a lecturer in the English Department at City College, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate Children’s Writing, and directs the Poetry Outreach Center. Several of her children's and poetry books have been published. Ronit and Jamil, A Palestinian/Israeli Romeo and Juliet in verse was published by Harper Collins in 2017, and was named among the 35 books to have on your radar for 2017. Bea, a picture book, was a finalist for the Katherine Paterson Prize for Children's Fiction in 2018. She is the winner of the 2018 International Fiction Prize from Leapfrog Press, and Why No Bhine, an epistolary novel about the Rohingya Muslims, was published in 2019. The Operating System published a bilingual picture book, Monster Maria, which is about Hurricane Maria, and is being used as a fundraiser for after-school programs in Puerto Rico. Linus Press published My Secret Wish about families seeking asylum, and is also being used as a fundraiser for Immigrant Families Together.

The Lost Language of Crazy, a middle grade-novel, was published in November, 2021 (Atmosphere Press). She is currently at work with Ukrainian author Vasyl Makhno on a YA novel in verse, Wisteria and Weeds, whose focus is on the war in the Ukraine, and what it means for the lives of teens.

Finally, she is this year's (2023) recipient of Judith's Room Freedom Through Literacy Board option prize for her current novel.
Follow her: twitter@RonitandJamil and follow her blog: http://PamelaLaskin.blogspot.com

Pam Laskin's WORDS UNWHISPERED: Ghazals in the Time of the Pandemic, 2021 is a stunning collection that documents the emotions, challenges, and fears that existed during the height of the pandemic. No topic is taboo here; love, death, longing, politics, family and isolation all appear in this haunting collection. There is a subtle melody and musicality underlying this extraordinary collection; a silent force that is a gift to her readers. Laskin herself reminds us of the gift of her poetry "the music melts my heart/in songs of ghazals/so every day I write/the gift of ghazal."
—JP Howard, author of SAY/MIRROR

"WORDS UNWHISPERED is a reminder of the importance of the ghazal being an ancient Arabic verse that deals with grief and loss. Laskin's accomplishments in this area of grief and loss reminds the reader of "Remembering the Fireflies," when Laskin concludes the stanza with, "Like a hemorraged rose." I have read the ghazals by John Hollander, Adrienne Rich and Patricia Smith, but Laskin stands among the greats."
—Robert Anthony Gibbons, author of Flight and Close to the Tree

Cover Art: Elissa Cohen

$16.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-97-0 | 60 Pages

New Release: Becoming Mirsky by Paul Beckman (Fiction)

Becoming Mirsky by Paul Beckman Červená Barva Press, 2023

Paul Beckman's last flash collection, "Kiss Kiss" was a finalist for the Best Indie Awards for short story collections 2019. Paul had a micro-story selected for the 2018 Norton Anthology New Micro Exceptionally Short Fiction, was one of the winners in the 2016 The Best Small Fictions and his story "Mom's Goodbye" was chosen as the winner of the 2016 Fiction Southeast Editor's Prize. Paul was nominated for the 2019 Best Small fiction series and had a story accepted for the 2022 Best of Microfictions. He's widely published with over 750 stories. Paul hosts the monthly Zoom FBomb global flash fiction reading series.

"Finally a Mirsky book! I’ve loved Mirksy since he first appeared in Paul Beckman's work, and in this collection Mirsky gets to rightfully shine, coming of age with paper routes, Devil dogs, pinball, bullies, absent fathers, Jewish mothers, Kosher Soap, and the inevitable disappointments and salvations of any survived childhood, especially one set in the big city projects of America. In Becoming Mirsky, we traverse the full range of Beckman's talents—the ironic, the asinine, and the wonderfully ridiculous, yes, but also the difficult, the poignant, and the downright tragic. I'm not sure if I love Beckman or Mirsky more, but I'm thrilled to indulge both here."
—Nancy Stohlman, author of After the Rapture and Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction

"Every so often a memoir is penned that transcends a literary filigree of recollections and gives us an authentic, deeply felt, and brilliantly written "accounting." Paul Beckman's Becoming Mirsky is such a book. In it are the quixotic and thrashing winds of culture, of youth — of "“becoming" itself. Here, Ethos and Pathos bespeak a life in a common tongue we all can understand. Here, buoyed by Beckman's wry wit, recollection is not a ghost, but rather a flawed, but earnest assortment of characters on the page we wish to know about. Care to know about. What a fine and accomplished work this is."
—Robert Scotellaro, author of What Are the Chances? and Ways to Read the World

"No one does it like Beckman — raw, raucous, poignant, vulnerable— headlong into the underbelly of Jewish family mishugas; a confabulation of stories too embarrassing to own or identify with. Beckman's razor—sharp insight splays out before us, leaving the reader with nowhere to hide and forever changed. Mirsky oozes originality, warmth, humour, and pathos. Brilliant!"
—Karen Schauber, editor/author of "The Group of Seven Reimagined: Contemporary Stories Inspired By Historic Canadian Paintings" (Published by Heritage House, 2019)

"From the brilliant and prolific pen of Paul Beckman comes the compelling, funny, heartbreaking novella-in-flash, Becoming Mirsky. This collection of short stories follows the life of Reuven Mirsky from his Jewish boyhood in the projects of the Bridgeport. CT, to his service in the Air Force, and on to a new life in New Haven Connecticut suburbs. This is a layered story of place and family, of tradition and loss and survival. The child of a broken home, Mirsky is perennially misunderstood and emotionally neglected. Yet he faces the world with resilience, rebelliousness, and a sarcastic tongue that gets him into no end of trouble. The writing all through is deft and beautifully distilled. In these pages, Beckman has given us an unforgettable story of disarming courage and wit and sensitivity."
—Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works

In Paul Beckman's unmistakable voice, a comfortable cup of coffee with a stiff shot of scotch, we meet (or better, examine) his recurring character, Reuven Mirsky, with all of the kid-of-the-fifties memories, so vividly drawn – lemon ices and paper routes - and the characters that inhabit Mirsky's world, a Bar-Mitzvah ruining Rabbi, Mirsky's kosher soap mother, and the father who only made guest appearances from time to time. A poignant, heart-tugging, witty, and ultimately triumphant story. A wonderful and memorable read.
—Francine Witte, author of Just Outside the Tunnel of Love

When master flash fiction writer Paul Beckman put pen to paper for Becoming Mirsky, he demonstrated why he's been selected for a Norton Anthology, a winner for Best Small Fictions, and a winner of Fiction Southeast's prize. Becoming Mirsky is as good as it gets, following the life of Mirsly, a Jewish boy growing up in poverty in the projects of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and experiencing a rough, yet incredibly realistic, life, even among his closest family members. Becoming Mirsky illustrates how we rise above, move on, and become more.
—Niles Reddick, author of Drifting too far from the Shore, Reading the Coffee Grounds, & Road Kill and Other Oddities

Beckman hits it out of the park, again. In Becoming Mirsky, a sidesplitting flash fiction bildungsroman that traces the trials of a young man growing up in Marina Village, a public housing project, Beckman sketches with his signature hilarity and warmth, the fraught path to adulthood for Mirsky. Sometimes innocently, and sometimes not-so-naively, Mirsky navigates his way among hardscrabble family, neighbors, and schoolmates. In adventures that range from delivering groceries past a dead man's body in a funeral parlor, to relishing the thought of one day becoming a successful shoe salesman so that he can smell the tantalizing scent of new shoe leather, Mirsky gradually learns the ways of the world. And as he recounts his hilarious adventures, readers learn that Mirsky’s world, while uniquely colorful, if at times hardboiled, is not so terribly different from their own.
—Brad Rose, author of Lucky Animals and No. Wait. I Can Explain.

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-78-9 | 74 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: 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 Tranlator
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

GIORNATA by Irina Mashinski

GIORNATA by Irina Mashinski Translated by Maria Bloshteyn and Boris Dralyuk Červená Barva Press, 2022

Irina Mashinski was born and raised in Moscow. She graduated from Moscow University, where she studied theory of landscape and completed her PhD in paleoclimatology. In 1991, she emigrated to the United States, where she taught high school mathematics as well as literature, history, and meteorology at several universities. Mashinski is the author The Naked World (MadHat Press, 2022) and of eleven books of poetry and essays in Russian. She is co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015) and of Cardinal Points, the journal of Brown University's Slavic Department. Her work has been translated into several languages and has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies both in the US and internationally. Website: www.irinamashinski.com

Irina Mashinski is a poet who has the rooting feeling for the tag game played between the inapposite and the apposite. Accordingly, nothing is off-limit because there is no limit for a poet who can be microscopic and cosmic, offhand and adjuring, and who, above all, is willing to descend and ascend-again, without limits. The long central poem In Absentia is a tour de force of relentless probing of loss and the innumerable, parti-colored shards that accompany loss, the drear yet enticing yet shattering yet sustaining landscape of memories. The translations bring a wonderfully attentive ear to the page, one that delights in the resonances and the cadences of English. All in all, this book is a book of poems to live with, containing the vastness and fearlessness we all hope to find in poetry.
-Baron Wormser, author of Legends of the Slow Explosion

If poetry is the language capable of shedding light on the things beyond, the things in between, then Irina Mashinski illuminates them - to the very core of our existence.
-Lothar Quinkenstein, author of Souterrain and translator of Olga Tokarczuk

Irina Mashinski's poems in Giornata inhabit the landscape of elegy and exile, as well as the actual landscape of rural America. She forgets nothing, asking without self-pity, "Who's left?" These translations feel wholly original, rich in music, but mostly rich with the poet's sensibility, the tenderness with which she opens to her losses and offers them to us, like her grandmother's "Moscow teacups" an image so simple and so arresting. Mashinski teaches us to reckon with the past, to know the world as inherently elegiac, and yet to also be tied to the moment, to love the moment, not missing anything, not the clouds blooming outside her window, or the detritus on the forest floor. These are poems to return to and live with.
-Anne Marie Macari, author of Heaven Beneath

Irina Mashinski's poetic eye has such range, it seems to move above the earth and see both the changing of landscapes and the shift between eras with equal ease. There is also an underlying cheerful quality about the poems, which could be straight elegies for our terrible centuries and histories but somehow refuse to give in to undiluted sadness. These new translations convey the purity and fineness of Mashinski's work, whilst conveying its formal complexity - a rare feat.
-Alexandra Dugdale, author of Deformations and Joy

Giornata. A day's work on a fresco, on a true fresco, buon, where the pigment is permanently fused with the plaster, where the vision, the dream, becomes one with its surface, where the day does not just point to its mystery, it is our mystery. In these poems, Irina Mashinski migrates between Russia and the U.S., between her past and present, between memory and memory. In so doing, she teaches me what cannot ever be left or lost: this moment, our now. Mashinski is a poet's poet. I am in awe. -Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of American Purgatory and Render / An Apocalypse

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-60-4 | 94 Pages

TRUE HERESIES by Michael Daley

TRUE HERESIES by Michael Daley Červená Barva Press, 2022

Michael Daley was born and raised in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He holds a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts and an M.F.A. from the University of Washington. His work has been awarded by Seattle Arts Commission, Washington State Arts Commission, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Fessenden Foundation, National Endowment of the Humanities, Fulbright, The Skagit River Poetry Foundation, and The Poets House Trust. A retired teacher, he lives near Deception Pass in Washington.

True Heresies is a cocktail of rage, anti-poems, and dissonant songs; this collection takes a swing or two at several revered institutions and dogmata. Some of the topics addressed here are exhumed from contemporary headlines, historical events often obscured by our collective distractions; at the unconscious fringe of philosophical meddling, some of these poems voice the suppressed terrors of today’s imminent dystopia. True Heresies calls out from necessity that shout in the street that is divine while remaining profoundly human. In an age when taking anything on faith is a challenge, these poems like bells peal forth their questions.

Mouth-filling! Mind-bending! A total trip! The images, references, and connections come so fast and furious, it's hard to catch my breath! These poems have some serious juice-the first one is SO intense-it seems to contain the outlines of all the rest-and from there, the poems slow a bit, and focus more closely, as if through squinted eyes, but never losing momentum.
-Marjorie Rommel, Poet Laureate Emerita, Auburn, Washington

I have no idea how these poems were conceived, whether in a boil after two weeks in the darkest recesses of a cave, or upon watching disastrous election returns on a continuous loop, or as one poem title suggests, at 35,000 feet while listening to The Odyssey, but they are bursting with classical and backwoods tragedies, passions, and humors (clever and ill), and they are excellent, challenging company.
-Kathleen Flenniken, former Washington State Poet Laureate

Michael Daley's poems are waiting for a world to be finished (and that is meant in both senses of the word). They are both powerfully evocative of the nothingness holding the living in its thrall and the dialectical affirmations of its images, whose textures confront that nothingness and insist on overcoming its negations. A book of poems that strengthens the soul.
-Jack Hirschman, Poet Laureate Emeritus, San Francisco, California

True Heresies is an American original, filled to overflowing with a unique voice and an idiosyncratic turn of mind. Daley's words and images can make a reader's head spin for a long time after the book is closed. It will enlarge your perceptions of what poetry can do. He makes conventional poems taste like sour milk. His work can fleece the reader raw.
-Louis Phillips, author of How Wide the Meadow

"Great literature," Ezra Pound famously said, "is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree." Michael Daley's poems most certainly are highly charged. "Language," he writes in one poem, "is tied to every atom." And that charge creates a kind of nuclear fusion that bonds music to meaning. In True Heresies, the music is often furious and symphonic, the meaning often a savage reflection of a fractured age, a time of climate disruption we ourselves have brought on and, as of now, appear to be doing very little to prevent what seems like a chain reaction. Daley's poems are the Greek chorus, the heretics who speak the sometimes-unspeakable truths we wish we could avoid.
-Ed Harkness, author of The Law of the Unforeseen

Cover photo: © Jay Mallin/ZUMA Press

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-63-5 | 96 Pages

CONFESSIONS poems by Anis Shivani

CONFESSIONS poems by Anis Shivani Červená Barva Press, 2022

Anis Shivani is a poet, fiction writer, and literary critic living in Houston, Texas. His critically acclaimed books include Anatolia and Other Stories, The Fifth Lash and Other Stories, Karachi Raj: A Novel, My Tranquil War and Other Poems, Whatever Speaks on Behalf of Hashish: Poems, The Moon Blooms in Occupied Hours: Poems, Soraya: Sonnets, Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies, and Literary Writing in the Twenty-First Century: Conversations. His work appears widely in such journals as the Yale Review, Georgia Review, Southwest Review, Boston Review, Threepenny Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Antioch Review, Black Warrior Review, Western Humanities Review, Boulevard, Pleiades, AGNI, Fence, Denver Quarterly, The Journal, Gulf Coast, Third Coast, Volt, Subtropics, New Letters, Times Literary Supplement, London Magazine, Cambridge Quarterly, Meanjin, Fiddlehead, Dalhousie Review, Antigonish Review, and elsewhere. He has also written for many magazines and newspapers including Salon, Daily Beast, AlterNet, CommonDreams, Truthout, Huffington Post, Texas Observer, In These Times, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Kansas City Star, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, St. Petersburg Times, Baltimore Sun, Charlotte Observer, Austin American-Statesman, and elsewhere. He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize, and a graduate of Harvard College.

"Defiant, deft, bound to the imagination and the practice of the poet's craft, Anis Shivani's Confessions has given us much to appreciate. This startling work resists the easy spectacle poetry, and even confessions themselves, often offer the heart. Instead, Shivani's lucid perceptions expose, darkly, and incandescently, too, the aches and auguries of that which is spoken and unspoken through language. These inseparable collisions of ecstatic and ordinary life, the world and the word, intellect and instinct, are visceral in discovery and intimacy. We, too, become fortunate travelers hurtling inside the prowess of Shivani's polyphonic acts. Confessions is the voice of an expansive mind, deeply conscious and deservedly celebratory of its own free textures and countries."
-Rachel Eliza Griffiths, award-winning author of Mule & Pear, Lighting the Shadow, and Seeing the Body

PRAISE FOR ANIS SHIVANI'S POETRY

"Anis Shivani evidently inhabits a world in which every moment of time in the past, present, and a humorously but lethally prophesied future, occurs simultaneously and is animated by a wit sometimes subtle, sometimes savagely indignant. Its two faces join forces and somehow manage to speak in unison of what they actually see and think. I sense everywhere an undercurrent of compassion and identification, a poignant humanity and sense of responsibility underneath his torrential voice."
-Franz Wright

"When I first plunged into Anis Shivani's work, I had the impression two of my most admired dead poet friends were one-upping each other in the afterlife-Tom Disch with his straight-faced drop-dead virtuoso satire of literary and political pretension and Aga Shahid Ali with his eloquent, global, polyglot formal legerdemain-both of them knowing more about history and about literature than ninety-nine percent of their readers. But Shivani's poems are no phantoms, they are vibrant, new, knowledgeable, daring, and welcome."
-Marilyn Hacker

"Anis Shivani's poetry is remarkable for its continuing preoccupation with literature, culture, and language, and a discourse that incorporates the written word, the oral tradition, and the imagery of art and film. His cerebral poems often border on the obscure, but constantly challenge the reader to unravel deeply embedded references, suggestions, and innuendoes. The innovative use of words and sounds that draw on myriad languages and cultures adds to the rich texture of each poem."
-Muneeza Shamsie

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-29-1 | 102 Pages

Quiet Geography by Michael C. Keith (Fiction)

Quiet Geography by Michael C. Keith Červená Barva Press, 2022

Michael C. Keith is the author or coauthor of more than two dozen groundbreaking books on electronic media, including one chosen by President Clinton for his official summer reading list. Beyond that, he is the author of an acclaimed memoir (The Next Better Place, Algonquin Books), a young adult novel, and 19 story collections- his latest Insomnia 11 from MadHat Press and Pieces of Bones and Rags from Cabal Books. He has received accolades for his academic and fiction writing.

In the tradition of the classic micro-fiction of renowned writer Lydia Davis, this singular collection explores the full range of human endeavor and behavior in all their varied and discrete (and not so discrete) manifestations. Keith's mini-stories, perhaps more appropriately called prose/poetry because of their lyrical nature, take the reader to places only a truly vivid and original imagination could. Often disquieting in theme and plot, the pieces within these covers invariably contain meaningful truths and lessons while managing to accomplish this in a witty and affecting manner.

In Quiet Geography, Michael C. Keith fashions a multitude of miniature worlds, and in each one he finds the perfect narrative distance and tone of voice to infuse the comic with the dark and the dark with the comic. Unique, yet intentionally ambiguous, these micro-stories are shapeshifters. Chameleon-like, Keith's creations change color and reveal different patterns so the reader may respond differently each time he or she re-reads them. These wry, richly detailed flash fictions repay each reading by offering gem-like, myriad angles of reflection.
-Allen Wier, author of Tehano and Late Night, Early Morning

Quiet Geography's cleverly dark humor stays lively throughout. It normalizes the strange and estranges the normal. There are cynical vibes, but they're not overwhelming; besides, as someone (Seneca?) said, cynics are really idealists at heart. It’s good to know Michael C. Keith is out there demonstrating the delights of idealistic cynicism. This is one of the best reads I've had this year.
-Betsy Delmonico, editor-in-chief Golden Antelope Press

$18.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-74-1 | 194 Pages

New Release: Gobbo: A Solitaire's Opera by David Cappella

Gobbo: A Solitaire's Opera by David Cappella Červená Barva Press, 2022

David Cappella, Professor Emeritus of English and the 2017/2018 Poet-in-Residence at Central Connecticut State University, has co-authored two widely used poetry textbooks, Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves and A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day to Day. He won the Bright Hill Press Poetry Chapbook Competition in 2006. His poems and essays have appeared in various literary journals and anthologies in the US and Europe. His novel, Kindling, has been called "a powerful and devastating coming-of-age story." Visit his university web site: http://webcapp.ccsu.edu/?fsdMember=249

Note to the Reader
Gobbo: A Solitaire's Opera is a "natural opera." That is, it is the emotional arc of a poet's life rendered in poetry. The sonnet sequence is divided into three acts much like a formal opera, and it is loosely based on the life of the Italian poet, Giacomo Leopardi. His life, fraught with emotional and physical pain, did not stop him from writing some of the most exquisite lyrical poetry of his age, of all time. His view of human nature, of mankind in general was dark, but this was not necessarily because he was physically misshapen, though some think that is the case. Whatever his view of humanity or whatever his emotional and physical pain, Leopardi demonstrated great courage in the face of adversity while his poetry transcended his life.

Though the emotional life of Gobbo follows the life of Leopardi, his voice is, most assuredly, not Leopardi's. The voice of Gobbo is the consciousness of a poet living his life. He is the artist navigating the world. Gobbo: A Solitaire's Opera is not an historical or a biographical document.

"David Cappella's Gobbo is truly operatic as it makes us feel the heart and soul of a tortured yet remarkable poet. Through the deft use of form, Cappella maintains a constant window on a changeable man. Each aria-like poem articulates an aspect of Gobbo’s experience while creating, as in opera, a powerful emotional skein. This is a life of a poet in poems. As such, its relevance is timeless."
-Baron Wormser

"It is difficult for us who live in an anti-romantic age to grasp the consciousness of the romantic poet without the aura of the decorative, or the merely forlorn, obstructing our appreciation. We may sense a great reduction has come to pass regarding the ways of being available to a poet in today’s world. In these poems, from the first act of David Cappella’s Gobbo: A Solitaire’s Opera, we are given, again, what poets in western societies have lost, the exquisitely articulated desires and claims of the young poet who has “no loves, no friends, nothing, just [his] studies” and yet, through the exercise of an intense imagination, finds comfort and confirmation in nature, books, language itself, and encounters with the beautiful and the infinite. It is high, grand stuff, true art, when a poet can embody the dance that transpires between the imagination and life lived in response to perceptions and circumstances. This is what David Cappella has created with delicacy and balance."
-Gray Jacobik

Cover art: "One / Leopardi" by Britta Winkels

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-15-4 | 106 Pages

New Release: Our Best Defense by David O'Connell

Our Best Defense by David O'Connell Červená Barva Press, 2022

David O'Connell's chapbook, A Better Way to Fall, was awarded the Philbrick Poetry Award from the Providence Athenaeum. His poetry has appeared in New Ohio Review, The Cincinnati Review, Poet Lore, Copper Nickel, and North American Review, among other journals. He has received fellowships in poetry from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and earned his MFA at Ohio State University. David lives in Providence, Rhode Island with his wife, the poet Julie Danho, and their daughter. More of his work is available at davidoconnellpoet.com.

These wonderful poems combine intellect and feeling, family life and history and are the "best defense" against the sleep of contemporary life in which people live vicariously through the famous, refuse to acknowledge the lessons of history, and persist in denying our finitude. They enact the scrutiny and self-awareness that Robert Lowell called for, that "agonizing reappraisal," and do so with great tenderness and with a wry sense of how our lives are interwoven with myth and history and with work memos and The Weather Channel. Our Best Defense arms us with humor, fearlessness, and wonder.
-Robert Cording

David O'Connell leads readers through a modern family life with tenderness, skepticism, and wonder. It's a life he knows-though that life is not everyone's. How much is lost when he passes on time with his wife to deliver a promised memo to Legal instead? When his toddler daughter sobs to a Christmas tune? These poems know better than to feel at ease with the timbre of Bing Crosby or the rhyme scheme of Edwin Arlington Robinson. These poems expose the mirage of perfect life outside day spas and inside sheltered schoolrooms. "Why do we learn / what we learn in this order?" is a persistent question-of this book and of the times. "What are you doing with your life?" O'Connell asks. The weather's unseasonably off. And there's no way to ignore the historical record skipping.
-Yona Harvey

Every poem in David O'Connell's fine debut embodies Robert Frost's definition of poetry: "A momentary stay against confusion." Poems celebrating work well done, the blues of Robert Johnson, and the deep nourishment of domesticity keep company with poems lamenting heroism's blindness and the wasteland homo sapiens seem determined to make of our planet. Formally various, the poems share a deceptively calm, patient voice, the sound of a writer who knows how ineffably fragile and sublime existence is. "Marriage," a three-line lyric that arrives late in the book, puts the matter best: "Evening, winter, fresh/from the bath, she leaves a trail./I take off my socks."
-John Repp

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-48-2 | 92 Pages

New Release: Nothing Resplendent Lives Here Stories by Renuka Raghavan

Nothing Resplendent Lives Here Stories by Renuka Raghavan Červená Barva Press, 2022

A Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions nominee, Renuka Raghavan, is an Indian-American author who writes short-form prose and poetry. She is the author of Out of the Blue (Big Table Publishing, 2017) and The Face I Desire (Nixes Mate, 2019). Her work has been featured in The American Journal of Poetry, Boston Literary Magazine, Bending Genres, and the South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. For a complete list of all her previous publications visit her at www.renukaraghavan.com. She writes and lives with her family and two Chihuahuas in Massachusetts.

"With the precision of a scalpel in the hands of a skilled surgeon, Raghavan cuts to the heart of the human experience, revealing characters at their most vulnerable. Raw and edgy, these stories bleed with emotional resonance. A powerful collection."
-Jayne Martin, author of Tender Cuts and The Daddy Chronicles-Memoir of a Fatherless Daughter

"In this literary braid of tragedy, irony, and humor, Renuka Raghavan delivers masterfully crafted stories that make you smile or break your heart. All of life’s messiest, saddest, weirdest, and most chaotic scenarios are here: from a soul deadening one night stand with a disc jockey and a calm stegosaurus skeleton who's not bothered by much, to the devastating consequences of a mother's criticism, no emotion is left unturned. Nothing Resplendent Lives Here is our choice for best short story collection of the year."
-Robin Stratton, editor Boston Literary Magazine

"Nothing Resplendent Lives Here is a beautiful swirl of tight, inventive stories that introduce us to invisible mothers who show up at a poetry reading, lovers who have died but continue to live in every corner of the house, and so many others. A mix of returning library books, fishing toys out of claw machines, and giant flowers that smell of decay, acts of ordinary life turned upside down. The stories are set in varying locales from Las Vegas to New Orleans to Delhi and, of course, the happiest place on earth. Skillfully crafted with charged language, poignancy, and unforgettable characterization, these stories will delight you and weave themselves into your heart."
-Francine Witte, author of Dressed All Wrong for This and The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-71-0 | 60 Pages

New release: On Earth As It Is by Michael Todd Steffen

On Earth As It Is by Michael Todd Steffen Červená Barva Press, 2022

Of his first book Partner, Orchard, Day Moon published in 2014 David Ferry wrote, Michael Steffen is so alive in his writing, keen with observation, both of what things actually look like, what the wind feels like, how things grow and rot, and also of character, his own, his uncles', anybody's he sees. Steffen is the recipient of a 2021 Massachusetts Cultural Council Literary Fellowship, and his poetry has appeared in journals, including The Boston Globe, The Concord Saunterer, Ibbetson Street, The Lyric and Synchronized Chaos.

From beginning to end, through great and small, the stirrings of a hurricane, the agility of a housefly, the majesty of a Pacific Northwest Sequoia, On Earth As It Is upholds the wonders of life on our lonely blue planet, bringing new inflections to the voice of eco-poetry, while formal and topical surprise from poem to poem defies genre. Steffen's restless curiosity ranges from silent alarm to staggering resignation, formal irony for the popular and political language of "global warming" to out and out observance for the iconic heroes and defenders of the earth and its elements from Rachel Carson to Ansel Adams. Still, barber, dentist, the memory of a dog, a Botticelli Madonna and Infant, Mae West, a tortoise wavering between its natural appearance and its resonance in fable, also appear as subjects in the poems to evoke the human and mythical entanglements at stake in the survival of our world. Shy of the overwhelming challenges we are facing in this realm today, the simple challenge of this selection to the reader is how to stop turning its pages.

It is so present, the speaker in this collection observes, and every poem in some way proves this: Steffen's close observations, intimate portraits, sense of history, surprising wit and the play of dark and light, all bring the reader into the now, a world where the sheer physicality of abstractions (the vice of innocence, immensity I sleep on, a narrow salvation and many more) renews and refreshes their meaning. The pleasures of the poems in On Earth As It Is are many, but foremost among them is the striking combination of the clear-eyed and the complicated, the everyday and the transcendent. This is accomplished and important work.
-Joan Houlihan, author of It Isn't a Ghost if It Lives in Your Chest

Cover art: Bridget Galway

$16.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-17-8 | 53 Pages

New release: NO TIME FOR DEATH by Harris Gardner

NO TIME FOR DEATH by Harris Gardner Červená Barva Press, 2022

Welcome to a world where there is no time for death. It is a place and a state of mind, both for the temporal and the spiritual with space for the mundane and the extraordinary. "No Time for Death' is Harris Gardner's fourth published collection; it is his first in fifteen years. This poetry collection is divided into three sections: An Argument with Time; Contemplating Mortality Instead of My Navel; and Negotiating for An Afterlife. These are serious poems with an undercurrent of humor pervading many of them. The subject matter spans the spectrum of the human condition imbued with faith, hope, and the occasional flicker of regret. It is engaged with the busy-ness of living. "No Time for Death" offers an overarching theme: Take a breath, a revitalizing pause; as for Mortality, slow down; enjoy the most of each day-to-day. What's the rush? Death can wait, can't it?

Harris Gardner has been the Poetry Editor of Ibbetson Street since 2010. He has authored four poetry collections: Chalice of Eros, co-authored with Lainie Senechal (Stone Soup Press) 1998; Lest They Become (Ibbetson Street Press) 2003; Among Us (Cervena Barva Press) 2007; No Time for Death (Cervena Barva Press) 2021. His numerous publication credits include The Harvard Review, A Poet's Siddur, Midstream, Cool Plums, Rosebud, Fulcrum, Chest, The Aurorean, Ibbetson street, Constellations (#6 and #7), Main Street Rag, Vallum (Canada), Levure Litteraire (France), Green Door (Belgium), Muddy River Poetry Review, Wilderness House Literary, Review.com, The Jewish Advocate, The New Renaissance, Endicott Review, Concrete Wolf, I Refused to Die (A Holocaust Anthology of stories of Boston Area Holocaust Survivors and Soldiers Who Liberated the Concentration Camps of World War II), Bagels with the Bards Anthology, Merrimac Mic Anthology, and others.

He co-founded, with Lainie Senechal, Tapestry of Voices, 1999 to the present); Co-founded, with Lainie Senechal, The Boston National Poetry Month Festival, 2001 to the present; Co-founded, with Doug Holder (his brainchild) Breaking Bagels with the Bards, 2005 to the present. Gardner was Poet-in-Residence at Endicott College, 2002-April, 2005. He founded and hosted many poetry venues over the past twenty-two years, a few which ran simultaneously for up to eight years including Boston Borders, Poetry in The Chapel Series (Forest Hills Cemetery), Mad Poets Café (Pawtucket, R.I.); others included The Parker House Hotel, The Laureate Series at Boston City Hall, and, currently, The First and Last Word Poetry Series, Co-founded and co-hosted with Gloria Mindock, 2010 to the present. He has been featured at many venues in New England.

He has been a member of six blue ribbon Poet Laureate selection committees: three for Boston and three for Somerville. His poetry has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and he received honorable mention for the New England Poetry Club's Boyle-Farber Prize. In 2015, he received a Life Time Achievement Award From Ibbetson Street Press and a Citation from the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He is currently a member of the Academy of American Poets.

No Time for Death is just the right title for this lovely collection that uses poignant wit and deep feeling to fend off mortality in the only way that poems know how: by keeping time alive in breathing lines. I admire the combination of playful, ebullient imagination and steady, formal restraint in these ranging meditations on transience. There are also some extremely moving poems about Gardner's Jewish heritage. And then there's Gardner's intuitive grasp of the instructive way that language, by its punctuated structure, keeps reminding us of our human predicament, even as it continues beyond the end-stopped lines.
-George Kalogeris, Author of Dialogos (Antilever Press) and Camus: Carnets (Pressed Wafer Press)

Harris Gardner's collection, No Time for Death, is sharply aware of mortality. How do we understand the passing of time, and our place in it? How do we come to terms with the certain knowledge that our lives will end? Although these are questions without answers, Gardner, in a poem like "Entreaty to the Trees" finds a way forward through the recognition of the world's healing beauty. The trees exhale "that we may breathe," and they nourish us with their "full blown fruit." They, and we, are sacred parts of the whole.
-Jennifer Barber, Founding Editor, Salamander, author of Works on Paper (Word Works)

Harris Gardner's new collection of poems is a contemporary memento mori, a sustained reflection on our mortality. These poems show us many surprising ways the awareness of death insinuates itself into our daily thoughts and most private feelings. With wry and humane wit, Gardner presents us with poetic spells or rituals that do not deny death as much as they put it in its place. Like Dylan Thomas and John Donne before him, Gardner is fully intent on showing us how death shall have in the end no dominion, and that it too will die. When one is committed to life, these poems say, there really is no time for death.
-Fred Marchant, Author of Said Not Said (Graywolf Press)

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-59-8 | 82 Pages

New Release: City of Stories by Denise Provost

City of Stories by Denise Provost Červená Barva Press, 2021

Denise Provost served for many years in local government and for almost fifteen years in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. She has published in such journals as Ibbetson Street, Muddy River Poetry Review, qarrtsiluni, Quadrille, Poetry Porch's Sonnet Scroll, Sanctuary, Light Quarterly, and in numerous Bagel Bard anthologies. She received the New England Poetry Club's Samuel Washington Allen Award in 2021, and the Best Love Sonnet Award from the Maria C. Faust Sonnet Competition in 2012. Her chapbook Curious Peach was published by Ibbetson Street Press in 2019.

"City of Stories is a full length poetry collection which explores the narratives we construct to shape our world. In three thematic sections, these poems observe the shared experiences of community, reactions to current events, and the imaginative life sparked by interactions with literature. Many of these poems employ formal conventions: Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets; quatrains, heroic couplets, the ghazal and the ballade."

Cover art: "Somerville 12" by Steve Imrich

"Both the art and toil of poetry might be summed up as the love of words. In "City of Stories" Denise Provost proves over and over that her romance is fruitful and enduring. The book opens with a series of charming sketches which limn the aura of her hometown city. From there, the "city" metaphor expands, and the reader is guided through realms that are personal, political, historical, literary, mythical, and even all of the above. Among its many surprises, Walt Whitman will declaim his apotheosis of the Internet, Rumi will have his own blog on it, and Maud Gonne will rewrite a famous poem by Yeats. This volume sparkles with bright spirit."
-Tomas O'Leary, author of In the Wellspring of the Ear

"Tip O'Neill's famous aphorism can be rightly extended: good poetry, like good politics, is local. Denise Provost's City of Stories sings the neighborhoods, the everyday events, the Honk! festival, Somerville's ArtBeat, Kendall Square, Longfellow Bridge - but reveals these places and events as universal. These poems portray carefully observed daily life around us - people talking on their phones, waiting for buses, listening to street musicians. They suggest a vision of what life everywhere should be: peaceful, leisurely, considerate. Denise Provost's lines weave a scaffold of ordinary scenes; the poetry happens in the spaces between, where it brings us the humane, and the extraordinary."
-Adnan Onart, author of The Passport You Asked For; winner of the 2011 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Award

"City of Stories is a book of poems full of awareness and clarity. The verse is strikingly steady and deep-rooted, the subjects oddly near and pertinent, as public as a bridge or tower clock, private as exchanges overheard between parents and children; from the gentrification of endeared neighborhoods, to the maddening rhetoric of our lawmakers. In these poems, Provost demonstrates simply dangerous wit and agility with language. The great surprise the collection offers us is all the fun she manages to have and impart along the way. Here are poems that fairly read themselves to us and then stay with us to remember."
-Michael T. Steffen, author of Partner, Orchard, Day Moon

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-51-2 | 72 Pages

New Release: Confini: Poems of Refugees in Sicily by Michelle Reale

Confini: Poems of Refugees in Sicily by Michelle Reale Červená Barva Press, 2021

Michelle Reale is a full professor at Arcadia University. She is the author of twelve collections of poetry including Season of Subtraction (Bordighera Press, 2019) and Blood Memory: Prose Poems (Idea Press, 2021). She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Cover art: "Portal" by Michelle Reale

Many Italians see the refugees and migrant workers arriving on Italian shores, mainly in Sicily, as a threat to Italy's economy, culture, demographics, and even its national identity. But who are the actual human beings who often are reduced to a horde of faceless invaders? In Confini: Poems of Refugees in Sicily, Michelle Reale lets us hear their voices by turning the interviews she conducted in Sicily into poetry. In the 27 poems she has created from the refugees' accounts, they tell us of the traumas that forced them to leave their home countries and how they nonetheless yearn for the familiar places (and people) they likely will never see again. They tell of the suffering they endured crossing the Mediterranean in unseaworthy vessels. They speak of the experience of being stateless, homeless, without work. "My cap is the only roof over my head," says "Suleiman." Their voices are anguished, ironic, matter-of-fact, and angry as they recount the quotidian but disorienting realities of adjusting to a new and often hostile society. Reale acknowledges her status as a privileged outsider. In one poem, she bears the brunt of "Ibrahim's" anger at "you white people with your notebooks and microphones." Reale has no illusions that the poems will save "the world or even the people that I wrote them about." But she hopes that they will promote understanding and compassion and ultimately help change inhumane policies.
-George De Stefano, author and journalist

A powerful collection, Confini offers a rare and intimate portrait of refugee life in Sicily, showcasing the complex nuances and heart-wrenching realities of lives displaced. Written with raw honesty and startling compassion, these tender, lyrical poems transport readers from the camps of Lampedusa to the streets of Siracusa, portraying the experiences of those navigating the treachery and hardship of life in a new country as they struggle to obtain work and legal status. Driven from their homelands because of severe poverty, economic turmoil, and the brutalities of war, these souls remain preserved in their agency and dignity as they seek to earn a new life free from violence and turmoil. Wrought with hope and compassion, Confini is an essential collection that should be read by anyone who values a deeper understanding of Italy's ongoing refugee crisis.
-Olivia Kate Cerrone, Author of The Hunger Saint

Here are cameos of rescued Africans in Sicilian camps. And here is a call to action via her poems. We listen, rapt and dismayed, to the (translated) anguished soliloquies and dialogues of refugees-as they are pulled out of the Sea of Death, barely alive, confronted on the streets with indifference or hostility, in state offices, in the food line, in maternity wards, in work fields-with just enough caritas to permit survival, little more. The ennui and smarrimento that take hold represent the stillness of post-trauma, sometimes alternating with moments of joy and reprieve: dancing to Bob Marley, "patron saint of the struggle." Michelle Reale has insightfully captured all of this baffling human tragedy with poignancy and solidarity, even braving the ireful rebukes of the ethnographic project: "you white people with your notebooks and microphones! [...] you want me to tell a fairy tale or a story of hard luck. Get out!"
-Luisa Del Giudice, Independent Scholar, Los Angeles

$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1950063-25-3 | 35 Pages

New Release: WITH NO SWEAT AT ALL by Alisa Velaj
Translated from the Albanian by Ukë Zenel Buçpapaj

WITH NO SWEAT AT ALL by Alisa Velaj Translated from the Albanian by Ukë Zenel Buçpapaj Červená Barva Press, 2021

About the Author:
Alisa Velaj was born in Albania, in 1982. She holds a Ph.D. in Albanian Language and Literature, which she has been teaching as subjects at university level, while writing poetry, prose, essays, articles, and research studies. Velaj was shortlisted for the annual international Erbacce-Press Poetry Award in UK in June 2014. Her work has been published in over 100 international online forums, printed magazines and anthologies across many countries (USA, UK, Sweden, Australia, Israel, India). Alisa earned an Artist-in-Residence Scholarship in February 2019 and attended the AIR Litteratur Västra Götaland Program in Villa Martinson, Jonsered, Sweden. In 2020, she won The National Prize in Poetry, awarded by the Albanian Ministry of Culture.

About the Translator:
Ukë Zenel Buçpapaj is an Albanian writer who has published books of poetry and prose at home and abroad. His translation work has appeared in Denver Quarterly (USA, 1994); Seneca Review (USA, 1995); Modern Poetry in Translation (UK, 1996); Visions International (USA, 1996 and 1997); The Year Book of American Poetry (USA, 1997); Grand Street (USA, 998); Fence (USA, 1999) etc. He had also translated several great poets into Albanian. Among them, worth mentioning, are: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, Ana Ahmatova, Arthur Rimbaud, Octavio Paz, Seamus Heaney, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Larkin, John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Rita Dove, Lucille Clifton, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Gerald Stern, Carolos Williams, E. E. Cummings, Robert Lowell, Yehuda Amichai, Ronny Someck, and Naim Araidi. He holds the following titles: 'International Visitor' ( USA , 1992); 'Honorary Fellow in Creative Writing' (University of Iowa, USA, 1992) and 'Fulbright Scholar' (University of Iowa, USA, 1992). A Professor Doctor, he is currently teaching Comparative Literature, Literary Translation, Contrastive Linguistics and Study Skills at the University.

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1- 950063-46-8 | 77 Pages

New Release: Marsupial Mouth Movements by George Kalamaras

Marsupial Mouth Movements by George Kalamaras Červená Barva Press, 2021

George Kalamaras, former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014-2016), is the author of eleven full-length books of poetry and seven poetry chapbooks. He has received several national prizes for his poetry, and he spent several months in India in 1994 on an Indo-U.S. Advanced Research Fellowship. He is Professor of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne (formerly Indiana University- Purdue University Fort Wayne), where he has taught since 1990. He lives with his wife, writer Mary Ann Cain, and their beagle, Bootsie, in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

In this collection of poetry, Marsupial Mouth Movements, former Indiana Poet Laureate George Kalamaras continues his ongoing series of Bone Sutras, poems that explore the interface of the human and natural world. Following his Surrealist forebears, Kalamaras explores the complexity of language, with startling images and juxtapositions, as a vehicle for visionary poetics. These poems seek to connect biological impulses to the realms of the spiritual and the discursive. In the process, the poems honor the varieties of human and animal life-mammals, marsupials, and the insect world, even probing the intelligence and "vision" that lie at the heart of molecules.

This Kalamaras text delights in the swirl of all-life-power, tasks forth, as if saying to all of us "... sound me toward dissolve." In this life-stream we go through zebra, hippopotamus, marsupial to Chilean poet Nicanor Parra and Van Gogh-all after the thing-in-itself, the as-is, the naked sumptuous flickering. Everything craves, even collectively, pulled toward extinction-in the constant "struggle for freedom." The voice here, an almost-Panda, spotted by "childhurt," goes into "belly-blur"-all is in a "shamanic meltdown." You can taste this volume, its layers and collages of multi-texture, you can read up close and attempt to unlock its codes of juxtaposition, dissonance and multiple bodies, you can also take flight through its various ceremonies and rites of passage, transformed, transfigured and reborn. Or you can sit and inner-eye witness the universe crushing in and out of you. A mega-realized set of teachings, poems, seeing-texts. A rare, one-of-a-kind, genius, collection.
-Juan Felipe Herrera, United States Poet Laureate, 2015–2017

George Kalamaras's Marsupial Mouth Movements redefines reincarnation to include myriad transmigrations within a single lifetime. The poet is a traveler who has discovered that "all time happens at once," and his nomadic spirit can inhabit any time, any creature, or any object with wonderful agility. He offers us a surrealist "Mantra Diksha" that initiates us into the Bretonian affinities of everything to everything. Through the example of the fetal marsupial crawling into the mother's pouch to gestate, Kalamaras shows us that birth is not an event but a continuum. The dazzling lyricism of this book, the depth and beauty of its vision, will change the way the reader sees the world.
-Lawrence R. Smith, author of The Map of Who We Are

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-30-7 | 79 Pages

New Release: In the Arms of the Father Poems by Flavia Cosma

In the Arms of the Father Poems by Flavia Cosma Translated from the Romanian by Flavia Cosma with Charles Siedlecki Červená Barva Press, 2021

A recipient of the John Dryden Prize for poetry in translation - edition 2007, the poetry collection In the Arms of the Father by Flavia Cosma is a remarkable representation of the high poetic accomplishment of a true "international" author. Flavia Cosma is a Romanian born poet, living in Canada and published widely in numerous countries and languages. Deeply metaphysical, this book gathers between its covers the permanent osmosis of the poet's state of mind and consciousness with the divinity and the wealth of nature. And just under this perspective, wonderful glimpses of the passage of time are coming to life, filtered through Flavia's particular sensitivity. Cosma seems to possess the magic of touching things with words, to caress them, to vivify them. Her inner world finds and receives its necessary living space from a true and real coincidence between man and his surrounding. The influence of multiple poetic traditions, combined with the poet's personality, find in the "Arms of the Father" the dimension absolute that opens up from the concreteness of reality to the mystery of life.

Flavia Cosma is a Romanian-born Canadian writer, poet and translator. She is also a professional photographer and producer, director and screenwriter for television documentary films. Flavia has published poetry, prose, children's literature and travel memoirs. Her books were translated and published in various countries and languages. Flavia has a Master's in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, Romania. Cosma's poetry books Leaves of a Diary, Thus Spoke the Sea and The Latin Quarter were studied at Universities in Canada and USA during the school years 2008, 2014, and 2017. A recipient of several international literary awards Flavia Cosma is the director of The Biannual Writers' and Artists' Festivals at Val-David, Quebec, Canada. www.flaviacosma.com

Charles Siedlecki is an educator, writer, translator and poetry editor living and working in Toronto, Canada. He received a degree in English Literature and Art History from the University of Toronto, and later took a fellowship at AKADEMIA SZTUK PIEKNYCH w WARSZAWIE (The Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts). He received the Third Prize in the 2007 Dryden Translation Competition for co-translating together with Flavia Cosma her poetry book In the Arms of the Father-prize awarded by British Comparative Literature Association/British Centre for Literary Translation. Charles Siedlecki's poetry collection Somewhere in the Universe was published by KCLF-21 Press, Toronto in 2008.

Embraced by lush foliage and endearing forest friends in the real and imagined world, Flavia Cosma's poems are inhabited by all of these in a larger cosmic understanding; lit by a spiritual incandescence that few possess in this worldly world. Her poems are havens of precious moments lingering over metaphors of porcupines and snakes, spiders and dogs, lion-fish, peacocks and crows, the wind and rain, seasons, blue snow and a purple wave that spills onto blank sheets of paper. Her lines "The returning steps of the Poet / On silks filled with grace" is for me Flavia walking her words. While her words have soft contours, they also alert us to the harsh realities of "Air no longer reaching the lungs / Dissolves into fog / And screams," reminding us of the current pandemic in the world. As a line in her meditative book says "He, who is consumed by fire will never rot," I believe this is true of poet Flavia Cosma who is a gentle flame and her words will live forever.

"All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one." T.S. Eliot

-Bina Sarkar Ellias, Poet, Art curator, Editor, Designer & Publisher Int. Gallerie, Mumbai, India

Flavia Cosma always delivers. Her latest book, In the Arms of The Father, is a delight. Evident once again is her exemplary language of the senses that is startling and beautiful as it expresses harmony with self and the universe. The spirituality inherent in Cosma's language is undeniable. Enjoy the lyrical journey that is provided by this fascinating poetry collection.
-Alan Britt, Dream Highway
Towson University

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-05-5 | 102 Pages

New Release: Temporary Shelter by Olena Jennings (Fiction)

Temporary Shelter by Olena Jennings (Fiction) Červená Barva Press, 2021

Olena Jennings is the author of the poetry collection Songs from an Apartment and the chapbook Memory Project. Her translation with Oksana Lutsyshyna of Artem Chekh's Absolute Zero was released in 2020 by Glagoslav. She and Iryna Shuvalova translated Pray to the Empty Wells by Iryna Shuvalova published by Lost Horse Press in 2019. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and an MA from the University of Alberta. She is the founder and curator of the Poets of Queens reading series.

"A scintillating and poetic novel, brimming with imagination, historical details, and profound emotional truths."
-Jennifer Croft, author of Homesick

"A thoroughly timely novel about the past. Jennings envisions Anna Akhmatova struggling against gender expectations and heteronormativity-even among fellow bohemians in 1910s St. Petersburg. Through many challenges, Akhmatova in Temporary Shelter remains committed to her individual identity and purpose. The novel is gorgeously written; Jennings's background as a poet and translator shines with imagery that is at once surprising and precise, sparse and sensuous."
-Olga Livshin, author of A Life Replaced, poems with translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-45-1 | 164 Pages

New Release: WALL AND NEUTRINO THE POET IN NEW YORK Selected Poems by Constantin Severin

WALL AND NEUTRINO THE POET IN NEW YORK Selected Poems by Constantin Severin Červená Barva Press, 2021

Constantin Severin is a Romanian writer and visual artist, founder and proponent of Archetypal Expressionism, a highly regarded global art movement, which he founded in Bukovina, in 2001, as well as co-founder of 3rd Paradigm International Artists Group. A graduate of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, he has published ten books of poetry, essays and fiction. One of his poems was included in the 2014 World Literature Today anthology, After the Wall Fell: Dispatches from Central Europe (1989–2014), aimed at popularizing post-Wende Central European literature on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Severin's conceptual art and artworks have appeared in Artdaily, World Literature Today, It's Liquid, Levure littéraire, Empireuma, Contemporanul, Vatra, Arkitera, Glare Magazine, Cuadernos del Ateneo, Dance, Media Japan, and other international art and literary magazines.
Cover: art by Constantin Severin
Website: http://constantinseverin.ro/

All of Constantin Severin's work which I've seen proceeds from a single steady universal pulse - his poetry and fiction, his editing, his artwork and his organizing. It's as if he'd simply alighted and settled somewhere slightly above and askew from this world, colonized that spot, and begun processing reality and producing art in this sublime frame ever since - like an own industry; like a small steady sun. In its steady universality, grounded in a strong particular European lineage, Constantin has managed to produce a body of work - and chiefly I am speaking of his poetry here, although it may also be true of his painting - which is somehow also unmarked, by which I mean both that it is unsullied, and also without jagged edges on which to snag. It is often the jagged edges by which one becomes acquainted with work of sometimes lesser or flashier poets. Thus, it becomes somehow easy to overlook Constantin's body of work, in our crush of days - to miss its significant achievement. I believe history will be kind to Constantin Severin in this regard. His work is like a beautiful species of animal or plant which exists regardless of our noticing. It is a natural fount of clear coherent poetic output simply flowing, unselfishly and whole. His is a tree of ripened aesthetic fruit, ready to nourish us unstintingly in delight and recognition - if only we happen upon it. Here it is.
Andrew Singer
Trafika Europe

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-44-4 | 94 Pages

New Release: Millie Collins, Your Barn is Gone by Sherri Felt Dratfield

Millie Collins, Your Barn is Gone by Sherri Felt Dratfield Červená Barva Press, 2021

Sherri Felt Dratfield graduated from Goucher College and is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. She received an M.F.A. in Acting from the University of Denver and holds a J.D., with election to Order of the Coif, from New York University School of Law. Sherri is the author of two previous collections of poetry, The City (Finishing Line Press, 2013) and Water Vigils (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Both collections were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies and have been awarded recognition in the Margaret Reid Contest for Traditional Verse, Jewish Currents' Raines Poetry Competition and the Passager Poetry Contest. Sherri lives in the West Village of Manhattan with her husband, Simon. They visit their shore home in Ventnor City, New Jersey during all seasons.

Sherri Felt Dratfield's new collection Millie Collins, Your Barn Is Gone explores change, loss, healing and renewal. Its sections correspond to Ecclesiastes' "to everything there is a season..." The poems take us from Venice, Italy to the seashore to the cafes of New York City; from learning a vaudeville song with Jimmy Durante to engaging the Madona in a Bellini Triptych to examining the divinity of an egg.

Sherri Felt Dratfield goes from strength to strength in this, her third book of poems. Gazing on minute details, she finds miracles in ordinary life, whether on city streets, on the shore, in her beloved Venice, or in her childhood. She writes joyfully of the woman on a dune, Murano leaves, a remembered song. And yet, devoted as she is to earthly realities, an underlying mysticism pervades this collection. Reading it, we are taken far beyond and under and above the world she captures in words to a place where only silence prevails. This is the remarkable effect of "Two O'Clock Bells," in which she watches the Campanile and hears, "three bells in unison./ I saw sound and felt life echo - /brief, gone."
-Grace Schulman, Winner of the Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry and Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters

The exquisite poems in Sherri Felt Dratfield's brilliant, luminous Millie Collins, Your Barn Is Gone draw on mythology and geography to explore themes of identity, memory, love, and loss. At once spiritual, intimate and worldly, they weave a rich tapestry of alchemical music. Inhabited by recurring angels, bristling with flurries of animals and a cornucopia of flowers, this collection is a feast for all the senses and a testimony to the redeeming power of beauty. To read Felt Dratfield is to be edified and entranced. She takes us down the rabbit hole in the magical "Arboreal," one of several stunning ekphrastic poems. Her timeless, exacting poetry lavishes us with blessings that "course veinlike through [our] hearts" and like "stronger tides forge fiercer bonds."
-Hélène Cardona, Independent Press Award and International Book Award Winner

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-07-9 | 97 Pages

New Fiction Release: Escape from Crimea A Collection of Short Stories by Svet DiNahum

Escape from Crimea A Collection of Short Stories by Svet DiNahum Červená Barva Press, 2020

Svet DiNahum was born in 1970 in Sofia, Bulgaria, and is of Jewish ancestry. He is a graduate of the Department of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University and currently lives in New York City, Sofia, Vienna, and Frankfurt. He has published short stories in numerous literary magazines in Bulgaria and throughout Europe; his work has been translated into English, German, Russian, Serbian, Turkish, Spanish, and French. His fiction has appeared in US literary magazines such as Drunken Boat, Gloom Cupboard, Danse Macabre, and Audience. DiNahum is the author of The Wolf's Howl (Short Novel, 1994); The Unicorn in Captivity (Collection of Short Stories, 2007), RAPTUS (Novel, 2009) Nicola Against Nicola (Short Novel & Screenplay, 2012), The Doctrinaire (Novel, 2015), and The Hangman and the Clown (Stage Play, 2017). RAPTUS was a nominee for the Elias Canetti National Literary Award and was subsequently published in the United States by Hammer & Anvil Books (Las Vegas, 2013). DiNahum serves as Press Secretary for PEN Center Bulgaria, defending human rights and freedom of expression.

Winner of Essay Competition for World Noble Peace Prize Laureates 2013 in Warsaw (and Lech Walesa Foundation) with his essay Solidarity Restarted. Author of screenplays: The Second Life of Michael Jackson (2011), The Unicorn In Captivity (2012), Rays (2013) In 2012 wins BTV competition for sitcom episode (TV comedy series Home Arrest). Author's website: www.svetdinahum.com Contact: sdnahum@gmail.com

To the readers in USA:
Dear American friends,
For writing the truth about the Russian occupation of Crimea, I've been persecuted and harassed in Bulgaria by organizations that are defending the interests of Putin's regime in the Kremlin. I've been targeted by a campaign aimed at discrediting me. I've also been threatened - indirectly - with so-called 'friendly advice' - a Bulgarian Union of Writers member told me personally after the book launch: "You be careful. You are making a provocation. They are organizing things so you'll be defeated." Then, referring to the nerve agent used against a former Russian military intelligence officer who defected to Britain, that same "friend" warned me: "You might eat Novichok just like Sergei Skripal."

But I am walking on the path of truth and I have passed the line of fear. I'm not going to give in.
-Svetoslav Nahum, Author, Escape from Crimea

"Escape from Crimea reveals the terrible events that we experienced in Ukraine - the criminal occupation of Crimea. Events are described with talent. The written words will not leave anyone indifferent. I am grateful to Svetoslav Nahum for his skill. This is a serious and significant book."
-H.E. Vitaliy Moskalenko, Ukraine's Ambassador to Bulgaria

"Escape From Crimea is getting much more attention this way with a much larger audience in USA. Nahum's work is an accurate depiction of events in Russia-occupied Crimea. I hope this book will also draw attention in the West to the suffering that so many Ukrainians have been through because of the Russian occupation and because of Russia's military aggression in eastern Ukraine."
-Ron Synovitz, Radio Free Europe, Prague

Photographs: Natalia Zhurminskaya

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-41-3 | 123 Pages

New Fiction Release: The Adventures of Camel Jeremy Eros by Corey Mesler

The Adventures of Camel Jeremy Eros by Corey Mesler Červená Barva Press, 2020

Corey Mesler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South. He has published 9 novels, 4 short story collections, and 5 full-length poetry collections, and a dozen chapbooks. His novel, Memphis Movie, attracted kind words from Ann Beattie, Peter Coyote, and William Hjorstberg, among others. He's been nominated for the Pushcart many times, and 3 of his poems were chosen for Garrison Keillor's Writer’s Almanac. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On, which won The Memphis Film Prize in 2017. With his wife he runs a 145 year-old bookstore in Memphis. He can be found at https://coreymesler.wordpress.com.

Camel Jeremy Eros, 60s Memphis poet, bon vivant and scenester, appeared in two earlier Corey Mesler novels. Now he gets his own biography. Beginning with his birth in Frayser, a gray carbuncle on the side of Memphis, Tennessee, and following him through his academic success and then his political/poetical awakening at the University of California, Berkeley, the novel touches on numerous multi-hued, phantasmagoric, hippiefied cultural landmarks, including the small press, bookstore scene in San Francisco, protests in the streets, and free love. Eventually Camel finds his way back to Memphis where he meets the darling of his life, the willowy sculptress, Allen. The novel’s latter half takes place mostly in Memphis as the lovers struggle with earning money, making art, setting up house, and eventual health issues that threaten to burst their rainbow bubble.

"The Adventures of Camel Jeremy Eros has an exuberant voice that pulls you in and a swaggering, larger-than-life character to keep you happily entertained. And then - just when you least expect it - this vivacious, colorful tale of a man's pursuit of literature and love also manages to break your heart."
-Tova Mirvis, author of The Ladies Auxiliary and The Book of Separation: A Memoir

"Corey Mesler's new novel The Adventures of Camel Jeremy Eros is a wonderfully Gumpian Memphis and San Franciscan Roman à clef, infused with aching lyricism, sharp wit, and ramped-up-to-eleven literary cleverness, its crackling prose delivered with a soft West Tennessee twang. The story of a Memphis poet and teacher named Camel Eros, his sculptor wife Allen and their love affair both with each other and with life itself is told through a redolent halcyonic haze, evoking memory of a time in America-the middle decades of the last century-that were a swirling paradox of protest, rebellion, free love and unfettered spiritual and artistic expression. Mesler's characters offer warmth and depth to this poignant tale, which is funny, wickedly sexy, and terrifically engaging."
-Mark Dunn, author of Ella Minnow Pea and We Five

"Rascally on the page, subversive in spirit and style, Corey Mesler just may be Memphis' answer to Ken Kesey. Here is a rip-snorting, picaresque tale of the Bluff City from the fifties and sixties that will make most Memphians smile-and will make non-Memphians wonder what the hell they've been missing."
-Hampton Sides, bestselling author of Hellhound On His Trail

$18.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-08-6 | 318 Pages

New Release: A Name for Everything by Mark Fleckenstein

A Name for Everything by Mark Fleckenstein Červená Barva Press, 2020

Mark Fleckenstein was born in Chicago. Six states and dozens of moves later, he settled in Massachusetts. He graduated from University of North Carolina Charlotte with a B.A. in English, and Vermont College of Fine Arts with a MFA in Writing. He's been very involved in the poetry community in and around Boston, for over 30 years. He was an assistant editor for (BLuR), the Boston Literary Review, founder/coordinator of two bi-weekly poetry reading series in Boston and a workshop leader, He is also a painter. He has two amazing daughters and a large, eccentric, long-haired black cat named Ariadne.

A Name For Everything is an impressionistic, densely imaged book of poems that explore memory: the residue, metaphysics, existential condition, the emotional location. The poems require the reader to put aside conventional expectations of contemporary lyric poetry and demand the reader's full attention. Whatever narrative exists, is fragmentary; elliptical and developed imagistically. It's best to surrender to these poems, with your eyes and mind opened wide.

Cover Artist: Mark Fleckenstein

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-04-8 | 49 Pages

New Release: WILD WRECKAGE by Charles Cantrell

WILD WRECKAGE by Charles Cantrell Červená Barva Press, 2020

Charles Cantrell's chapbooks are Cicatrix and Greatest Hits. His awards include grants from the Wisconsin Arts Board, a scholarship from the Fine Arts Work Center, residencies from Ragdale, Ucross, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and three Pushcart Prize nominations. Mr. Cantrell, an Air Force veteran, received his MFA from Goddard College (now at Warren Wilson). He taught for several years at Madison Area Technical College and lives in Madison, Wisconsin with his wife and son.

"Make some music in the wreckage," fictional poet Paul Chowder advises in Nicholson Baker's Traveling Sprinkler (2013), and real-world poet Charles Cantrell takes up that challenge in poems that thrum with romanticism amid bruise and ruin, amid the clamorous machinery of America. Wild Wreckage offers homage to labor and language, and to the "great / distance between love and silence" that these poems make palpable with clarity and affection.
-Michael Waters

In a world of wild wreckage-a world of piss odors and mop buckets, salt sweat and snake skins, black rot and fodder-an alcoholic father might die drunk on the railroad tracks, a long-suffering mother might be attacked with a kitchen skillet, someone might light a fuse in his sock on a passenger plane or knock a daughter's teeth out, and sadness might ultimately be expected to win out over happiness. But if that world also contains a father who teaches his son to write his name on a fogged-up windowpane, a mother who encourages her son to dance, and a poet who manages, time after time, "to say it right, rhythm/ and tone exact," allowing that although "love and shit get mixed up," "maybe the light holds a story," then the wreckage of Charles Cantrell's title is not only wild, but wonderful and necessary. If Cantrell's is a world of blues and bruises, it also embraces Wittgenstein's "sense of care," and Lorca's "brief, but furious hope," finding ways, like Levertov, "to ease the dread and silence." With a toughness of mind and heart, in richly textured and often luminously lyrical language, Cantrell finds "the perfect knowing" as, shining through the wreckage, "love stands on every corner" of this wild and wonderful book.
-Ronald Wallace

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-16-1 | 78 Pages

Pre-Release: The Bitter Kind A Flash Novelette by Tara Lynn Masih & James Claffey

The Bitter Kind A Flash Novelette by Tara Lynn Masih & James Claffey Červená Barva Press, 2020

In this spare novelette, acclaimed flash fiction writers James Claffey and Tara Lynn Masih collaboratively create an original tale of loss and love, as The Bitter Kind deftly alternates between Stela, the daughter of a ship's captain, burdened by her family secrets, and Brandy, a Chippewa orphan, haunted by ghost wolves and spirits. The authors cross genres and borders between historical and contemporary, speculative and realistic, presenting two unforgettable characters on a journey toward their inevitable, fateful destination.

"With two writers as well matched artistically as Tara Lynn Masih and James Claffey, a collaboration is cause to celebrate. This richly woven, haunting novelette transcends the confines of its brevity; feels tender, sprawling, immersive. The Bitter Kind is an alchemy, a duet, a gorgeous melding of two of our most treasured literary voices."
-Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works from 2003-2018

"With short, alternating passages, James Claffey and Tara Masih vividly illuminate the separate and commingled lives of Stela and Brandy in this original and elegantly textured novella. It is a story, human and soulful, of place, mysticism, and the hard-won ground we all struggle toward."
-Robert Scotellaro, author of Nothing Is Ever One Thing

"From ghost-soaked frontier towns to leafy waterways, frozen river basins, and the open road, Tara Masih’s and James Claffey’s parallel narratives tumble along through stunning landscapes of loneliness and beauty. The writing is evocative and tender, exploring both the haunted and the haunting; touching in its examination of broken things and masterful in its prose."
-Kimberly Lojewski, author of Worm Fiddling Nocturne in the Key of a Broken Heart

"With beautiful imagery and a seamless voice, Masih and Claffey move us through decades as two parallel lives seek solace and healthy human connection. Stela, long plagued by abusive relationships, and Brandy, spurred by tragedy and unlucky in love, are shaped and steered by the things that haunt them, and, perhaps, the things that will someday guide them to heal. This winning collaborative effort is both stirring and satisfying."
-Mel Bosworth, author of FREIGHT and coauthor of Second Acts in American Lives

"With their binocular lyric lenses, Masih and Claffey provide a lacquered and sanded depth to this compilation set in the chambered karst of our heartfelt heartland. The book is a layered lanyard, a laurel wreath, an ouroboros, Mobius’s Mobius, an effortless enso, and a terrific torqueing torus. The diastolic/systolic dub-Dub, a syncopated sink or swim, of the call and response had me reeling, a time step timed to hit the one and the three. What I am saying is that this is a tour de force, a fait accompli."
-Michael Martone, author of Brooding and The Moon Over Wapakoneta

Reviews:

"To read The Bitter Kind is to witness two writers who, in this slim 68-page volume, manage a marvel by beautifully performing two seemingly impossible tasks... the first astonishing thing about The Bitter Kind: Masih and Claffey blend their styles so seamlessly that, aside from a very few turns of phrase, it's nearly impossible to tell the difference between their voices. The second astonishing aspect of this book is that Masih and Claffey create a rivetingly cohesive central narrative from flash segments... Even more extraordinarily, they form a novelette with the scope and sense of fulfillment one would expect of a much longer work."
Emma Bolden, Tupelo Quarterly
To read full review click here...

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-40-6 | 68 Pages

New Release: LAVINIA & HER DAUGHTERS A Carpathian Elegy by Ioana Ieronim
Translated from Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Ioana Ieronim

LAVINIA & HER DAUGHTERS A Carpathian Elegy by Ioana Ieronim Translated from Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Ioana Ieronim Červená Barva Press, 2020

Ioana Ieronim is a distinguished Romanian writer, author of more than ten collections of poetry (three in English) and a volume of drama. Her narrative poetry in Lavinia and Her Daughters as well as The Triumph of the Water Witch (Bloodaxe Books, 2000, translated with Adam J. Sorkin-Shortlisted for Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, St. Anne's College) was hailed as groundbreaking. Ieronim has participated in numerous international poetry festivals, and her translations include drama from Shakespeare to Tony Kushner. She was cultural attaché of the Romanian Embassy in Washington, DC (1992-96) and thereafter served the Soros Foundation and the Fulbright Commission in Bucharest. She divides her time between Bucharest and Washington.

Adam J. Sorkin, an award winning translator of contemporary Romanian poetry, was introduced to Ioana Ieronim in the summer of 1989 when he was in Bucharest on his second Fulbright grant.

Cover photo: Kathleen Laraia McLaughlin
Photo taken in Romania from the album "The Color of Hay."

A recommended book by Small Press Distribution!

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-37-6 | 109 Pages

New Release: WINTER JOURNEY EL VIAJE DEL INVIERNO by Alicia Aza
Translated by J. Kates and Stephen A. Sadow

WINTER JOURNEY EL VIAJE DEL INVIERNO by Alicia Aza Translated by J. Kates and Stephen A. Sadow Červená Barva Press, 2020

About the Author

Alicia Aza, by profession an attorney specializing in corporate law in Madrid, has published four books of poems. Both El libro de los árboles and Las Huellas fértiles (2014) were nominated as finalists for the Andalusian Premio de la Crítica. El viaje del invierno (2011) won the International Rosalía de Castro Poetry Prize. Arquitectura del silencio (Architecture of Silence) was published by Valparaíso Editions first in the original Spanish only (2017) and then in a bilingual edition in 2018. Aza's literary work has appeared in many international journals and anthologies and been translated into Arabic, Bulgarian, French, Italian, and Serbian, as well as into English. She is a member of the Writers' Association of Spain and vice president of La Asociación Internacional Humanismo Solidario.

About the Translators

J. Kates is a minor poet, an award-winning literary translator of Russian and French poetry and the co-director of Zephyr Press. He has been granted three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. He has published three chapbooks of his own poems and one full book, The Briar Patch (Hobblebush Books). He is also the translator of a dozen books of Russian and French poetry, has edited two anthologies of translations, and collaborated with Stephen A. Sadow on a half dozen books of Latin American and Peninsular Spanish poetry in translation.

Stephen A. Sadow is Professor Emeritus of Latin American Literature and Jewish Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. He specializes in Latin American Jewish literature and art. Among Sadow's books are King David's Harp: Autobiographical Essays by Jewish Latin American Writers, winner of a National Jewish Book Award and his translations of Mestizo, A Novel by Ricardo Feierstein, Unbroken: From Auschwitz to Buenos Aires, the autobiography of Holocaust survivor Charles Papiernik, and Philosophy and other Fables, short essays by Isaac Goldemberg. With J. Kates, he has co-translated poetry by César Tiempo, Teodoro Ducach, Rosita Kalina, Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, Miryam Gover de Nasatsky, Ricardo Feierstein, José Pivín, Isaac Goldemberg, Susana Grimberg, Daniel Chirom, Sonia Chocrón, and Alicia Aza.

Cover art: Michèle Oliva

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-36-9 | 55 Pages

New Release: Get Up Said the World by Gail Goepfert

Get Up Said the World by Gail Goepfert Červená Barva Press, 2020

Gail Goepfert, an associate editor at RHINO Poetry, is a Midwest poet, photographer, and teacher. She's the author of a chapbook, A Mind on Pain (2015) and Tapping Roots, released by Kelsey Books (2018). She's received five Pushcart Nominations. Her poems rode a PACE bus, were set to music, posted next to a sculpture in a park, and folded into an origami book. Currently, she teaches poetry for National Louis University and writes book reviews for RHINO Reviews. Goepfert's poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies including Sugar House Review, Stone Boat, Postcard Poems and Prose Magazine, Bluestem, Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, The New Verse News, SWWIM, and Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives in Illinois. More at www.gailgoepfert.com

Get Up Said the World is a personal exploration of the profound and universal dualities of life. The book begins by stacking up evidence why someone would want to pull the covers over our heads-each poem illuminating a new reason: loneliness, lack of purpose, lost youth, physical and emotional pain, longing, abuse of power, man's ineptitude and cruelty. The poet amasses a soul-deadening weight that risks paralysis and despair. In the second half, she takes the given world and derives personal meaning from it in a way that shows the ravishing beauty and richness around us. We are led through triumphant images of nature, kindness and courage by the skilled hands of a priestess of the beautiful. These poems often become meditations, meanderings of the poet's mind that lead to a rejuvenation bordering on the spiritual. They depict everyday glories with a simplicity that gets to the heart.

"In Get Up Said the World, Gail Goepfert's stunning full-length poetry collection, every poem is either an elegy or a love poem to the world. Bringing forth her lyrical and narrative gifts, Goepfert pays close attention to both the sorrow and beauty that are the price and prize of being fully human, looking unflinchingly at disconnection, violence, and death, while also turning her gaze to those unexpected moments of human redemption that make it all worthwhile. Like the book's title, these poems are a wake-up call reminding us that "the simplest things last," and that our true heart's home can be found in the consolations of nature, family, and authentic human connection. With a photographer's eye, Goepfert brings us poems that celebrate both light and shadow, but always with a poet's determination to sing despite the noise of the world, refus[ing] to hush the bee box inside me."
-Angela Narciso Torres, author of Blood Orange

"In poems both searing and tender, each married to a dictionary definition, Gail Goepfert creates a new lexicon for loss, for remembering, for relishing the ordinary. She offers readers the world with all its flaws, celebrates each observation, reminds us that there is "No way to backspace, delete what's soulless." Get Up Said the World is a collection that will leave readers enraptured with the details of daily living and the words used to define it."
-Donna Vorreyer, author of Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story

"Gail Goepfert's, Get Up Said the World, is a unique meditation on relationships and life. Poignant and playful, these poems stay in our minds and ask through images and definitions: How do we persist in this living? Goepfert's distinct form gives readers an inspiring way to view the present and past while also allowing the poems to reverberate with each additional read. Topography shifts. Swiftly... I want to stay untamed-smart, engaging, and thoughtful in their appreciation of the nuances of language, the beauty of these poems will enhance your imagination and make you grateful for their stories."
-Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Author Hourglass Museum and The Daily Poet

Cover Art: Rob Vaughn @followrobv

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-24-6 | 121 Pages

New Release: 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

New Release: DOWN CEMETERY ROAD by Ned Randle(fiction)

DOWN CEMETERY ROAD by Ned Randle Červená Barva Press, 2020

Ned Randle resides in southern Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Mo., a region that informs his writing. His debut novel Baxter's Friends was released in 2013 by Coffeetown Press to good reviews. His third novel St. Michael Poker & Drinking Club is schedule for release March, 2020 by Regal House Publishing. His short stories have appeared in The Examined Life Journal, Soundings Review, Earth Review, and Prism Review. He's also published numerous poems in literary journals and reviews. Coffeetown Press published his full-length Running at Night: Collected Poems in 2013. His author website is: www.nedrandle.com

"The much-anticipated release of this prequel to the unforgettable Baxter's Friends was well worth the wait. Randle raises the curtain on the formative years of Billy Bright's life, revealing a formula for his adult years that is at once both intoxicating and utterly sobering. Down Cemetery Road delves into the disillusionment of adolescence sadly often shot down by mid-life."
—K.K. Snyder, Editor, Southwest Georgia Living magazine

During the 60s, the most divisive period of American history since the Civil War, coming of age was abrupt and ambiguous for able bodied boys fated by the shadow of conscription. This insightful novel explores death of boyhood replete with a bathtub baptism comically celebrating the slap dead end of innocence and the abrupt birth into the adult world, where high school graduates must decide to fight, fly or go to jail for resisting an immoral and unjust war. This novel is provocative and carefully written—a good read.
—O. Victor Miller, Author of short story collections One Man's Junk and The Tenderest Touch

$18.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-19-2 | 266 Pages

New Release: Momentary Turbulence by Brad Rose

Momentary Turbulence by Brad Rose Červená Barva Press, 2020

Brad Rose was born and raised in Los Angeles and lives in Boston. In addition to Momentary Turbulence, he is the author of a collection of poetry and flash fiction, Pink X-Ray (Big Table Publishing, 2015, http://pinkx-ray.com and Amazon.com.) Brad has two forthcoming books of poems, WordinEdgeWise, from Cervena Barva Press, and de/tonations from Nixes Mate Books. He is also the author of five chapbooks of poetry and flash fiction. Four times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and once nominated for Best of the Net Anthology, his poetry and micro fiction have appeared in, The Los Angeles Times, The American Journal of Poetry, Sequestrum, Hunger Mountain, Folio, decomP, Lunch Ticket, The Baltimore Review, and other publications. His story, "Desert Motel," appears in the anthology Best Microfiction, 2019. Brad's website is: www.bradrosepoetry.com

"The paragraphs in Momentary Turbulence are perhaps the closest we will get to that razor edge where prose poem and story balance perfectly. They also highlight the many ways in which the works in verse here recall Pound's dictum that poetry must be as well written as the best prose. If it didn't have such a big Yankee heart, Momentary Turbulence might also be the answer to the question of what a Robert Bolano raised north of the border would look like: blue collar pomo, searing, with a noir eye. But there is a twinkle in that sad smile, a delight in the beauty of a toxic sunset that comes from knowing just how long night will last."
—Ron Silliman, author of The Alphabet. (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/ron-silliman)

"Momentary Turbulence—a perfect name for this Brad Rose collection of prose poems. They take but a few moments to read and are filled with wondrous turbulence. Rose has an uncanny ability to write a sentence, fling it into space, and have it return in perfect harmony from its journey—matching up to the following sentence. These terrific stories leap from philosophy to stand-up, and add a little mystery and some shtick. But make no mistake about this description—this is the work of a pro who wields language liked a sculpture wields his hammer and chisel—chipping away at every unnecessary word. Bring a copy of this book for a hostess gift—it'll hold so much better than the wine you were considering."
—Paul Beckman, author of Peek

"The good folks in Brad Rose's Momentary Turbulence live like we all do, alone alone or alone around other people. They know "the emptiness of one thing is in the emptiness of all things. This is the shock of the world." When one of them splits the skin of a prose poem to stick out his head, look right at me, and say, "I warn you my friend, never turn off your eyes. The trees lie in wait. You never know when you're going to hear shots," I listen. You should, too. We're heading into some rough wind and this book will help us through."
—Christopher Citro, author of The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-09-3 | 52 Pages

New Release: Asking the Form by Hilary Sallick

Asking the Form by Hilary Sallick Červená Barva Press, 2020

Poet and educator Hilary Sallick lives and works in Somerville, MA, where she and her husband raised their two children. She teaches reading and writing to adult learners and serves as vice-president of the New England Poetry Club. Her longtime interest in the potential of poetry to build community and to foster deep learning grounds all her work. Her chapbook, Winter Roses, was published in 2017. Asking the Form is her first full-length collection.

About Asking the Form
As its title suggests, the poems in Hilary Sallick's Asking the Form raise questions about and through form: If I place my trust in form, where will it take me and how can its meaning grow? What connections can I discover by asking the form? A milkweed pod, the human body, time itself are all subjects and forms under consideration, and the poems experiment with the sonnet, villanelle, pantoum, and other traditional forms as well. The collection ranges widely in theme, from children and relationships to art and nature; and in setting, from small interiors to large vistas, from New England to Texas. The voice that arises through these poems, at times intimate, at times cool, is distinct.

With a watercolorist's perception of how the eye sees and a musician's feel for the shape of sound, Hilary Sallick pulls the reader in close in Asking the Form. The poems unfold quietly, unerringly, through the accumulation of subtle observation and depth of insight. In "Watercolor at Long Pond," she writes that "The coming and going the here / and not here intertwine," and her ability to capture flux is an essential part of her gift. She trusts the reader to journey with her, to contemplate alongside her, and to explore with her the contours of the inner and outer, the irreplaceable moments of a life.
-Jennifer Barber

I very much admire the beauty, depth and intensity of this collection, in which Hilary Sallick takes the materials of daily life and shapes them into profound meditations on life itself. The book's first poems consider the various containers that enclose us; a later group brings us painfully close to the experiences of a dying man. The title poem, a sonnet sequence, reflects on making art in the midst of one’s life, as Sallick continues to work on the sonnet, "this sieve, with water running through," while both grounded and interrupted by her small son's hands, "red with cold, shaped for impatient understanding." Asking the Form's authentic questioning is only equaled by the skill and grace of its poetry.
-Susan Donnelly author of The Path of Thunder

Hilary Sallick's Asking the Form is a wise and beautiful exploration of the poet's perennial question-where to begin? The poems are like little rooms of meditation where one ponders the pointillist nature of the creative impulse-the gathering, the listing, the organizing, the chronicling that must somehow be shaped into coherence and revelation. However, as I read the poems again, I began to understand that these are also the revelation! These are the paths leading to the poem! This is the wonderful work that Sallick performs in Asking the Form. The well-wrought organicism of these poems puts one in the mind of Aristotle's notion of entelechy: that there is something in an organism that knows what it must become-but at each point of its becoming it is surprised by what it is! And these poems are surprising, for they are of a writer being written-being shaped into being by her own need and urge and breath. The poems in Sallick's Asking the Form, are not just sculpted scripts for the page-they are also made for the ear and the mouth! Sallick's phrasings need to be heard aloud, and are a joy to speak. And so the reader, transformed as listener, finds another form of pleasure: music.
-Regie Gibson

$18.00 | 978-1-950063-18-5 | 81 Pages

New Release: Fly Fishing in Times Square by William Walsh

Fly Fishing in Times Square by William Walsh Červená Barva Press, 2020

William Walsh is the author of four books of poetry, four novels, three film screenplays, a collection of interviews, an anthology of contemporary American poetry, and a collection of essays. He is the director of the Etowah Valley M.F.A. Program at Reinhardt University in Waleska, GA where he teaches graduate and undergraduate creative writing and literature. Among his awards for his writing, he has received the 2018 Cervena Barva Press Editors Book Series Award, Georgia Author of the Year, and has been recognized by the Association of American University Presses as a Selection for Public and Secondary Libraries. He has been a finalist or semi-finalist in many competitions, including, among others, the Glimmer Train Short Story Contest and the William Faulkner "William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition" for his novels The Boomerang Mattress, Haircuts for the Dead, and The Pig Rider. His work has appeared in AWP Chronicle, Cimarron Review, Five Points, Flannery O'Connor Review, The Georgia Review, James Dickey Review, The Kenyon Review, Literary Matters, Michigan Quarterly Review, North American Review, Poetry Daily, Poets & Writers, Rattle, Shenandoah, Slant, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Known for his literary interviews, he has interviewed some of the most highly respected writers in the world, including A.R. Ammons, Doris Betts, Richard Blanco, David Bottoms, Joseph Brodsky, Pat Conroy, Harry Crews, James Dickey, Ariel Dorfman, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Stephen Dunn, Eamon Grennan, Mary Hood, Edward Jones, Madison Jones, Donald Justice, Ursula Le Guin, Andrew Lytle, Czeslaw Milosz, George Singleton, Lee Smith, and many others. Originally from Jamestown, NY, he has resided in Atlanta since 1980.

"Memory, nostalgia, a changing America. The magic of the animal world and the fragility of all creatures. An eschewing of what is manmade and crowded and impersonal. Comradeship, sports, and competition. Beautiful unfulfilled mothers, the difficult communication of fathers and sons. William Walsh's Fly Fishing In Times Square is a love letter to Americana, a love letter to America. Each of these exacting, spectacular poems come around the corner like long lost friends to kiss each reader on the cheek."
—Denise Duhamel

"William Walsh is a master of the narrative poem. In Fly Fishing in Times Square, he investigates memory, the self, family, and being with sculpted imaginal and aurally textured confidence. His poems elucidate rather than purposefully befuddle; they refresh rather than freight; they revivify rather than siphon a reader's emotional energy. However, Walsh is not afraid to step into the dark and witness existential matters—but it’s in this lack of hesitation to do so-as well as his ability to explore a wide gamut of both macroscopic and microscopic motifs-that makes his poems so beautiful. They are manifestations of "what happens / when imagination confronts the universe." Fly Fishing in Times Square is a book I'll read more than once; it's the sort of collection that teems with ideas and leads others to their own inspirations."
—William Wright

"William Walsh's new poems prove, once again, that 'there's no controlling the world's divine mysteries. With amazing vision and linguistic skill Walsh explores the desires and realities of domestic life in America. Reading these fine poems we are drawn into a complex world of family where separation is natural and memory provides the only means of holding on. These powerful poems never fail to lead us to ask the right questions about family and the wilderness, the world and our place in it."
-David Bottoms

"With a keen and painterly eye, Bill Walsh masterfully renders the poetic, mysterious landscapes of memory and place, capturing his spiritual and physical self amid his intangible and tangible worlds that embrace us and become ours. I feel completely at home in these poems that question the very idea of home through imagery and language that is wise with longing, powerfully tender, and passionately at peace."
-Richard Blanco, Presidential Inaugural Poet

Reviews:
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2020/06/fly-fishing-in-times-square-by-william.html

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-14-7 | 78 Pages

New release:
Secret Histories by Michael McInnis

Secret Histories by Michael McInnis Červená Barva Press, 2019

Michael McInnis lives in Boston and served in the Navy chasing white whales and Soviet submarines. His poetry and short fiction has appeared in Chiron Review, Cream City Review, Deadly Writers Patrol, Naugatuck Review, Oxford Magazine, Unlikely Stories and Yellow Chair Review to name a few. He was the founder of the Primal Plunge, Boston's only bookstore dedicated to 'zines, underground culture, and small press literature. His previous two books, Hitchhiking Beatitudes and Smokey of the Migraines were both published by Nixes Mate Books.

More Praise for Secret Histories

Secret Histories, by Michael McInnis, is a journey from sea to sky, where you "see the stars in each swell, as if land exists only at the pleasure of the ocean." Mermaids walk amongst us, and fortune may allow us to trace their tattoos with our tongues. There are secret messages in storms and unquenchable thirsts, and a girl named Lucy, whose skin we can't stop thinking about. McInnis shows us "how we dream up gods in our desert consciousness," knowing that all the while, the sharks feed below.
-Heather Sullivan, author of Method Acting for the Afterlife

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-10-9 | 122 Pages

New release:
Balkan Grit by Milan Djurasovic

Balkan Grit by Milan Djurasovic (fiction) Červená Barva Press, 2019

Milan Djurasovic is a Bosnian American writer, artist and journalist. He currently lives and works in Sacramento, California. His educational background is in psychology and Russian literature. Milan has published dozens of articles and short stories in various international magazines. His most recent publication includes a book of fiction No More Happy Endings (published in 2016).

Balkan Grit is a collection of short stories that explores the psychology of characters who are trying to shield their sanity and hope while coping with loss and bleakness in a post-war society. Neglected and abused, without a prospect for a normal life, they are rendered bitter and cynical. Some try to make sense of their daily troubles and newly imposed external values by holding onto a familiar way of life and a deeply rooted moral code. Others become subdued and frozen in time in a world full of abrupt change and cruelty.

Cover Design: Aleksandra Djurasovic

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-21-5 | 80 Pages

New release:
White Zion by Gila Green

White Zion by Gila Green (Fiction) Červená Barva Press, 2019

Canadian Gila Green is a writer, editor, and EFL teacher. As the daughter of a Yemenite-Israeli father and an Ashkenazi-Canadian mother, she often writes about the immigrant experience, including dislocation, alienation, and racism. She spent time in South Africa before settling in Israel where she lives with her husband and five children.

She is the author of White Zion, two adult novels: Passport Control and King of the Class and her short works have appeared in dozens of literary magazines and anthologies. Her new young adult novel No Entry is forthcoming in 2019 and is the first in an environmental series. Please visit Gila www.gilagreenwrites.com

Gritty Yet Shimmering Stories! I'm not exaggerating here one bit.
It's titled 'White Zion' but Gila Green paints from all the colors/hues of the Jewish palette. These gritty yet shimmering stories get into you. I read them all in two swoops, then stayed up for an hour or two, maybe four, waiting for my heart to return to normal.
-Ruchama King Feuerman, author of In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist and Seven Blessings

In a journey of generations from Aden to Palestine to Ottawa, one Yemenite family encounters new and difficult realities: racism and war, rejection and divorce, resourceful survival and tragic death. With smells of delicious breads wafting up from the page, embroidering detail upon detail in fine literary stitch, Gila Green draws us fully into her narrative, as she generously shares with us the hidden core of family life and the stories she is not afraid to tell.
-Yael Unterman, author of The Hidden of Things: Twelve Stories of Love & Longing

Imagine a group of friends and relatives coming together throughout the afternoon over food and drink, staying late into the evening to share stories that engender laughter, tears, empathy and admiration. The profoundly satisfying stories in White Zion are rich in intimate detail, peopled with a cast of heart wrenching characters at once familiar and unique, a gathering of personalities that leaves me reluctant to leave their company and eager to revisit them.
-Pearl Luke, author of Madame Zee and Burning Ground

Review by Susan Weintrob:
Susan Weintrob is a retired university English instructor and Jewish day school administrator.
https://www.expandthetable.net/gila-green-s-white-zion

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-12-3 | 145 Pages

New release:
CEREMONIAL ENTRIES by Joseph DeRoche Edited by Kevin Gallagher and Martha Collins

CEREMONIAL ENTRIES by Joseph DeRoche Edited by Kevin Gallagher and Martha Collins Červená Barva Press, 2019

Joseph DeRoche (1938-2013) taught at Northeastern University for many years. This collection gathers all of his published poems, and many of his unpublished ones.

ABOUT THE EDITORS
KEVIN GALLAGHER is a poet, publisher, and political economist living in Boston, Massachusetts with his wife, Kelly, kids Theo and Estelle, and dog Rexroth. His recent books of poetry are Radio Plays, And Yet it Moves, and Loom. Gallagher edits spoKe, a Boston-area journal of poetry and poetics. He works as a professor of global development policy at Boston University.

MARTHA COLLINS is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently Night Unto Night and Admit One: An American Scrapbook. She founded the Creative Writing Program at U.Mass-Boston and served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College for ten years. Her tenth book, Because What Else Could I Do, is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh in fall 2019.

With razor-sharp wit and élan, Joseph DeRoche's poems remind us that revelation is never easy-that it often comes at great cost as we "loat to Paradise / In a slaughter / Of small things." DeRoche's poems are as formally taut as they are conversationally playful. His impeccable, architectural eye for detail creates a language that unmakes and reshapes the coercive structures that constrict our speech. In poems that delightfully blur the boundary between body and spirit, the individual human utterance becomes "an ordering / Against the furious weather / Of the world’s silence." Thanks to editors Kevin Gallagher and Martha Collins, a new generation of readers will now have the opportunity to experience the lyric grace and benevolence of DeRoche's brilliant poems.
-Tony Trigilio, author of The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 1

Joe DeRoche's poems are tough and tender minded-and tough and tender hearted. Artfully arranged from early to late, they begin by exploring contraries in conflict: ornamentation and spareness, say, or the starkly observed and the richly imagined. But their sharpest focus throughout is on the spiritual and secular frameworks used to assess the competing claims of body, mind, and soul, and of faith and doubt in divinity, love, and poetry itself. The collection's title says a sense of ritual unites the poems. It does, as their ceremonies lead from struggles between conflicting goods toward acceptance that the world and our experience of it is always sacred and profane: a place where Satan may be a saint and the light in an image of the infant Jesus Christ can seem as earthbound as celestial, where love can redeem and debase, where poetry can transform, disinfect, and merely feint or fail or cheat. DeRoche variously registers that acceptance in warm approval, bemused or startled recognition, or eerily calm alarm. Meanwhile, whether rhymed and metrical or free, his gay devotional verse repeatedly achieves the mysterious interaction between prosodic shape and developing content Robert Hass says is meant by poetic form.
-Guy Rotella, professor Emeritus, Northeastern University, author of Castings: Monuments and Monumentality in Poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-32-1 | 211 Pages

Released February 2019:
CHANTS a memoir in sonnets by John L. Stanizzi

CHANTS a memoir in sonnets by John L. Stanizzi Červená Barva Press, 2019

John L. Stanizzi is author of the collections – Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide - Ebb Tide, and Chants. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, The Cortland Review, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Rust & Moth, Connecticut River Review, Hawk & Handsaw, and many others. His work has been translated into Italian and appeared in El Ghibli, in the Journal of Italian Translations Bonafinni, and Poetarium Silva. His translator is Angela D'Ambra. John has read and venues all over New England, including the Mystic Arts Café, the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, Hartford Stage, and many others. John is coordinator of the Fresh Voices Poetry Competition for Young Poets at Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT. He is also a teaching artist for the national recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud. A former New England Poet of the Year, John teaches literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, CT and he lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry.

This is what history sounds like, a song that takes over us until we join the Chants and become part of history. Thanks to John L. Stanizzi for showing us another path of walking into today.
—Romeo Oriogun, Nigeria's Oriogun is the recipient of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize 2017

These loose sonnets with the punning title — "Chants"—push us in various directions: towards the past, towards the present, even towards the immensely problematical future. It's the story of a Catholic boy grown into a compassionate, intelligent man looking at the world as it has configured itself in his lifetime: all the changes. The difference from a newspaper account is that Stanizzi is an observer with music on his mind: "cause / to breathe in cleanly in the thrall of rain." These poems sing—"chants"—about the life he has lived out of all the lives he might have lived: "chance." It is a poetry of witness dealing with death, life, childhood and growth. But it also allows us to experience sudden miracles of flight: I am inspired/to pick him [a goldfinch] up—and he lets me!—his eyes/unsure and trusting in a lightning flash,/and then he flies, my upturned palm in rain.
—Jack Foley, Foley is the author of many books, including Grief Songs, and The Tiger

These inspiriting poems amplify and celebrate life. They find the deepest reaches of the human heart with a passion that will cause readers to pause and read again. From the beauty of goldfinches to the horrors of war and the joys and tribulations of family life, John Stanizzi discovers the universal in the personal. He turns words into instruments that pierce the soul.
—David K. Leff, author of The Breach and Poet-in-Residence New England National Scenic Trail, 2016-2017

$17.00 | ISBN:978-1-950063-00-0 | 47 Pages

Released January 2019:
YET, LOVE, ILLUMINE US and Other Poems by Jüri Talvet

YET, LOVE, ILLUMINE US and Other Poems by Jüri Talvet Červená Barva Press, 2019

Since the start of the 21st century, Jüri Talvet (born in 1945 in Pärnu) has emerged as one of the internationally best-known Estonian poets and essay writers. Book-length selections of his poetry have appeared in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Romanian, Serbian and Catalan. Yet, Love, Illumine Us, and Other Poems is Talvet’s third poetry book in English translation, following Estonian Elegy (2008) and Of Snow, of Soul (2010), both published by Guernica (Toronto). Talvet has chaired World / Comparative Literature at the University of Tartu since 1992 and is elected member of Academia Europaea (2016).

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
H. L. Hix's recent books include a poetry collection, Rain Inscription (Etruscan Press, 2017), an essay collection, Demonstrategy (Etruscan Press, 2019), and an art/poetry anthology, Ley Lines (Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 2014). His previous collaborations with Jüri Talvet include a selection of poems by the Estonian poet Juhan Liiv, Snow Drifts, I Sing (Guernica Editions, 2013), and anthologies of contemporary Estonian poetry: Vello ceo nórdico. Poesia estonia contemporánea (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 2002) and On the Way Home. An Anthology of Contemporary Estonian Poetry (Sarup & Sons, 2006).

From the introduction...
As, according to Aristotle, philosophy begins in wonder, so too do Talvet's poems. But Talvet's is not a youthful, naïve wonder. Instead, it is the wonder that Elias Canetti speaks of in this way: "The real creator gets bolder with age…. [T]he more one has experienced, the more there is to be astonished by. Our capacity for wonder grows with experience, becomes more urgent." The poems in Yet, Love, Illumine Us are bold in proportion to the urgency and maturity of their astonishment, the capaciousness of their wonder.
—H. L. Hix

Cover image by Laura Talvet

$17.00 | ISBN:978-1-950063-01-7 | 103 Pages

Released January 2019:
Captive in the Here poems by Gary Metras

Captive in the Here poems by Gary Metras Červená Barva Press, 2019

Gary Metras is the author of four previous poetry books along with eleven chapbooks, most recently, Two Bloods: Fly Fishing Poems. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in such journals as America, American Angler, The Boston Review of Books, Gray's Sporting Journal, Poetry, Poetry East, Poetry Salzburg Review, along with the recent anthologies Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams (Coffee House) and The American Public School Teacher: Past, Present, & Future (Harvard Education Press). He is a past recipient of the Massachusetts Fellowship in Poetry. He is the editor, publisher, and letterpress printer of Adastra Press. He fly fishes the streams and rivers of western Massachusetts as often as possible.

Critical praise for the books and chapbooks of Gary Metras:

"The Moon in the Pool is the work of a seasoned poet, a writer accustomed to having his way with words. But there is more to these poems; they make us what we already are. In other words, they tap into our shared humanity….This small book is a welcomed read. Its aftertaste is long lasting-analogous to the love it expounds, in the midst of all else that life offers."
-The Compulsive Reader

Greatest Hits 1980-2006: "The words are gifts from an accomplished poet, sure of his words and his mission to deliver his words carefully measured and assured… So read this book and see a good writer at work."
-Hotmetalpress

Until There Is Nothing Left: "Metras is an unpretentious writer who keeps company with readers...In fact, he's good company. His voice is direct, simple, uncomplaining and democratic."
-Daily Hampshire Gazette

Seagull Beach: "The book's feel, heft, and contents are an evocative experience."
-Virginia Quarterly Review

A Room Full of Walls: "…powerful and successful, so eloquent of strong, controlled emotions….the very considerable achievement your collection represents."
-Anthony Hecht

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9981027-3-3 | 66 Pages

New Release:
What happens Next by George Ovitt

What happens Next by George Ovitt Červená Barva Press, 2018

George Ovitt is the author of Splitting the Difference (poems), The Snowman (stories), and Stillpoint (a novel). Since 2012 he has co-written the popular literary blog Talented Reader. He lives in New Mexico.

The poems in What Happens Next allow us to enter the patience and calm of a poet who expresses himself after long listening, creating a welcome intimacy and a sense of life considered and savored. Natural in their diction, unforced, these poems create clarity even when looking out at a chaotic world.
-Kim Garcia, author of DRONE and The Brighter House

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-692-13790-1 | 69 Pages

April 13, 2018:
Family Chronichles by Andrey Gritsman

Family Chronicles Poems by Andrey Gritsman Červená Barva Press, 2018

Andrey Gritsman is a poet, essayist and writer of short stories from Russia, writes in English and in Russian. His works have appeared in many American, European and Russian magazines and anthologies. Gritsman is the author of ten collections. Andrey runs Intercultural Poetry Series at Cornelia Street Café and edits poetry magazine INTERPOEZIA. He lives in New York City and works as a physician.

This book is a poetic family memoir. It is roughly divided in three parts: "Childhood – Youth," "Parents" and "America." Naturally, there is a significant overlap in terms of themes, moods and approach to the material. For the reader it will be easier to go through this book since it relates metaphorically to biography.

My childhood and youth, the younger years, were spent in Russia, in Moscow where I was born and raised. My family is Muscovites in several generations. I am also a third generation of doctors who graduated from the First Moscow Medical School (Medical Faculty of the Moscow State University).

I came to the U.S. in the spring of 1981 with my family (my wife and two little children). For a year I worked as a research fellow at the National Cancer Institute, then passed my medical exams and walked the usual path of the American physician: Residency, Fellowship at the Cancer Center in Houston and eventually landed in Manhattan at Lenox Hill Hospital, historical place on the map of the United States. Since then my life was closely connected with the City, Hudson River and Hudson River Valley.

Upper East Side was place were my literary career in American poetry started: Master Class with incomparable Amy Clampitt. The best creative years were years at the Vermont College MFA working with such brilliant poets and mentors as Deborah Digges, Jack Myers, and Roger Weingarten. A special influence on me has been my long term friendship with wonderful American poet Baron Wormser.

I am a poet and a writer of short stories and personal essays both in Russian and in English. This part of bilingual writing is important facet of my combined sensibility. The reader might notice this bilingual feature in the content of poems, but also in the usage of language and idioms.

Many of the poems are equipped with a short footnote, explaining some of the peculiarities and specificities of the situation, explaining some of the historical events. But also, specific features of the Russian and Moscow life at certain historical periods. Some of the footnotes are simply the explanations of certain family events and their relation to the historical periods and events in Russia or in the U.S.

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9984253-3-7 | 70 Pages

April 13, 2018:
The Dishonesty of Certain Mirrors by Len Kuntz

The Dishonesty of Certain Mirrors by Len Kuntz Červená Barva Press, 2018

Len Kuntz is a writer from Washington State and an editor at the online magazine Literary Orphans. He is the author of three books, The Dark Sunshine, I'm Not Supposed To Be Here and Neither Are You, and The Dishonesty of Certain Mirrors. His latest story collection, The Deep End, is forthcoming from Ravenna Press in 2018. You can also find more of Len's writing at: lenkuntz.blogspot.com

Poetry Summary:
In this searing collection of personal poems, we encounter a myriad of everyday struggles and loss deftly turned on their head. From dementia to child abuse to the disintegration of relationships, each subject is rendered with raw abandon as well as an empathetic heart. There's lush music in the language of these poems, no matter their length. True to the title's promise, there's also a magical pulling back of the curtain, so that we are not only voyeurs privy to the author’s innermost life and experiences, but our own as well. Stepping inside these pages is like finding a diary replete with secrets, hopes and broken dreams, a diary that could well belong to our closest friend, or perhaps, a diary written by our own hand.

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9984253-4-4 | 94 Pages

January 5, 2018:
The Sun Eaters a novel by Alex M. Pruteanu

The Sun Eaters a novel by Alex M. Pruteanu Červená Barva Press, 2018

Alex M. Pruteanu is author of novella Short Lean Cuts, and Gears: A Collection (Independent Talent Group, Inc.), both available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Powell's Books. He has published fiction in Guernica, [PANK], Specter Literary Magazine, The Prague Revue, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and many others.

The Sun Eaters unravels the story of two brothers in a small village of an Eastern European country just post World War II. The two boys and a handful of their colorful mates struggle to survive famine, desolation and destruction, as well as repressive political ideology that has been forced upon their country. In the boys' battle against what seems like all elements of life-turned-hostile, we discover the beauty of the enduring human spirit and the coping powers of a child's imagination during difficult times.

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9984253-5-1 | 156 Pages

December 8, 2017:
SHADES by Rene Schwiesow

SHADES by Rene Schwiesow Červená Barva Press, 2017

Rene Schwiesow came to the Boston Poetry Scene through drumming. In a fortuitous alignment of the planets and stars she met the late, great Mike Amado at a drum circle and the rest is history. She is currently a co-host for the popular South Shore poetry venue, The Art of Words, where she not only reads poetry and introduces features and open mike readers, but also is maker of the meatballs served during intermission (recipe is strictly a secret, unless you ask her nicely). Rene has been published in various publications including Muddy River Poetry Review, City Lights, Ibbettson Street Press, The Aurorean, and Bagel Bard and Tidepool Poet Anthologies. When she is not writing, reading, or watching Doctor Who, she can be found with a Tarot deck, aligning chakras with Reiki, or shopping for boots in support of her obvious shoe fetish.

In this collection of heart echoes, the words reverberate moments strung along the poet's timeline. The poetry is a showcase of laughter, heartache, growth, letting go, recognition, awareness, friendship, and love. Schwiesow has used keyboard as paintbrush to create page after page of moving images. May you find your own echoes whispering in the gap between each word, phrase, and poem that imprints itself upon your mind.

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9984253-0-6 | 77 Pages

September, 2017:
Questionable Shapes Poems by David Gullette

Questionable Shapes Poems by David Gullette Červená Barva Press, 2017

David Gullette was one of the first editors of Ploughshares, and has been for many years the Literary Director of the Poets' Theatre. He has published poetry, fiction, memoir and criticism in a wide range of journals, and book-length translations from both Italian and Spanish, with a specialty in Nicaraguan revolutionary poetry. He is Vice President of the Newton/San Juan del Sur (Nicaragua) Sister City Project and Professor Emeritus of English at Simmons College in Boston.

David Gullette describes 'the way we live our only life': the world is kicked awake by our desire;/if not, the loser lies there sunk in sloth./ There is no sunset we do not ignite. A lesser writer would have composed a more "slothful" volume: But the ignition of brilliancies in David Gullette's QUESTIONABLE SHAPES is as dependent on copious learning and the keen sort of intelligence that the Augustans called wit as it is on emotional impulse. The balance and maturity of this book make it a real keeper!
-Sydney Lea, Poet Laureate of Vermont

QUESTIONABLE SHAPES is a book brimming with long-brewed illuminations. "Orbiter Dicta" gives an unforgettable portrait of a lovable dangerous brilliant father. "Disaffiliation" and "What the Catbird Sang" are terrific poignant instances of the eternal farewell to mother. "Superscriptions" and "Fame" are profound meditations on the unappeasable human longing to leave a lasting trace. Questionable shapes as we all are, we need the soul-encouragement that David Gullette's marvelous book so generously and buoyantly provides.
-Mark Halliday, author of Thresherphobe

"What are the strata / of pastness?" a poem in this fine book asks, and David Gullette responds with ghosts, dreams, daydreams, visions-"questionable shapes" that live beneath the surface of richly lived and recorded experience, like "waves breaking deep down under the house." A carefully wrought tension between depth and surface, memory and desire makes this deeply explorative book-with its moments of linguistic whimsy and social commentary-both challenging and engaging.
-Martha Collins, author of Blue Front

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9984253-8-2 | 67 Pages | In Stock

September, 2017:
EK: Poems of Ekphrasis by Tree Riesener

EK: Poems of Ekphrasis by Tree Riesener Červená Barva Press, 2017

Tree Riesener is the author of Sleepers Awake, a collection of short fiction, winner of the Eludia Award from Hidden River Arts, published by Sowilo Press in 2015. Her collection of poetry inspired by astronomy, The Hubble Cantos, was published in 2016 by Aldrich Press. Her achievements include three first prizes for fiction at the Philadelphia Writers Conference, finalist for Black Lawrence Press's Hudson Prize, finalist in PANK magazine's Fiction Chapbook Contest, the William Van Wert Fiction Award, semi-finalist in the Pablo Neruda Competition, three short stories staged in the Writing Aloud Series of InterAct Theatre, Philadelphia, a Hawthornden Fellowship at Hawthornden Castle, Scotland, and three poetry chapbooks: Liminalog, Inscapes, and Angel Poison.

The poems in Tree Riesener's EK: Poems of Ekphrasis hark back to the original meaning of ekphrasis- "to speak" "out." Driven by a kind of surrealistic urgency, the poems use all the language at their disposal to name what they see so that one bird "might escape the net." Whether focusing on works of art, photos, ultrasound images, relics, a bull fight, Chernobyl, or a shrine for a boy struck while bicycling, Riesener is an "eye witness," combining a longing for an "otherworld" with a sharp awareness of the "dead zones" of our making.
-Rebecca Seiferle, Editor of The Drunken Boat, Tucson Poet Laureate, author of Wild Tongue

In the epigraph to EK, Goethe speaks of reproducing the world that surrounds by means of the world within. No argument there as far as it goes - but he may have, in his heart, aimed for more. Tree Riesener applies wit and sometimes ecstatic imagery to form and to literary conceit, clearly aiming for more; beyond reproduction toward provocation; in this case, evoking not just the world but the mystery of encountering it. In EK, such evidence is abundant, first poem to last: "clear bright dense mysterious dusky bluish venous arterial subterranean multi-layered sustaining singing vulnerable scarlet" or "you signed the forms to be present in this room because being here where perpetual light shines upon you is better than being in the prison yard buried under a number"
-Kathryn Rantala, Founder-Editor of Ravenna Press, author of The Finnish Orchestra and other collections

The breadth and range of subjects in Tree Riesener's latest collection, EK: Poems of Ekphrasis, stretch the boundaries of the form, demand attention, enthrall, unsettle, and delight the careful reader. In "annunciation of reluctance," she has captured both Mary's terror and her desire for things to be normal with an unpleasant but quite ordinary migraine, a signal of that surreal occurrence. Brilliant! In a group of poems inspired by the Messiaen musical quartet, written in a concentration camp during WWII, the reader joins her in "searching the ruins of the rainbow for the angel who announces the end of time" (after Katrina). The ending dirge, "owed to thanatopsis gardens," is written for the plastinated bodies in an exhibit. The beautiful questioning meditations on the sublime round out these poems of witness truly written on the body and the soul.
-Michele Belluomini, poet and storyteller, former Literature Librarian of the Free Library of Philadelphia, author of Crazy Mary and Others (winner of Plan B Press chapbook contest), Translations from the Dark and signposts for sleepwalkers.

In this new collection, Riesener's "poems of witness" move into powerful, unexplored worlds of language. What strikes me the most? The vitality and freshness of her work-the beautiful side by side with the ugly and the sacred with the profane. The author dares you to tell the difference.
-John Sweet, author of Famine, Human Cathedrals, and Century of Dreaming Monsters, winner of the 2014 Lummox Poetry Prize

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9981027-6-4 | 114 Pages | In Stock

April, 2017:
SLOW TRANSIT Stories by Michael C. Keith

SLOW TRANSIT Stories by Michael C. Keith Červená Barva Press, 2017

Michael C. Keith is the author/coauthor of 30 book volumes and dozens of articles on the subject of radio and broadcast studies. In addition to his non-fiction titles, Keith has published over a dozen creative works, including an acclaimed memoir: The Next Better Place-a young adult novel: Life is Falling Sideways-and 12 short story collections: most recently Perspective Drifts Like a Log on a River. His fiction has been nominated for several awards, among them the Pen/O. Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize, the National Indie Excellence Award, and the International Book Award.

"Michael Keith is doing his part to keep the short story alive in this world of novel, novel, novel... Let us hope he keeps those original stories coming."
-Brad Watson, author Miss Jane

"The characters in Slow Transit transport you to a universe of unfulfilled desires, doubts, and dreams made all the more terrifying by the author's keen sense of the dramas that make life worth living. Highly recommended."
-Ed Hamilton, author The Chintz Age

"Keith's output and beautiful prose continue to rise."
-Adam Johnson, author Fortune Smiles

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9984253-6-8 | 226 Pages

December 2, 2016:
Twenty-one Ghazals by Alisher Navoiy
Translated from the Uzbek by Dennis Daly

Twenty-one Ghazals by Alisher Navoiy Translated from the Uzbek by Dennis Daly Červená Barva Press, 2016

Dennis Daly lives in Salem, Massachusetts with his wife Joanne. They have four adult children. Daly graduated from Boston College and has an MA in English Literature from Northeastern University. He has published three books of poetry: The Custom House (Ibbetson Street Press, 2012), Sophocles' Ajax, a Modern Translation (Wilderness House Press, 2012) and Night Walking with Nathaniel (Dos Madres Press, 2014). Daly's Sophocles' Ajax was subsequently performed at Skidmore College in a production sponsored by that college's Classics Department. Among other jobs Daly has worked as a Union Leader of a 9000 member industrial local, and as a city department head. He has traveled widely in Central Asia. Visit his blog at dennisfdaly.blogspot.com.

"Tulip fields blaze the face of my soul's fire?." So begins one of the twenty-one ghazals in Dennis Daly's elegant translation of the work of the fifteenth-century poet, Alisher Navoiy. The fire that burns through these poems is complemented by stunning illustrations from the era chosen with care by the translator that set off their own quiet conflagrations. In both illumination and interpretation, Daly's skill as wordsmith and designer is coruscating. We are indebted to him for introducing us to this poet and his passion.
-Tom Daley, author of House You Cannot Reach: Poems in the Voice of My Mother and other Poems

Dark-eyed ones come, revealing their inner selves. Alisher Navoiy, or Nizam-al-Din 'Ali-Shir, a fifteenth century poet, mystic and artist, is reawakened in Daly's sublime translations. True to their spirit yet infused with a modern idiom, these ghazals tremble on the tongue, sparkle on the sheaf. A body in flames fires a path through the wilderness, a pinch of skin reminds how close we remain. Here at the source, a cloud hovers. Delectable, delicate, dangerous ... finally, a denouement.
-Marc Vincenz, author of Becoming the Sound of Bees

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9966894-6-5 | 62 Pages | In Stock

December 2, 2016:
Geography of Love and Exile by Susannah Simpson

Geography of Love and Exile by Susannah Simpson Červená Barva Press, 2016

Susannah spent much of her childhood in Kabul, Afghanistan and spoke Farsi as a child. She has been a waitress, a founding member of the Ad Hoc Players, learned to wield a grease gun at at an auto repair garage, worked on locked psychiatric wards and as a Hospice nurse held the hands of the dying. She is the Expressive Writing Specialist at a residential treatment center in West Palm Beach,FL.

In Geography of Love and Exile, Susannah Simpson explores the deepest of human desires: to belong to this world. Through language translucent with longing, she introduces us to her many worlds. We walk with her through the bazaars of Kabul, experience the sensual pleasure of s'mores over a campfire in upstate New York, witness the red-shouldered hawk's shadow "looping across canal water" in Florida. All the while, Simpson's inner landscape-of loss, loneliness, love-accompanies us along the way. To read this remarkable collection is to explore how the places in our lives shape who we are-and sometimes, if we are fortunate, help us to feel a little less alone.
-Mary Reynolds Thompson, author of Embrace Your Inner Wild and Reclaiming the Wild Soul

I couldn't read Geography of Love and Exile without thinking of Zora Neale Hurston's line-"Ships at a distance have every man's wish aboard." Or, I would add, even ships at anchorage, ships moored to the quay, temporarily in port, poised to continue a voyage, contain our yearning, our restlessness, our hunger for both memory and renewal, for unchartered distance and unrelenting intimacy. This, then, is the spirit and the soul of Susannah Simpson's powerful work, each poem a vessel of a journey taken, lost, interrupted, unfinished, redeemed.
-Bob Shaccochis, author of Swimming in the Volcano; The Immaculate Invasion; The Next New World; Domesticity, and The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9981027-2-6 | 67 Pages | In Stock

October 12, 2016:
Melancolía Poems by Roberto Carlos Garcia

Melancolía Poems by Roberto Carlos Garcia Červená Barva Press, 2016

Roberto Carlos Garcia's chapbook amores gitano (gypsy loves) was published by Červená Barva Press in 2013. His poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Public Pool, Stillwater Review, Gawker, Barrelhouse, Tuesday; An Art Project, The Acentos Review, Lunch Ticket, Bold As Love Magazine, Entropy, PLUCK!: The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, The Rumpus, 5 AM, Wilderness House, Connotation Press-An Online Artifact, Poets/Artists, Levure Litteraire, and others. Roberto also works with The Dodge Poetry Foundation's poetry in the classroom program. He is the founder of Get Fresh Books LLC: a cooperative press. Melancolía is his first book.

A native New Yorker, Roberto holds an MFA in Poetry and Poetry in Translation from Drew University, and is an Instructor of English at Union County College. His website is www.robertocarlosgarcia.tumblr.com.

Agitations both tender and muscular simmer inside these poems. A sadness that's palpable and physical haunts this poet; so does rage at the power-mongers' forces that keep children hungry, that fester poverty in terrifying mutations. Poet of engagement, Garcia speaks to the moon, to his sister, to the seasons and the garden, to his body a vessel: "these hands like a chunk of asteroid-full of taking & giving." This book offers us a photo-real blueprint of one man's life-space, an elegant blues-print of one man's heart, with direct utterance and lavish music.
-Judith Vollmer, Vollmer is the author of five full-length books of poetry, including The Apollonia Poems, forthcoming in 2017 as winner of the University of Wisconsin Press Four Lakes Poetry Prize.

Roberto Carlos Garcia is, it seems to me, poet-kin of both Lorca and Neruda, but also things like rain, wind, the color yellow and the color green. In Melancolía we have a collection of gorgeously quiet poems rendered by intellect and the dream where lyricism is born out of the dusky space between mystery and the everyday. Here is a breathtaking archive of an imagination at work, a body made up of effort and world. See: "My friends I am not above you // I can hear the song of reckoning in the rose thorns" and "In my mouth melancolía is an orchard, /a yellowing day & bluing night, // In my ribcage Melancolía is an ecstatic lilt /made of pearls, my heart-wet sand, /pungent as dogwoods."
-Aracelis Girmay is the author of three collections of poetry: The Black Maria (BOA Editions, 2016); Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), and Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007). She is a Cave Canem fellow and teaches at Hampshire College and in the Drew University MFA program.

In these sensuous poems everything is up for inspection and interrogation, including the speaker himself. Here are echoes of Lorca and Neruda, their depth and power, but in a voice entirely the poet's own. Roberto Carlos Garcia's poems take beauty as a gift, and also as a sometimes foil against capitalism and the numbness of the suburban life we are supposed to desire. "& what is poetry if not what we need?" We need poems like these, with their living language and their vision of where we are and where poetry, ecstatic and elegiac, can take us.
-Anne Marie Macari, author of Red Deer, (Persea, 2015)

These poems ache and plead and yearn, and never forget song. Never forget song.
-Ross Gay is the author of the National Book Award finalist Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), Bringing The Shovel Down (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), Against Which (Cavan Kerry Press, 2006). He is an Associate Professor at Indiana University and a Cave Canem Fellow.

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9981027-1-9 | 51 Pages | In Stock

New Release September 21, 2016:
A Peaceful Color From The Silence by Gulnar Ali Balata

A Peaceful Color From The Silence by Gulnar Ali Balata Červená Barva Press, 2016

Gulnar Ali Balata is a Kurdish American poet, novelist, short-story writer, teacher, and translator. She was born in Kurdistan in 1974. Gulnar is the author of six books, three books of poems in the Kurdish language, Luna and Twelve Months (2006), Song of the Sad Ruins (2008), and A Breath from Letters of Borders Dream (2012) published in Duhok, Kurdistan. My Soul Still a Virgin is a collection of translated poems from Kurdish and Arabic to English by the author in 2010. My Poems Weep to the Seagulls (2014), is a book of poems published in Arabic, in Kurdistan. Kurdonya, a novel written in the Arabic language (2015), was published in Syria.

Gulnar has been published in numerous literary journals, websites and anthologies in Kurdish and Arabic languages, which are her first and second languages. Her work has been translated into many languages, and has been published in newspapers and magazines, in Kurdish and extensively on the internet.

She was a teacher in Kurdistan and taught English for three years before she left home in 1996. Gulnar received an Associate's degree in Art from Bunker Hill Community College in 2009.

She has participated in several poetry festivals within the Kurdish Region, and also abroad, in Turkey and Europe. From her outstanding cooperation, and successful writing, she has received awards from her work, and has been listed as one of the top Kurdish Women Voices in modern Kurdish poetry.

Gulnar Ali Balata's fourth volume of poetry, A Peaceful Color From The Silence, is an intimate gift by a mature poet infused with love for her tattered homeland of Iraqi Kurdistan. Her pen ripples with sparkling rivers and her expectant heart wrings with sadness as she infuses her poems in shooting stars and sweet dew, as "tears braid Fate's threads... shoulder/ the coffin of [her] childhood." The poet is "a weaned child," an "immigrant girl," a "lover," and "the melody for the executed." When "in exile... beyond the ocean... the coffins write [her] lines." This poet insists on the possibility of a "new page from a new sorrow/with a happy heart/ Make your name in my peace/symbol of a gorgeous love's spring." We take this journey with Balata and arrive strangely hopeful, crying tears of love for the resilience of the human spirit.
-Molly Lynn Watt, On Wings of Song and Shadow People

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9966894-5-8 | 73 Pages | In Stock

New Release July 21, 2016:
No More Happy Endings by Milan Djurasovic

No More Happy Endings by Milan Djurasovic Červená Barva Press, 2016

Milan Djurasovic is a Bosnian Serb from Mostar, the descendant of delightful peasants and modest working-class stock. He lives in northern California, where he works as a paraeducator. No More Happy Endings is his first collection of poems and short stories.

"The bedtime stories of my grandmother, Baba Jela, changed after the Bosnian civil war. Before the shooting began, her stories were ordinary, positive, life-affirming, with a clever hero or good-natured idiot overcoming challenges and a greedy foe soon reduced to a pitiful scrub. At the end, the world would turn out rosy and just, and taking part in it made sense. But after a war of nearly 100,000 deaths, millions of displaced bodies and souls, and decay peering out of every crevice, such propriety seemed unnatural. So Baba Jela decided to get rid of it. While other elderly men and woman decided to end their own lives after realizing that nothing would ever again be the way it was before the war, Baba turned her stories and lullabies dark and horrifying, her own way of refusing to play along with uncontrollable circumstances."

Cover Design: Aleksandra Djurasovic

$12.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9966894-8-9 | 30 Pages | In Stock

New release June 16, 2016:
Secret Letter by Erika Burkart, translated by Marc Vincenz

Secret Letter by Erika Burkart, translated by Marc Vincenz Červená Barva Press, 2016

Swiss poet Erika Burkart (1922-2010) has been compared to the likes of Ingeborg Bachmann, Friedericke Mayröcker, and Rainer Maria Rilke. During the latter half of her lifetime, the Swiss literary establishment perceived her not only as the grande dame of German- Swiss poetry, but also as an elusive, metaphysical, at times eccentric enigma of contemporary German-language literature. Born in Aarau, Switzerland, Burkart published over 24 collections of poetry and nine prose works, writing for the most part in the house of her childhood (the former summer house of the Prince-Abbot of Muri), Haus Kapf in Althäusern, Aargau, which was run as a tavern by Erika's parents.

Burkart received numerous literary prizes during her lifetime, including the Johann-Peter-Hebel-Preis (1978), the Wolfgang-Amadeus-Mozart- Preis (1990), the Joseph-Breitbach-Preis (2002), and the Gottfried-Keller-Preis (1992). To date, she is the only woman ever to have been awarded Switzerland's highest literary prize, the Grosser Schiller-Preis (2005).

Born in Hong Kong, Marc Vincenz is the author of nine collections of original poetry; his latest are This Wasted Land, and Its Chymical Illuminations (Lavender Ink, 2015), Becoming the Sound of Bees (Ampersand Books, 2015) and Sibylline, a book-length poem (Ampersand Books, 2016). The Washington Independent Review of Books recently called Vincenz "[a] peripatetic linguist... [he] prospers through travel like a psychoactive medicine man. Each poem is an open environment where anything can happen-a ceremony of advanced thinking-where a pilgrim of great altitudes accepts life's vagaries." Vincenz is also the translator of many German-language poets, including the Herman Hesse Prize winner, Klaus Merz, Werner Lutz, Erika Burkart, Alexander Xaver Gwerder, Robert Walser and Jürg Amman, and has published ten collections of translations-the latest is A Late Recognition of the Signs by Erika Burkart. His translation of Klaus Merz's collection Unexpected Development, was a finalist for the 2015 Cliff Becker Book Translation Prize and will be published by White Pine Press in 2018. He has received several grants from the Swiss Arts Council and a fellowship from the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin. His own work has been translated into German, Russian, Romanian, French, Icelandic and Chinese; Bucharest's Tractus Arte Press released a Romanian translation of his collection The Propaganda Factory, at the 2015 Bucharest Book Fair. He is International Editor of Plume, Executive Editor of MadHat Press, and Plume Editions, Co-Editor of Fulcrum, and lives and writes in Western Massachusetts. Recent and forthcoming publications include The Nation, Ploughshares, Guernica, Washington Square Review, The Common and World Literature Today.

"Erika Burkart often evokes darkness, all the while "recu[ing] / fragments of images / from the dark chambers"-and these bits and pieces of the world, which she gathers with such care, gleam with a lasting, even healing light in her work. A precise and loving observer of nature, this major Swiss poet is especially sensitive to the question of how perceptions can be written down to "find [her]self / [...]-a language / no one knows anymore." For her, words raise no insurmountable barriers between the self and outside reality, but rather encourage her, as it were, to examine how one might more fully live."

"With Secret Letter, Marc Vincenz has gracefully and accurately rendered one of the last and most important books written by this philosophically minded poet. Hats off to him, for these full-fledged English poems express all the discreet music, subtle emotions, and thought-provoking qualities of the originals."
-John Taylor, poet, translator of Philippe Jaccottet, Jacques Dupin, and Jose-Flore Tappy

"Secret Letter by Erika Burkart offers lyrics so pristine and resonant in English that it's hard to fathom that these are translations. Marc Vincenz has done a great service for English-speaking, opening our shutters, our vistas onto the light- rich work of this amazing poet. Each poem mirrors creation and the birth of poetical language, without affectation or even extra syllables. The ensemble remins us of why we turned to poetry in the first place, for its spare, lyrical power, its shock of beauty, emotion, and insight."
-Marilyn Kallet, poet, translator of Paul Eluard, Benjamin Peret, and Chantal Bizzini

"Burkart's poems leave behind much more than a fleeting trace in the snow. Her delicate poetic footsteps have long since inscribed themselves in the memory of nature and her readers."
-Deutschlandfunk

"Erika Burkart possessed something like a second sight. She saw people, nature, the world, with both an inner and outer vision."
-Bieler Tagblatt

$15.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9966894-3-4 | 83 Pages | In Stock

New release March 2, 2016:
Fire Tongue by Zvi A. Sesling

Fire Tongue by Zvi A. Sesling Červená Barva Press, 2016

Zvi A. Sesling has published poetry in numerous magazines both in print and online in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland France, New Zealand, India, Canada, Australia and Israel. Among the publications are: Midstream, Voices Israel, Saranac Review, New Delta Review, Plainsong, Asphodel, Ibbetson St., Blue Lyre, Door Is Ajar, Scapegoat, The Chaffin Journal, Ship of Fools, Levure Litteraire, The Moth, First Literary Review-East, and Main Street Rag. He was awarded First Prize (2007) in the Reuben Rose International Poetry Competition. In 2008 he was selected to read his poetry at New England/Pen "Discovery" by Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish. He was a featured reader in the Jewish Poetry Festival in Brookline, MA. He is a regular reviewer for the Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene and is Editor of the Muddy River Poetry Review and publisher of Muddy River Books. Sesling has been a featured reader in various venues in the Boston area, San Diego, the Massachusetts Poetry Festival and the Boston Poetry Festival. Sesling has also read on local radio and cable television programs. He is author of King of the Jungle, (Ibbetson St., 2010), and a chapbook Across Stones of Bad Dreams (Červená Barva Press, 2011). He has taught at Suffolk University, Emerson College and Boston University. He lives in Chestnut Hill, MA with his wife Susan J. Dechter.

In Fire Tongue, the poems are precise and unsparing as they probe old questions of how and why the unspeakable enters our lives. In terse, suspenseful language and lines that are as light as their subjects they carry are heavy, indeed ominous, Sesling looks for hope, for what can redeem us. The poet finds the answer in our ability to listen, to feel, to own a conscience, and to value life.
-Afaa Michael Weaver

Poet Zvi Sesling is at a point in life where there is much more in his past than in his future. In "Fire Tongue" there is delicate balance of the past, present and speculation of what is to come. Sesling fearlessly faces what we all feel deep in our marrow - our own mortality. As a highly skilled poet with a gimlet eye, Sesling pulls this off with a mixture of humor and pathos. No word is wasted... life is too short for that... Sesling ,my friends, is well acquainted with the night.
-Doug Holder, Ibbetson Street Press, Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing/Endicott College

Fire Tongue takes us on a journey down Zvi Sesling's "road of sorrows." Here is madness, pain, cities of the dead, remnants of the lost, vast fields of suffering, outcroppings of cruelty, deserts of war and violence. With a dream-like clarity and precision reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch, Sesling shows us what we cannot deny about our nature, our history, our times. This is poetry as ritual incantation, a fiery tongue in its own right, teaching us how to navigate and thus perhaps begin to understand our harsh and bloody terrain.
-Fred Marchant, Author of The Looking House (Graywolf Press)

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9966894-4-1 | 87 Pages | In Stock

Release date November 2, 2015:
THE CHINTZ AGE tales of love and loss for a new new york by Ed Hamilton

THE CHINTZ AGE tales of love and loss for a new new york by Ed Hamilton Červená Barva Press, 2015

Ed Hamilton is the author of Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with the Artists and Outlaws of New York's Rebel Mecca (Da Capo, 2007). His fiction has appeared in dozens of small journals, including Limestone, The Journal of Kentucky Studies, SoMa Literary Review, Exquisite Corpse, Bohemia, Omphalos, and in translation in the Czech Republic's Host. His non-fiction has appeared in The Villager, Chelsea Now, The Huffington Post, and Living With Legends: Hotel Chelsea Blog. Ed lives in New York City. Visit his website at www.edhamilton.nyc

Just as Soylent Green is people, so The Chintz Age is now. Everything is cheaper and chintzier than in the past, from consumer products to culture itself. Our great cities, and, in particular, New York, are being transformed as we speak, as rising rents squeeze out the artists and bohemians who honed and burnished the city's glittering cutting edge. So should we look backward in teary-eyed nostalgia for the glorious past, or grit our teeth and move forward, accepting the inevitability of change in order to carve out a place for ourselves in this Brave New New York? This book of gritty urban fairy tales represents a heartfelt prayer for the future of the arts in New York, as well as a blueprint for a moral and spiritual resistance to the forces of cultural philistinism.

In seven stories and a novella, Ed Hamilton takes on this clash of cultures between the old and the new, as his characters are forced to confront their own obsolescence in the face of this rapidly surging capitalist juggernaut. Ranging over the whole panorama of New York neighborhoods-from the East Village to Hell's Kitchen, and from the Bowery to Washington Heights-Hamilton weaves a spellbinding web of urban mythology. Punks, hippies, beatniks, squatters, junkies, derelicts, and anarchists-the entire pantheon of urban demigods-gambol through a grungy subterranean Elysium of dive bars, cheap diners, flophouses, and shooting galleries, searching for meaning and a place to make their stand.

PRAISE FOR THE LEGENDS OF THE CHELSEA HOTEL

"There's something remarkable about the way the author manages to celebrate the Chelsea's singular atmosphere - the exuberant aspiring artists, the divorced movie stars, the disheveled blonde who may have Tourette's and who lingers in the lobby hissing like a snake - without ever forgetting how toxic the air is for many of the people who come desperate to breathe it."
-Jeff Giles, The New York Times Book Review

Reviews:

Boston Magazine: http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2015/10/02/gentriwatch-gentrification-book-somerville/

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9861111-9-8 | 284 Pages | In Stock

September 22, 2015:
Trailerville a play by John Dufresne

Trailerville by John Dufresne Červená Barva Press, 2015

John Dufresne is the author of two short story collections, The Way That Water Enters Stone and Johnny Too Bad, and the novels Louisiana Power & Light, Love Warps the Mind a Little, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year, Deep in the Shade of Paradise, and Requiem, Mass. His books on writing, The Lie That Tells a Truth and Is Life Like This? are used in many university writing programs. He's the editor of the anthology Blue Christmas. His short stories have twice been named Best American Mystery Stories, in 2007 and 2010. He's a professor at Florida International University in Miami. He is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction. His latest novel is No Regrets, Coyote. A sequel, I Don't Like Where This Is Going will be published in April 2016.

It's Labor Day weekend at the Trailerville Mobile Home Park in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana. Merdelle Harris's husband of forty-one years is rapidly deteriorating with Alzheimer's. She is determined to care for him, to save him if she can. In saving Bobby she's saving her own life, she believes. There are days he doesn't know her, doesn't know himself. Arlis Bryant lives in the trailer next door with his daughter, her three kids, and her beer-drinking, hot-tempered boyfriend. It's awful crowded in there, and the boyfriend thinks someone needs to go. Arlis has fallen for Merdelle, and his attentions are both a comfort and a torment to her. She has to choose between the man who loved her once and the man who loves her now, between the past and the future.

Trailerville, the first play by novelist John Dufresne, is all about love, in all its flavors: first love, unrequited love, unbridled passion, doomed young love, the love of parents for an adult child they don't really understand, the love that grows over time in a marriage, love that is blind to the beloved's faults (even if no one else is), and ultimately, what it means to love yourself. This may sound like a recipe for heartwarming romantic comedy, so let me note that one of Dufresne's strengths as a novelist is his ability to undercut sentimentality with black humor; that talent is in evidence here as well. But Trailerville is also a very sad play, because it acknowledges that love is messy and complicated and often hurts as much as-or more than-it heals.
-Loren Noveck, nytheatre.com

Trailerville delivers big laughs and a bittersweet glow.
-Flavorpill

$15.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9966894-2-7 | 112 Pages | In Stock

September 22, 2015:
Becoming an Ancestor Poems by Lucille Lang Day

Becoming an Ancestor Poems by Lucille Lang Day Červená Barva Press, 2015

Lucille Lang Day is the author of nine previous poetry collections and chapbooks, including The Curvature of Blue, The Book of Answers, and Infinities. Her first poetry collection, Self-Portrait with Hand Microscope, received the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature; her most recent chapbook, Dreaming of Sunflowers: Museum Poems, won the Blue Light Poetry Award. She has also published a children's book, Chain Letter, and a memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story, which received a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. Day earned her M.F.A. in creative writing at San Francisco State University and her Ph.D. in science/mathematics education at the University of California at Berkeley. The founder and director of a small press, Scarlet Tanager Books, she also served for seventeen years as the director of the Hall of Health, an interactive museum in Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband, writer Richard Michael Levine. Her website is http://www.lucillelangday.com.

"The poems in Becoming an Ancestor begin in autobiography, move into history, and branch backward and forward through genealogy, offering instruction on the natural world along the way. Lucille Lang Day recreates her ancestors with scrupulous detail and often stunning images until her poems read like the history of anyone "born of the myths of Europe/and North America." These myths propel Day to tell us of migrations, mutations, secrets, heartbreak, disappointments, defiance, death, and resilience-in other words, of life in all its complexity as she shows us all "which way is home" in our shared fate of becoming ancestors."
-Lynne Knight, author of Again

"Soulfully thrilling, the poems in Becoming an Ancestor constitute-historically, geographically, emotionally, caringly-a mindful poet's family picture album. Following centuries of fateful migrations, Lucille Lang Day becomes the California teller of tales that wow us with her own intimate versions of how need, time and again, restores our lives to living streams of love."
-Al Young, California Poet Laureate Emeritus

"At the poetic heart of Lucille Lang Day's Becoming an Ancestor is a series of vivid historical poems starting in the early 1600s when 13-year-old Elizabeth sails to Plymouth on the Mayflower. Rowland is in the Gold Rush, Nathan in the Union Army. Old maid Angenette has an out-of-wedlock baby with a Wampanoag Indian. The ancestors tell Day, "Welcome home. The elders have been waiting for you./Listen to their drums, the beat/of your own heart." As the poet comes closer to becoming an ancestor herself, she details her losses and her fears, and she worries whether she is creating a masterpiece or an old pot. Read this old pot, and you will find the hand of a master."
-Penelope Scambly Schott, author of Lillie Was a Goddess, Lillie Was a Whore

"Becoming an Ancestor carries us from the very beginning of this great clock-universe through human migrations to the bitter end, where however a horned lark is singing beside a field of silver hairgrass in winter. When this confluence produces Lucille Lang Day, who sings the world as both a family member and a scientist, and her daughters and grandchildren, they appear in the life-lines of her poems both as the homecoming of historical pilgrimages and as intertwining swirls of DNA. Here too the endings can be bitter as family members slip away. But the music of her poetry remains."
-Emily Grosholz, Advisory Editor, The Hudson Review

Reviews:

Kirkus Reviews: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/lucille-lang-day/becoming-ancestor/

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9861111-6-7 | 118 Pages | In Stock

September, 2015:
Belly by Steven Schreiner

Belly by Steven Schreiner Červená Barva Press, 2015

STEVEN SCHREINER is the author of the collection Too Soon to Leave and the chapbook Imposing Presence, and co-author with Allison Cundiff of In Short, a Memory of the Other on a Good Day. His poems have appeared in many magazines, including Poetry, Image, Colorado Review, River Styx and December, and numerous anthologies. He is the recipient of fellowships from the VCCA, Tall Rock Retreat, and The National Writer's Voice of the YMCA. He teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and is the founding editor of Natural Bridge, a journal of contemporary literature.

Cover art: Ethan Shaltout and Steven Schreiner

Belly is a sequence of confessions. It is a quiet yet intense journey into the deepest wells of a maturing heart. Schreiner writes movingly about the painful transience of love and loss, the forces of memory and childhood, delineated by the revision of seasons and the symbolism of flowers as death, as remembrance. Belly reconciles the permanence of family in all its anguish and grief with the consciousness and inevitability of what supremely makes us human: forgiveness.
-Rewa Zeinati

Steven Schreiner reaches his summit in this remarkably vivid, darkly truthful, and often heartbreaking book of memories, losses and longings, the work of experience.
-Edward Hirsch

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9861111-8-1 | 80 Pages | In Stock

September, 2015:
Hamburgers and Berliners and other courses in between by Matt Potter

Hamburgers and Berliners and other courses in between by Matt Potter Červená Barva Press, 2015

Australian-born Matt Potter lives in Adelaide but keeps part of his psyche in Berlin. He is the founding editor of Pure Slush, Pure Slush Books, Truth Serum Press and Lit Bulb international writing festival. By day he has been a social worker, an English as a Second Language teacher, and oh, many other things. Find more of his work at http://mattcpotter.webs.com/

Matt Potter's Hamburgers and Berliners took me to Germany-with brief forays to Austria, Portugal and other European countries-without me having to shift an inch from my sofa. Potter's prose is, as always, absorbing, amusing, enlightening and engaging. If you are thinking of a trip to Europe (or Australia, where Potter originates) make sure you read Hamburgers and Berliners before you go. This intimate portrait of an Australian abroad should be nestled in your hand luggage beside your spare undies and bottled water-it's just as essential. Potter examines the differences between cultures big and small-between countries, continents or, at the other end of the scale, the microcultures that exist within a block or a street. He constantly questions the what and the why of things, observing idiosyncrasies and habits and ingrained patterns of thought in a way that makes you see your own surroundings and behaviours afresh. Never uncomfortably disrespectful (though often funny), Potter had me smirking with some of his descriptions and going "Aha!" at others.
Hamburgers and Berliners is that rare thing, a guide to humanity, forgiving in its delivery but covering every niggly aspect of living as a foreigner abroad in delicious detail, warts and all. If you want to give your brain a holiday, get it, read it, and have a ball.
-Gill Hoffs, author of The Sinking of RMS Tayleur: The Lost Story of the Victorian Titanic and Wild: a collection

Matt Potter unflinchingly allows us inside his mind and heart, sharing fears and insecurities that most of us would never dare to reveal. His book is both poignant and funny, and through Potter's eyes we get a vivid picture of Germany-its landscapes, people, customs and quirks-while also witnessing one man's struggle to make sense of his own life as well as life at large.
-Len Kuntz, author of The Dark Sunshine

Matt Potter's Hamburgers and Berliners brings back the adventures, the frustrations and the newness of moving to Germany. These honest missives made me want to do it all over again.
-Christopher Allen, author of Conversations with S. Teri O'Type

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9966894-0-3 | 273 Pages | In Stock

Release date August 12, 2015:
To Part Is to Die a Little by Claudia Serea

To Part Is to Die a Little by Claudia Serea Červená Barva Press, 2015

Claudia Serea is a Romanian-born poet who immigrated to the U.S. in 1995. Her poems and translations have appeared in Field, New Letters, 5 a.m., Meridian, Word Riot, Apple Valley Review, The Red Wheelbarrow, and many others. A four-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, she is the author of three other full-length collections: Angels & Beasts (Phoenicia Publishing, Canada, 2012), A Dirt Road Hangs From the Sky (8th House Publishing, Canada, 2013), and Nothing Important Happened Today (Broadstone Books, forthcoming, 2016). Her poem My Father's Quiet Friends in Prison, 1958-1962 received the New Letters Readers Award in 2013. Serea co-hosts The Williams Readings poetry series in Rutherford, NJ, and she is the founding editor of the National Translation Month. More at cserea.tumblr.com.

Serea's poems instantiate with startling clarity and empathy what it means to be at once deeply rooted in the world and permanently dislocated, a cultural curator and translator, a juggler of conflicting desires. Her pendulum-like sway between her homeland, Romania, and the adopted/adoptive one, America, creates a fluid space of in-betweenness that allows her transnational speakers to choose not to choose, and to articulate, instead, what it means to live attuned to the distinct textures of these two worlds' beauty and grit, to their flute songs and "half-lit solitude[s]." Her incisive eye gives us the "Plexiglass politeness" of America alongside the de-humanizing deprivations of life in (post-) communist Romania, the guarded emotions of New World suburbia alongside the odyssean waiting that has become her parents' life in the village house with a "wasps' nest in its bosom" and chickens ready "to scratch the road for coins and worms."

To Part Is to Die a Little is a spare yet rapturous chant about an unending emigration and the continuous return to the soul of one culture in the language of another.
-Mihaela Moscaliuc, author of Father Dirt (Alice James Books, 2010)

Readers of To Part Is to Die a Little should prepare for an emotional journey, as they witness dramatic changes in the speaker's character and her surroundings. Deeply moving poems chronicle poignant milestones spanning from the speaker's decision to leave her country of birth to settling into her country of choice, adopting her new life and seemingly making peace with an inherent duality voiced as "Let me be the pendulum/between my two lives." We meet and sympathize with poignant and vivid characters such as a Thai busboy, a Russian grocery bagger, Danny-the-butcher and other "Stars of the Underground." Congratulations to Claudia Serea for a well-crafted and brilliantly structured book!
-Katerina Stoykova-Klemer, author of The Porcupine of Mind

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9861111-5-0 | 96 Pages | In Stock

Release date June 4, 2015:
Span of Thread by David Giannini

Span of Thread by David Giannini Červená Barva Press, 2015

David Giannini's most recently published collections of poetry include AZ TWO (Adastra Press), a "Featured Book" in the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival; RIM/WAVE in 2012;, and 10 chapbooks in 2013-15 including INVERSE MIRROR, a collaboration with artist, Judith Koppel;. His work appears in national and international literary magazines and anthologies. Awards include: Massachusetts Artists Fellowship Awards; The Osa and Lee Mays Award For Poetry; an award for prosepoetry from the University of Florida; and a 2009 Finalist Award from the Naugatuck Review. He has been a gravedigger; beekeeper; taught at Williams College, The University of Massachusetts, and Berkshire Community College, as well as preschoolers and high school students, among others. Giannini was the Lead Rehabilitation Counselor for Compass Center, which he co-founded as the first rehabilitation clubhouse for severely and chronically mentally ill adults in the northwest corner of Connecticut. He lives among trees in Becket, Massachusetts with his wife, Pam.

On OTHERS' LINES

I don't see how any close reader won't come away learning a great deal about the potential in quotation, the distinctness of first lines & the possibilities of form. That's a lot for a project of this scope to accomplish.
-Ron Silliman

Yes, it's very deftly done, and there is much that is both attractive and amusing: Paul Pines, Charles Olson, and Howard Nemerov as bedfellows is a bit difficult to imagine, but your result is convincing. What comes through to me is the likenesses between all human beings, no matter how differently they may perceive things. It certainly must have been a colossal undertaking.
-Theodore Enslin

I think you have really triumphed. These are poems that succeed most of the time as poetry and carry a real spiritual impact. And your way of using the whole page, if necessary, to get the space/time equivalents you need may transform all of our writing.
-Robin Magowan

On RIM/WAVE

Many of these poems, though short, resonate deeply, and few poets get so much from so few words. These two books complement each other through Giannini's great skill with language and his ability to join the concrete and the abstract. It's poetry grounded in the earth.
-Mark Farrington, Assistant Director and Fiction Advisor in the Johns Hopkins M.A. in Writing Program in Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9861111-2-9 | 138 Pages | In Stock

Release date June 1, 2015:
A World Less Perfect for Dying In by Ralph Pennel

A World Less Perfect for Dying In by Ralph Pennel Červená Barva Press, 2015

Ralph Pennel is the author of A World Less Perfect for Dying In, (by Cervena Barva Press, 2015). His writing has appeared in The Cape Rock, Ropes, Open to Interpretation, Ibbetson Street, The Smoking Poet, Unbound Press, Monologues From the Road and various other journals in the U.S. and abroad. Ralph teaches poetry at Bentley University and literature at Bunker Hill Community College. He has been a guest lecturer at Emerson College and served as the judge for the 2013 WLP Dean's Prize for Emerson. Ralph also teaches workshops at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education and for Student Day of Poetry run by MassPoetry.org. He is a founding editor and the fiction editor for the online literary magazine, Midway Journal (www.midwayjournal.com), published out of St. Paul, Minnesota. Ralph Pennel lives and writes in Somerville, Massachusetts, and was a finalist for the Poet Laureate of Somerville in 2014.

Cover art: "Rising Tide" by Resa Blatman

In the opening poem of Ralph Pennel's debut collection, the speaker lists things he looks for in a poem: "Clear blue light / A single voice, cold, in need of fire" and "Everything I have ever buried," making a concise introduction to A WORLD LESS PERFECT FOR DYING IN-a world which is, after all, the imperfect but beautiful place where we live and die. "But I believe that we all, at the very least, should have some. Beauty, that is." That persistent belief in beauty and the simple kindnesses that one human being can offer another suffuses these poems-often filled with pain and loss-with something like light.
-Joyce Sutphen, Poet Laureate of MN, author of Naming the Stars

"I'm writing all this down," Ralph Pennel says at the end of his frightening and beautiful poem "Just Off The Hennepin Bridge": and he is writing it all down, a world haunted by both beauty and despair. Again and again Pennel returns to the theme that echoes throughout the book, "the great immeasurable hole /that only love lost can make." What a wonderful task to set yourself as a poet, to take the measure of the immeasurable as best you can and to call this impossible task-this ache you feel for the world-by its true name: love.
-Jim Moore, author of Invisible Strings

Ralph Pennel's poems situate us front and center in the speaker's intimate company. In a few humble, trust-earning gestures, Pennel can take us great, often dark, distances. "Confiding in the Prison Guard," written in the voice of John the Baptist on the eve of his execution, risks the one harrowing image after another in service to empathy far transcending them; the poem closes with a devastatingly vernacular plea. Whether he is slipping in and out of personae with the ease of a shape shifter, or serving his subjects as a caring spy, Ralph Pennel has reminded this reader that the single, irrefutable craft of poetry is graceful connection.
-Frannie Lindsay, author of Our Vanishing

Reviews:

Tinder Box Editions: http://tinderboxeditions.blogspot.com/2015/08/book-interview-world-less-perfect-for.html

Doug Holder Blogspot: http://dougholder.blogspot.com/

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9861111-7-4 | 76 Pages | In Stock

New Release April 21, 2015:
Almost Too Much by Barbara E. Murphy

Almost Too Much by Barbara E. Murphy Červená Barva Press, 2015

Barbara Murphy's work has appeared in several literary journals including New England Review, Green Mountains Review, The Threepenny Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is the recipient of a Vermont Council on the Arts fellowship. Murphy has worked as president of Johnson State College in Vermont since 2001 and has been recognized for her leadership roles in higher education. She lives and works in northern Vermont with her husband Tom Garrett.

Almost Too Much both tactfully and relentlessly interrogates our human experience in these dehumanizing times. There's not a sliver of false hope in these pages, but reading them, we catch glimpses of the paradox of our lives, that "The sound of geese /overhead, their thin cries clear /as night through the ceilings and roof / of the house, is either the saddest /sound [we] will ever know / or one of great lifting joy." Barbara Murphy's quietly brilliant poems move us readers toward usable truth.
-David Huddle Author of Glory River and Blacksnake at the Family Reunion

Murphy's lyrical narratives, lively and exact, speak of braveries and hesitations, fugitive beauties and stations of calm. A lifetime of truths take the reader through first games of hide and seek, the boys so far away/lost in their secret places/there was no way/they'd ever get home in time; first loves and second marriages where desire is more of a casual friend./It will not/always be there breathless and flushed; loving children and step-children with different needs in different time zones. These poems should be read aloud for their honesty and musicality. They do the heart good. Almost Too Much is a stunning debut.
-Dzvinia Orlowsky Author of Silvertone and A Handful of Bees

Deeply intimate, each line a breath. In flashes of brilliance against a landscape of existential dread, these poems flare up and stare down this given world until it surrenders its grace.
-Nancy Mitchell Author of The Near Surround and Grief Hut

Reviews:
http://www.basementmedicine.org/arts-entertainment/2015/05/07/5553/

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9861111-3-6 | 70 Pages | In Stock

New Release February 18, 2015:
some words suicidal by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu

some words suicidal by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu Červená Barva Press, 2015

Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, Ph.D. in French Language & Literature, is the author of numerous collections of poetry published in the United States, Romania and France. She writes poetry in English, French and Romanian and her poems have appeared in Laurel Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Wallace Stevens Journal, Seneca Review, Pleiades, Rhino, Louisville Review among others, as well as in a variety of literary magazines in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Quebec and Romania. She is the winner of several International Poetry Prizes awarded for her French books, including the Prix Amelie Murat (2013) and the Grand Prix de la Francophonie (2014). A collection of her New & Selected Poems is forthcoming from Orison Books Press. At the present she lives in Chicago.

Cover Art: Icone en confidence by Michel Benard

Poetry is the record of hidden things in commerce with one another, and only that mystery allows us to live. Stella Vinitchi Radulescu's poetry is an alchemy, a magic of restraint and exposure, revealing the machinations of our invisible feelings, motives, appetites and fears. That she is a master of her condensary goes without saying, for this is a consummate language shaped with remarkable skill, and the voyages that these poems take are brilliant excursions into our inner lives, secret things pushed into the subconscious, broken promises and whispered asides. I have long admired Radulescu's bilingual ability to bend sentences to her will and those constructions are filled with a cross-cultural understanding that is consistently transcendent, that builds bridges into the landscapes of our shared interior lives.
-Keith Flynn, author of Colony Collapse Disorder

Some Words Suicidal, Stella Radulescu's newest poetry collection, is all at once experientially effusive and parsimonious, and is bravely so, both on and off the page. The meditative remittance of these works reminds us just how language means. Radulescu is not afraid to insist her readers subsist on the unnamable, in the spaces between ideas. The poems here thread rather purposefully through dimensions, all the while rending artifice's will without the prudence of architecture, where "words are bees stars ants roaming / on the page / beyond understanding" into truth. Radulescu takes nothing and everything for granted, and at her behest, every word, every line, every stanza and poem reminds us we should too. And, yes, every time, with absolute devotion.
-Ralph Pennel

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9861111-1-2 | 100 Pages | In Stock

New Release December 10, 2014:

Jews by Sami Shalom Chetrit Červená Barva Press, 2014

Teacher, poet, writer, filmmaker, and scholar Sami Shalom Chetrit was born in Morocco, raised in Israel, and lives in New York City. He has been writing and publishing poetry for thirty years, with five books in Hebrew: a new book, Broken Times, is due out from Bimat Kedem (2014); this was preceded by Yehudim (Jews), from Nahar Books (2008). Chetrit's Shirim BeAshdodit (Poems in Ashdodian) became a bestseller in Israel where a popular musical, based on the poems, was produced. He has published countless poems in literary magazines, periodicals, newspapers, and anthologies, as well as several performing shows with leading Israeli musicians. There is a growing body of critical work on his poetry in both Hebrew and English and a generation of younger poets and artists have been inspired by his work. He was recently included in a list of the top 40 Modern Hebrew poets. Though a selection of his work appeared in Ammiel Alcalay's Keys to the Garden, this is Chetrit's first full-length book of poetry in English.

Chetrit's novel Doll's Eye came out from Hargol Am Oved in 2007, and in English from Xlibiris in 2013. His groundbreaking study, Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews, was published by Routledge in 2011.

Producer and director of three documentary films, Chetrit's latest film, Shattered Rhymes: The Life and Poetry of Erez Bitton, depicts the renowned Moroccan born poet, an inspiration to Chetrit's generation. The film came out in January, 2014, appearing in festivals as well as broadcast on Israeli television, and is available in English.

Chetrit is Associate Professor of Hebrew and Middle Eastern Studies at Queens College, CUNY, and is on the faculty of Middle East/Middle East in America Studies at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Cover Art: "A painter without words" water on canvas, 2014
by Igal Fedida

With unflinching courage, clarity, and wit, Sami Shalom Chetrit has gone places no contemporary Israeli Hebrew poet has dared venture. These are places in which the brutality of separatist ideology, enforced identity, militarism, and military occupation, have attempted to blot out the ethics of memory and human relations. It is in these ruins that Chetrit's rage, irony, and compassion create new ways of imagining realities we thought had reached a point of utter saturation. This collection finally allows English readers a chance to hear Chetrit's vital and inspiring voice.
-Ammiel Alcalay, professor of comparative literature Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-692-33628-1 | 100 Pages | In Stock

New Release November 15, 2014:

Poetry With Legs An anthology of Sin by J. Edwin Whitelaw and Friends Červená Barva Press, 2014

These pages that connect fourteen poets whose chance encounters with one who is no longer with us make fifteen. J. Edwin Whitelaw, obscure to all but those who knew him, provided a connection between those whose works and comments appear within, and to whom this anthology is dedicated.

Born in the Arkansas Delta near Helena in 1953 Whitelaw escaped, however the South's influence upon him for good and bad played an important role in all aspects of his life until his death on Christmas Eve in 2006. Near his death, he described himself as "a slightly older man" who had become a mere caricature of his former self.

His poetry ran the spectrum from bitingly cruel as you will find in "An Acute Friendship" to the painfully romantic "Icarus Dreams Of Aphrodite" that appear in this collection. And so say his ex-wives and lovers. Once asked for an explanation of his paradoxical approach to poetry, he would not give one.

After leaving the South he began working as an analyst for the Security Service, a branch of the National Security Agency during the early 70's in San Vito, Italy. "Cooling his heels from the Vietnam Era", as he put it, he developed a distrust of all things governmental. He later entered teaching on both the preparatory and college level. He held a doctorate from the University of Arkansas, and viewed his colleagues as "boors and pompous asses."

During the Bush Eras, he found an increasing and alarming distrust of Americans abroad. "This unholy alliance between the Patriots of the Religious Right and the Republican Party will push this country to the fascist brink. But hey, look on the bright side, oppression has always been good for poetry." according to J. Edwin.

He retired from teaching in the late 90's. Having lived in three foreign countries, he was conversant in five languages, and later worked as an independent consultant to international firms seeking to do business in the United States.

Divorced more times than he cared to discuss in detail, he once said he was destined to die alone surrounded by his books unless his large dog outlived him. It was a statement that proved to be prophetic. His dog in fact did not outlive him, and he was found dead in his rented flat in the Trastevere District of Rome on Christmas Day 2006 having apparently died the evening before quite alone.

In putting this collection together one contact led to another tied with the common thread of poetry. For his enumerable faults, defects and sins all of which he freely confessed, he with a few exceptions managed to salvage his broken relationships converting them into strange forms of friendships that included me.

Another acquaintance, who asked not to be identified commented to me, "J. Edwin had his share of baggage, but I have to say it was the Louis Vitton of emotional baggage. He suffered from potential." Not a religious man by any measure, he had somewhat of a distorted moral code that had at its core a disdain of hypocrisy. His take? "By and large self-professed born-again Christians have no sense of poetry, reflection or self examination. Show me one, and I will show you someone who gives Jesus a bad name."

Fittingly in his honor this anthology is subtitled "An Anthology of Sin" and dedicated to an extraordinary ordinary man.

GISELA FALABELA

$16.95 | ISBN: 978-0-9910091-9-0 | 121 Pages | In Stock

New Release November 15, 2014:

Victory over the Sun The First Futurist Opera by Aleksei Kruchenykh Translated by Larissa Shmailo, Edited and with an introduction by Eugene Ostashevsky Červená Barva Press, 2014

Victory over the Sun, one of the most important events in Russian Futurism and in the avant-garde in general, is not well recognized in the West. Now in a new edition of Larissa Shmailo's brilliant translation of the text, with a lively introduction by Eugene Ostashevsky, readers can appreciate the significance and innovativeness of the 1913 play. Using Shmailo's translation and Malevich's pathbreaking stage designs, the play was reconstructed and staged in 1980 to great acclaim and remains a signal accomplishment in the history of the avant-garde.
-Gerald Janecek, Author of Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism (UCSD, 1996) and Sight and Sound Entwined (Berghahn Books, 2000)

Velimir Khlebnikov, literally, missed the train on co-penning this one, contributing only a poem to Kruchenykh's libretto. Staged alongside Mayakovsky's Vladimir Mayakovsky, A Tragedy, the 1913 original production of Victory is remembered primarily for Kazimir Malevich's costumes, lighting, and set design, instigations for the Suprematism and Constructivism still to come in 1915 and 1919, respectively"¦. Nothing is more fitting for this centennial of "Russian Futurianism" than a celebration of Kruchenykh's great contribution to poetry, his Zaum, and not just for its verbal play "“ the inventive neologizing and the Ã©pater-le-bourgeois utopianism "“ but for the underappreciated antilyricism of his verse, as well. In communicating to us his musicality in English, Larissa Shmailo has done a remarkable job in conferring on Kruchenykh his true due as a poet.
-Alex Cigale, Translations Editor of MadHat Lit

A century ago, Aleksei Kruchenykh was the way out writer's most way out writer. If publishing today, he still would be.
-Richard Kostelanetz, Author of A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (Routledge, 1993)

Rain Taxi review:
http://www.raintaxi.com/victory-over-the-sun-the-first-futurist-opera/

Featured in Russia Beyond the Headlines: http://rbth.com/literature/2015/01/21/the_enduring_appeal_of_russias_avant-garde_43039.html

$16.00 | ISBN: 978-0-692-30231-6 | 56 Pages | In Stock

New Release September 3, 2014:

Les cahiers de Val-David Festival Notebooks Los cuadernos de Val-David 2009-2014 Anthologie brÃ¨ve by Flavia Cosma (Editor) Červená Barva Press, 2014

The Trilingual Anthology "Les cahiers de Val-David, Festival Notebooks, Los cuadernos de Val-David, 2009-2014" reunites, thanks to a generous grant from CLD Laurentides, some of the most talented international writers who participated so far in the Festivals at Val-David. (The International Writers' and Artists' Residence at Val-David, Quebec, Canada) The anthology is in English, French, and Spanish with many translators bringing the language of the International writers available for us to read. The International Festival of Writers and Artists is held twice a year at the International residence and is directed by Flavia Cosma, a well-known writer whose poetry, prose and children literature is published in English, French and Spanish, as well as her native Romanian. She welcomes at her residency, year after year, new talents from all corners of the world. They have the opportunity to share their poetical-artistic experience with other fellows through festivals where poetry and prose readings, book launches, conferences, round tables, improvisations, music and exhibitions are giving poets and artists of all ages and styles an opportunity to perform their work in the language of participants, most frequently English, French, Spanish, Romanian and even Ancient Greek. (www.flaviacosma.com) This anthology will take you on a journey reading the work of international writers from so many different countries and cultures.

Contributors: David BrÃªme, Alan Britt, Christopher Bowen, Gordon Bradley, Philip Brunst, Julie Burtinshaw, Claudia CÃ¡ceres Franco, Luis RaÃºl Calvo, Rodica Gabriela Chira, Flavia Cosma, Carmen Doreal, HÃ©lÃ¨ne Dorion, Sharl DubÃ©, Louise DuprÃ©, Denis Emorine, Adrian Erbiceanu, Anna Louise E. Fontaine, Jacobo Fijman, Antoine Gravel-Bilodeau, Talleen Hacikyan, Eva Halus, Diana HaÃ¯k Hambardzumyan, Hugh Hazelton Louis-Philippe HÃ©bert, Clelia Ifrim, Jeanne Jutras, Anna Levine, Ana LÃ³pez, FrÃ©dÃ©rique Marleau, Gilles Matte,Felicia Mihali, Ljubica Milicevic Gertrude Millaire, Gloria Mindock, Michael Mirolla, Pierre Mondou, Ofelia de Santos, Mel Sarnese, N. A'Yara Stein, Czandra Mostly Luminita Suse, JÃœRI TALVET, Patricia GonÃ§alves Tenorio, Jeremiah Wall, Cheryl Antao-Xavier

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-692-28317-2 | 122 Pages | In Stock

September 21, 2014: What Wakes Us Poems by E.K. Mortenson

What Wakes Us Poems by E.K. Mortenson Červená Barva Press, 2014

E. K. Mortenson is the author of the chapbooks, The Fifteenth Station (Accents Publishing, 2012) and Dreamer or the Dream (Last Automat Press, 2010. His work also appears in both print and online journals as well as anthologies. He was the 2008 recipient of the Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize, the 2012 Accents Publishing Chapbook Award, and is an instructor in the MFA in Creative and Professional Writing program at Western Connecticut State University. He writes and teaches in Pennsylvania where he lives with his wife and two children.

Answer: Attention, which is a kind of compassion.

[Somewhere between Charles Wright's obsession with the shadows where the physical and the spiritual worlds meet and David Kirby's laughably brilliant ability to find the gut-rooted humor in both worlds, we find E. K. Mortenson's poems of celebration and grief, of laughter and agony, of people in dreams and people in our arms, all recycling: the hands of a lost grandfather come again in the hands of a toddler fascinated with water; the world refashions itself as another day, every day; what's out there is born again in the brain, and that loop makes a mind and something at least like a soul.]

Q: What is the central energy in the universe?

-Brian Clements, author of And How To End It and Jargon

E. K. Mortenson's What Wakes Us is a delightful exploration of the world at hand. The poems experiment with lineation "“ seeing what's possible both with the fractured line of Ferlinghetti's early poems, and with a more sustained line reminiscent of C.K. Williams. The final section of the book abandons the device of lineation altogether in a sequence of prose poems. But throughout the book, there are pleasures to be found. There is the startling comparison of eyes "the blue / of the continental shelf / on a pull-out map / from one of his National Geographics / with which I would wallpaper my room." There is the worry of a father holding a sick child, who is "terrified to wake you, / to spill the overfull cup of your sleep." And there is the accuracy of moments like this: "Small boats creak in the harbor, with only a token strain at their mooring lines, dangling kelp and dulse and carrageen." The reader of Mortenson's work will find many such pleasures.
-Charles Rafferty, author of Appetites and A Less Fabulous Infinity

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9910091-3-8 | 72 Pages | In Stock

July 29, 2014: Fugitive Hope by Bruce lader

Fugitive Hope by Bruce Lader Červená Barva Press, 2014

Bruce Lader is the author of four other volumes of poetry, most recently, Embrace (Big Table Publishing, 2010) and Landscapes of Longing (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2009). Discovering Mortality (March Street Press, 2005) was a finalist for the 2006 Brockman-Campbell Book Award. Winner of the 2010 Left Coast Eisteddfod Poetry Competition, his poems have appeared in Poetry, New York Quarterly, Confrontation, The Humanist, New Millennium Writings, Fulcrum, Harpur Palate, Against Agamemnon: War Poems anthology, and over 100 other magazines and anthologies. He has received a writer-in-residence fellowship from The Wurlitzer Foundation and an honorarium from the College of Creative Studies at UC-Santa Barbara. Formerly a Special Education teacher, he is the Director of Bridges Tutoring, an organization in Raleigh, North Carolina, educating multicultural students. His author Website is www.BruceLader.com.

Bruce Lader's new collection, Fugitive Hope, begins with attractive, jazzy pizzazz and over four sections deepens, broadens, and sweetens, as a pastoral symphony might, into gratitude for life, nature, and his wife, who bears the mysteries of faith and hope. In the lovely Hide & Seek, the speaker is only certain of this abracadabra / moment ludicrous with / giddy freedom. Witty and cutting, Memo from Another Planet imagines Earth's quick, quiet capitulation to conquest. Near book's end, we are listening to "covert concerts in these woods," and in Vision of Uncertainty, the poet dreams of seeing spring's advent in his wife's eyes after his death. It is an astonishing journey, beautiful and hopeful.
-Kelly Cherry, The Retreats of Thought: Poems

In Fugitive Hope, Bruce Lader is an adept guide covering the vast territory of this fresh, lively collection. He offers compelling, sympathetic portraits of a wide range of individuals, from soldiers to judges, from Diogenes to Orpheus. A skilled craftsman, he knows just when to pull up at the end of his poems, put on the brakes, and send us flying.
-Jim Daniels, Having a Little Talk with Capital P Poetry

These are tightly structured, tightly controlled poems profuse with passion and a sometimes hidden but always savage lust for life, formed of "the legacy of gargoyle and...of cherubs hovered in balance."
-Jared Smith, The Collected Poems of Jared Smith: 1971-2011

Review by CL Bledsoe: http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/gallery.php?item=23664

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9910091-8-3 | 81 Pages | In Stock

March 31, 2014: Let's Go Back To The Mainland by Grzegorz Wroblewski

Let's Go Back To The Mainland by Grzegorz Wroblewski Translated from the Polish by Agnieszka Pokojska Červená Barva Press, 2014

Grzegorz Wroblewski, born in 1962 in Gdansk and raised in Warsaw, has been living in Copenhagen since 1985. He has published ten volumes of poetry and three collections of short prose pieces in Poland; three books of poetry, a book of poetic prose and an experimental novel (translations) in Denmark; and a book of selected poems in Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as a selection of plays. His work has been translated into fifteen languages. His recent book of prose poems, Kopenhaga, was published by Zephyr Press, 2013.

Between classical lyricism and central European surrealism, between the punk aesthetic of Mark E Smith and the existentialism of Camus, between the miniatures of Joseph Cornell and the stalker of Tarkovsky, between painting, plays, poetry, performance art, and the memoir, between Poland and Denmark and the milky way, Grzegorz WrÃ³blewski is on the mainland. His work is the most distinct and diverse coming out out of the so-called "bruLion generation" always moving into the major leagues of this universe and perhaps others. If we don't become extinct as a species in the near future, Wroblewski will go down as one of our greatest writers, artists, and thinkers.
-Marcus Slease, author of Mu (so) Dream (window)

Cover photo: Wojciech Wilczyk

Review by Ann Wehrman: http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/gallery.php?item=23672

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9910091-7-6 | 96 pages | In Stock

March 18, 2014: Diet of Nails by Charles S. Kraszewski

Diet of Nails by Charles S. Kraszewski Červená Barva Press, 2014

Charles S. Kraszewski. Poet and translator. Recipient of the 2013 Award for the Promulgation of Polish Literature and Culture by the Union of Polish Writers Abroad (London). Recent publications include Beast (poems), Rossetti's Armadillo (verse translations and essays), Irresolute Heresiarch: Catholicism, Gnosticism and Paganism in the Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz. Creative in both English and Polish, he is a frequent contributor to Odra (translations of T.S. Eliot and Robinson Jeffers).

Cover art: Navajo Antelopes by Stefan Tejk

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9910091-5-2 | 87 Pages | In Stock

March, 2014: Inclusions by Joanna Kurowska

Inclusions by Joanna Kurowska Červená Barva Press, 2014

Cover Art: Untitled (1991) by Pawel Mlynarczyk

Joanna Kurowska immigrated to the U.S. in 1988. After publishing two books of poetry in Poland-Sciana (The Wall), 1997 and Obok (Near), 1999-she gradually switched to English as her poetic medium. Many of her poems have appeared in American and European journals. In 2013, eLectio Publishing released The Wall & Beyond, a volume of her Polish poems translated into English. Another collection of Joanna's poetry, The Butterfly's Choice, is forthcoming in 2015, from Broadstone Books.

Inclusions is Joanna Kurowska's first book of originally English-language poems.

These mostly short, lapidary lyrics present to the reader not only a fallen world of detritus, missed emotional connections, thoughtless consumption, empty gratification, but also a world of fragile and fleeting beauty, raptures that last "but a fraction of a second," and art-making that redeems us. A town's soul leaks away as globalization grinds everyone and everything to sameness; a bishop's suit in a window is "a skin missing a body;" and a price is put on everything: "The trees have turned into business letters." This is simply the "now," as Kurowska sees it. But these are spiritual poems, though the god evoked-invoked-is not the property of any single group or mission. In the title poem, the speaker longs "to make sure/that i, too, am included/in the world deposited/on God's tongue." And always, the human possibilities, and the beauty of the world, are what we transcend to. In the final poem, to her son who asks what the meaning of life is, the poet replies, "Next to me, a feather swirls/In the air. A draft carries it/When the window is open"... To me, this is a lovely, non-Western image of the inclusion the poet prays for.
-James Cummins, Author of Still Some Cake

Inclusions is a book of surprising, reflective encounters with things as small as ants and as big as God. The ants, however, are big enough to make us think about the meaning of life and death. God, on the other hand, is small and light enough to fit into a snowflake. The poems listen to silence, loved ones now gone, cupboards and birds. Joanna Kurowska's slender verses pray by playing and masterfully lead the reader to the realization that "knowing is letting go."
-Katia Mitova, Author of Dream Diary

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-09910091-6-9 | 53 Pages | In Stock

March 7, 2014: A Sharp Double-Edged Luxury Object by Rodica Draghincescu

A Sharp Double-Edged Luxury Object by Rodica Draghincescu Translated from Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin with Antuza Genescu Červená Barva Press, 2014

Cover Art: Devis Grebu

Rodica Draghincescu, born in 1962 in Buzias, a town in the province of Timis in the west of Romania, and now living in the region of Metz in France, was called by World Literature Today "one of the most spectacular figures in the new Romanian literature of the 1990s." She has published prize-winning books of original poetry and prose fiction in Romanian and in French (both in France and Canada), as well as translations, interviews, and essays. Her work has also appeared in translation in England, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. In 2006 Draghincescu was awarded the "Le Lien" Prize for Poetry in Nancy-Metz, France, and in 2013 the "Virgil" Prize for European poetry in Paris. Since 2007 she has served as Artistic Director of the International Poetry Festival of Metz and consultant for arts education to the institutions of culture of Lorraine, and she is editor-in-chief of the multilingual web-magazine Levure litteraire and on the editorial board of the German review Matrix.

About the Translators:
Adam J. Sorkin is a translator of contemporary Romanian literature, whose work has won the Poetry Society (U.K.) Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation for 2005, as well as the Kenneth Rexroth Memorial Translation Prize and the Ioan Flora Prize for Poetry Translation. In 2011, he published A Path to the Sea by Liliana Ursu, translated with Ursu and Tess Gallagher (Pleasure Boat Studios-Silver Award winner in poetry as a ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year), Ioan Flora's Medea and Her War Machines, translated with Alina CÃ¢rÃ¢c (University of New Orleans Press-third-round selection for the National Translation Award), Ion Muresan's The Book of Winter and Other Poems, translated with Lidia Vianu (University of Plymouth Press), and The Vanishing Point That Whistles: An Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry (Talisman House). In 2012, Mouths Dry with Hatred by Dan Sociu, translated with the author (Longleaf Press), and The Flying Head by Ioan Flora, translated with Elena Borta (Toad Press), both appeared. Sorkin is Distinguished Professor of English at Penn State Brandywine.

Antuza Genescu is a free-lance translator who lives and works in Timisoara in the west of Romania. Her translations of Rodica Draghincescu with Adam J. Sorkin have appeared in literary publications in the United States, the Netherlands, and Slovenia, both in print and on the web.

Reviews:

Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene:
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2014/05/a-sharp-double-edged-luxury-object.html

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9910091-2-1 | 41 Pages | In Stock

March 7, 2014: Partner, Orchard, Day Moon by Michael Todd Steffen

Partner, Orchard, Day Moon by Michael Todd Steffen Červená Barva Press, 2014

Cover Art: Irene Koronas

Michael Todd Steffen's poems and articles have appeared in Connecticut Review, Poem (HLA), ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), Ibbetson Street, Wilderness House Literary Review, Muddy River Poetry Review and in the window of the Grolier Poetry Bookshop. A graduate of Belmont in Nashville, on a Rotary International Fellowship he studied and taught in England and France. He was awarded the 2007 Somerville Newswriters Festival poetry prize, and currently lives in Cambridge where he writes and works for non-profits.

I've just come back from reading the poems in Partner, Orchard, Day Moon, full of admiration. Steffen is so alive in his writing, keen with observation, both of what things actually look like, what the wind feels like, how things grow and rot, and also of character, his own, his uncles', anybody's he sees. The book gives us many wonderfully memorable lines using his chosen meter for all its worth. This is very good work.
-David Ferry

"A very moving collection of poems. I'm enjoying reading - and re-reading-the poems."
-Kathleen Spivack, author of With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz and Others

Reviews:

Poet to Poet: Michael Todd Steffen, author of Partner, Orchard, Day Moon (Cervena Barva Press, 2014) interviewed by Doug Holder on SCAT TV.
http://vp.telvue.com/preview?id=T02351&video=195415

March, 17, 2014; Boston Area Small Press & Poetry Scene:
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2014/03/partner-orchard-day-moon-by-michael.html

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9883713-2-3 | 61 Pages | In Stock

January 15, 2014: How to be Another by Susan Lewis

How to be Another by Susan Lewis Červená Barva Press, 2014

Painting by Melissa Stern

Susan Lewis lives in New York City and edits Posit (www.positjournal.com). Her other books and chapbooks are This Visit(BlazeVOX [books], 2014), State of the Union (Spuyten Duyvil Press), The Following Message (White Knuckle Press), At Times Your Lines (Argotist e-books), Some Assembly Required (Dancing Girl Press), Commodity Fetishism, winner of the 2009 Cervena Barva Press Chapbook Award, and Animal Husbandry (Finishing Line Press). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published in a great number of journals and anthologies, including Berkeley Poetry Review, BlazeVOX, Cimarron Review, The Journal, The New Orleans Review, Phoebe, Raritan, Seneca Review, Verse (online), and Verse Daily.

Susan Lewis poses questions that are sine waves amid the urban ruckus of unsweetened yet unnatural nouns. She nuzzles the vibrato context that her poems would recast. Poetic prophecy thrives amid a balance between selected, anchored logic and prevailing, accurate illogic in the midst. There is a delicious sense of understatement in these poems that drive toward the surprise end of the spectrum that diverts from expectation. Along this welcome string of mysteries, we are perpetually challenged to invent new steps.
-Sheila E. Murphy

Clipped, cut, cajoling, the prose bits of Susan Lewis are pure poetry. When and whether she unravels the endless to and fro with an/other who never quite makes true contact, or provides procedural instructions on how to be some self, she never spins anything less than "the courage to tell us something new, no matter how frightening or untrue." Her capsuled narratives cohere and dissolve with the piquant absurdity of the voices they refract, then send back out into the ether. This is the kind of entropy "we might as well learn to ride like the wind" to whatever full-stop it takes us, with fun and thanks punctuating our language-voyage.
-Amy King

Waking headlong transcriptions of what poetry's dream can do that no other form of writing can: sing condensed quicksilver improvisations that are any smart feeling reader's sought after letters to the Other you too can learn to become from out a "most entertaining cave." Read these poems and be right back in the new present unfurling moment of language's immediacy-each poem is a successful risk-taking trip flying in and out of Susan Lewis' brilliancy. Rx: read this book.
-Lee Ann Brown

Susan Lewis' poems in How to Be Another offer often ironic, always eloquent testament to the agonies of relationships in general and couples in particular. Wielding incisive metaphors like a scalpel, she cuts through social poses and masks to the messy failures and disappointments that lurk underneath the surface of our all too human interactions. Her poetry is compassionate enough to capture our desire to connect with each other and wise enough to recognize our repeated and heartbreaking failure to do so.
-Howard Good

Reviews:

http://galatearesurrection26.blogspot.com/2016/07/how-to-be-another-by-susan-lewis.html

Interview with Susan Lewis by Rob Mclennan on Rob Mclennan's Blog:
http://www.robmclennan.blogspot.ca/2014/02/12-or-20-second-series-questions-with_15.html

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9910091-0-7 | 81 Pages | In Stock

December 3, 2013: The Telling by Denise Bergman

The Telling by Denise Bergman Červená Barva Press, 2013

DENISE BERGMAN is the author of Seeing Annie Sullivan, poems based on the early life of Helen Keller's teacher. She conceived and edited City River of Voices, an anthology of urban poetry. Her poems have been widely published. An excerpt of her poem about a neighborhood slaughterhouse is installed as public art in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Denise Bergman's second collection of poems is astonishingly original: I can't think of another work that uses something so small to such large effect. The Telling is ultimately about time and memory, art and truth, women and birth and death, and it all comes from "A sepia memory/mildeweed, perhaps, or not"-a tiny center around which Bergman's lyrical intelligence moves with haunting power and grace.
-Martha Collins

As scribe to the recounting of a few harrowing childhood hours that would shape her grandmother's life, Denise Bergman examines trauma, suppression and how the honest mind must sometimes alter truth. This, then, is no simple compassion; as the narrator bears witness to the recounting of a monumental and guilt-laden secret, Bergman searches underneath the told story. In her spare, halting lines and the wide silences between them, one senses a tender and horrified listening, and in this listening an implied counterpoint, a murmur of truths unspeakable. Every object in The Telling has a vulnerable, culpable animus. All are witnesses. Bergman's testimony acknowledges the heartbreaking necessity of amnesia.
-Frannie Lindsay

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9910091-4-5 | 84 Pages | In Stock

My Father's Eyes a memoir by Mary Bonina

My Father's Eyes a memoir by Mary Bonina Červená Barva Press, 2013

Mary Bonina has published two collections of poetry, Clear Eye Tea and Living Proof. She is also the author of Lunch in Chinatown, a chapbook of poems inspired by the experience of teaching the English language to recent immigrants in their work places. Her poetry and prose has been featured in Gulf Stream, Salamander, English Journal, Hanging Loose, and in many other journals and several anthologies, most recently in Entering the Real World: VCCA Poets on Mt. San Angelo, celebrating forty years of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Commissioned by composer Paul Sayed, she wrote a suite of three poems, Grace in the Wind, and Sayed's composition for piano, cello, and soprano voice had its world premiere at the Longy School of Music of Bard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts in November of 2012. Bonina is a graduate of the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. In addition to being a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow since 2001 when she was named the finalist for the Goldfarb Fellowship in non-fiction, she is also a member of the Writers' Room of Boston, Inc. where she is working on a novel and a new collection of poetry. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, poet Mark Pawlak and their son, Gianni Bonina-Pawlak.

ADVANCE PRAISE for MY FATHER'S EYES

"Not many pages into this gloriously moving book, a feeling begins to grow that it would have been a humbling yet exquisite experience to have sat and talked with Biagio John Bonina. What his daughter Mary Bonina has given us is a solid and lasting portrait of a man who was simple and complicated. (That is not a contradiction once you come to know him.) America is a country of grand men and women who live on a modest scale, and no one fits that category more than he does. Once his eyes began to fail him, he lived even more for his family and its welfare and his efforts and work make him in my mind, the kind of real hero we fail to glorify anymore. So enter this book and come to know her father and his dedicated overwhelmingly loyal daughter, as well as a large stage of family members and friends who are unforgettable and insanely knowable and human."
-Edward P. Jones, author of The Known World

"Mary Bonina casts her considerable spell with exquisite sentences and unerring evocative details. She is a writer of inordinate compassion, formidable intelligence, and unflinching honesty. My Father's Eyes documents a family's coming to grips with the legacy of blindness, a daughter's unflagging allegiance to her father, and one man's heroic determination to live a life of independence and quiet dignity despite obstacles that would crush the strongest of us. The book is an inspiration. When I finished reading it, I walked around for days seeing the world through its lens. Yes, it's that good. It's that important."
-John Dufresne, author of Requiem, Mass. and No Regrets, Coyote

"Packard. Record player. Telephone party line. Fallout shelter. Holy Ghost. These and other blasts from the past make up the world of this beautiful, clear-eyed memoir that reads like a novel. It's partly the story of a girl who loved words on her way to becoming a writer. Of all the words in her universe, the most important were eyes and seeing, for this was a girl growing up with a beloved father going blind. Becoming his guide and his eyes, she becomes herself. And what a character he is! We come to know him as if we're all his children, one minute consumed with terror at the dangers he faces, and the next minute awed by his courage, and the next exasperated by his human flaws. And ultimately, we see and feel for ourselves what his daughter means when she says, "I know about love from being my father's eyes."
-Ellen Cooney, author of A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies

Reviews

Solstice Literary Magazine: http://solsticelitmag.org/mary-boninas-memoir-fathers-eyes/

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9883713-8-5 | 290 Pages | In Stock

New Release: My Life With Blondie by JiřÃ Klobouk

My Life With Blondie by Jiri Klobouk Červená Barva Press, September, 2013

Jiri Klobouk writes fiction, radio plays, poetry and essays. He discovered jazz when he was twelve and later began to visualize the world around him through a camera lens - he worked for 20 years in television. These experiences are reflected in his writing. He created a body of work in which as one critique noted: "We could feel the rhythm and see things from unexpected angles." Many short stories have appeared in literary periodicals: Partisan Review, Chicago Review, Stories and Artful Dodge. For Winter Wolves, a story published in Mid-American Review, he was named outstanding writer in the 1985-86 The Pushcart Prize edition. His list of books includes: My Life with Blondie, Winfield, Radio Plays I, Radio Plays II, Music After Midnight, The Stair Climber, Anti-Communist Manifesto (1975), The Homecoming, JAZZ II: Parents and Third Wife. The author lives in New York City.

Translated from the Czech by Helena and John Baker

A fifty-year-old man, named Harley Davidson, has suffered from a vivid fantasy, a condition not as rare as it might seem: alongside reality, which he perceives accurately, he has created for himself a second, parallel world of dreams. When he was seventeen, he fell in love with Blondie he saw on a magazine cover. For the next thirty-three years all he wants is to tell her that he loves her. As time goes by it seems it will never happen, but then one day...

...thirty three years later Harley learns that Blondie (inevitably an aging starlet) is arriving in town to perform at a local bar. She has reserved a room in the rundown hotel where Harley works as a receptionist. Finally, he is convinced his dream will come true.

In this novel, we become acquainted with Harley's entire life - from childhood, through the demise of two marriages. We follow him on his journey to Austria, Portugal, Germany and Vietnam. It is a story of a human being who, inspired by the power of love, keeps his spirit intact against all odds and circumstances.

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9883713-6-1 | 284 Pages | In Stock

New release: On Paths Known to No One Poems by Flavia Cosma

On Paths Known to No One Poems by Flavia Cosma Červená Barva Press, 2012

Flavia Cosma is an award winning Romanian-born Canadian poet, author and translator. She has a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest. Later she studied Drama at the Community School of Arts-Bucharest, Romania. She is also an award winning independent television documentary producer, director, and writer, and has published seventeen books of poetry, a novel, a travel memoir and five books for children. Her work has been represented in numerous anthologies in various countries and languages, and her book, 47 Poems, (Texas Tech University Press) received the ALTA Richard Wilbur Poetry in Translation Prize.

Cosma was nominated three times for The Pushcart Prize with poems from Leaves of a Diary (2006), The Season of Love (2008) and Thus Spoke the Sea (2008).

Flavia Cosma was awarded Third Prize in the John Dryden Translation Competition- 2007, for co-translating In The Arms of The Father, poems by Flavia Cosma, (British Comparative Literature Association & British Literary Translation Centre)

Cosma's Songs at the Aegean Sea made the Short List in the Canadian Aid Literary Awards Contest, Dec. 2007. Her translation into Romanian of Burning Poems by George Elliott Clarke was published in Romania in 2006. Her translation from Spanish into Romanian of work by the Argentinean poet Luis Raul Calvo was published in 2009 under the title Nimic Pentru Aici, Nimic Pentru Dincolo. Her translation of work by the USA poet Gloria Mindock was published in 2010 under the title La Portile Raiului. Her translation into English of Profane Uncertainties by the Argentinean poet Luis Raul Calvo was published by Červená Barva Press in 2010.

Flavia Cosma was appointed International Affairs Chair for The League of Canadian Poets in 2008.

Cosma's poetry book Leaves of a Diary was studied at the University of Toronto E. J. Pratt Canadian Literature during the school year 2007-2008. Flavia was decorated with the Golden Medal and was appointed Honorary Member by the Casa del Poeta Peruano, Lima, Peru, 2010, for her poetry and her work as an international cultural promoter.

Flavia Cosma is the director of the International Writers' and Artists' Residency, Val-David, Quebec, Canada

Flavia Cosma: http://www.flaviacosma.com

As in Flavia Cosma's whole literary production, nature isn't reduced here to the role of a neutral backdrop to the poet's life; it influences her imagination and consciousness in innumerable ways becoming a source of inspiration for a thorough studying of existing ideas and for awakening new ones. Flavia is an expert in using nature as an adequate space for metaphors, comparisons, symbols. She humanizes nature, granting it an interior life, with the highest intensity, at the supreme level.
-Dr. Irena Harasimowicz-Zazecka PhD Philology, University of Bucharest, Romania

$15.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9844732-6-7 | 128 Pages | In Stock

New release: Hyperlinks of Anxiety by Daniel Y. Harris

Hyperlinks of Anxiety by Daniel Y. Harris Červená Barva Press, 2013

Daniel Y. Harris holds a Master of Arts in Divinity from The University of Chicago, where he specialized in the history and hermeneutics of religion and wrote his dissertation on The Zohar. He is the author of The New Arcana (with John Amen, New York Quarterly Books, 2012), Paul Celan and the Messiah's Broken Levered Tongue: An Exponential Dyad (with Adam Shechter, Červená Barva Press, 2010; picked by The Jewish Forward as one of the 5 most important Jewish poetry books of 2010) and Unio Mystica (Cross-Cultural Communications, 2009). He is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. His poetry, experimental writing, art and essays have been published in The Denver Quarterly, European Judaism, Exquisite Corpse, The New York Quarterly, Poetry Salzburg Review, among others.
His website is www.danielyharris.com.

Daniel Y. Harris's new volume of poetry brings together a range of texts "older and newer" evocative of the qualms and uncertainties of our new millennium. A subtle and highly affective read.
-Sander L. Gilman, Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences; Professor of Psychiatry, Emory University

Is cyberspace the most recent iteration of the diaspora? Will the next Zohar be composed in computer code? Can notarikon generate lyric poems out of the discourses of pharmacology, neurology, biophysics"¦? Welcome to the Hotel Url, Daniel Y. Harris, sole owner and proprietor, where these questions-and others that the reader has yet to dream-will be answered. No need to be anxious: in less than a nanosecond, the hyperlinks elaborated in Harris's poems will whisk you from catastrophe creation to apocalypse and beyond. Beam me up, Ezekiel!
-Norman Finkelstein, Professor of English, Xavier University and author of On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry

Daniel Y. Harris combines impressive erudition with a profound awe for continuity-that the eternal energies underlying Life itself constantly (re)iterate and (re)incarnate in myriad waxing and waning forms. Ideas birth Art; Art births Ideas. In such fashion, to employ classic terms, the heart and mind forge a dynamic union resulting in both clarity of perception and depth of feeling. These are poems to be read and reread, concepts and descriptive phrases operating like portals into other worlds. In Hyperlinks of Anxiety, Harris functions as a twenty-first century, digital alchemist, adeptly yoking the abstract and concrete, offering us singular and transformative experiences, all the while reminding us that Poetry is trans-authorial, Mystery our only true teacher.
-John Amen, author of At the Threshold of Alchemy; editor of The Pedestal Magazine

Reviews

Review by John Amen:
http://www.albany.edu/offcourse/issue54/john_amen_review_d_y_harris.html

Stride Magazine (Out of England):
http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/Stride%20mag%202013/July%202013/Fear%20The%20Moral%20Nebulae.htm

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9883713-4-7 | 156 Pages | In Stock

May 3, 2013: Sweet Snow A novel of the Ukrainian famine of 1933 by Alexander J. Motyl

Sweet Snow A novel of the Ukrainian famine of 1933 by Alexander J. Motyl Červená Barva Press, 2013: Cover Photograph: Mark Hewko

Alexander Motyl is a writer, painter, and professor. He is the author of four novels, Whiskey Priest, Who Killed Andrei Warhol, The Jew Who Was Ukrainian, and Sweet Snow, and two novellas, Flippancy and My Orchidia; his poems have appeared in Mayday, Counterexample Poetics, Istanbul Literary Review, Orion Headless, The Battered Suitcase, Red River Review, Green Door, and New York Quarterly. He has done performances of his fiction and poetry at the Cornelia Street CafÃ© and the Bowery Poetry Club in New York. Motyl's artwork is represented on the Internet gallery, www.artsicle.com, and has been exhibited in solo and group shows in New York, Philadelphia, Westport, and Toronto. He teaches at Rutgers University-Newark and lives in New York.

Sweet Snow is set in the winter of 1933 in Ukraine. A terrible famine is raging in the countryside, while the Soviet secret police is arresting suspected spies in the cities. A German nobleman from Berlin, a Jewish communist from New York, a Polish diplomat from LwÃ³w, and a Ukrainian nationalist from Vienna come to share a cell in some unknown prison. One day, as they are being transported to another prison, their van overturns, their guards are killed, and they are freed - to wander amidst the devastated villages, desolate landscapes, snowbound villages, and frozen corpses. As they struggle to survive, they come to grips with the horror of the famine as well as with their own delusions, weaknesses, and mortality.
$18.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9883713-7-8 | 154 Pages | In Stock

May 12, 2013: The Bonsai Curator by Pamela L. Laskin

The Bonsai Curator by Pamela L. Laskin Červená Barva Press, 2013

Pamela L. Laskin is a lecturer in the English Department, where she directs the Poetry Outreach Center. Poetry collections include: Remembering Fireflies and Secrets of Sheets (Plain View Press), Van Gogh's Ear (Červená Barva Press), Daring Daughters/Defiant Dreams (A Gathering of Tribes), and The Plagiarist (Dos Madres Press). Several children's books have been published.

In The Bonsai Curator, through metaphor, myth, and fairy tale, Pam Laskin chronicles a life, from the figurative museum, into the woods, then out of that museum, into the world. But my favorite moments live in her language and imagery, like: The pines, bamboo, and plum trees... from the same father, / a recluse / who made his children lovely, / but lonely. / and I am good at stunting growth; / I've kept myself / five forever. As always, Laskin doesn't blink, and she doesn't flinch, either.
-Estha Weiner

In this subtly complex collection of poems, Pam Laskin takes the image of bonsai-stunted and scarred into beauty through deliberate human artifice-and makes it a metaphor of being mothered, smothered and "wretchedly loved." Then with great deftness, she uproots the image and offers us a fresh and expansive vision of a tree, one that summons us to the sprawling beauty of parenting-and of poetry-that is nurtured in respect and love.
-David Groff, Author of CLAY

Bonsai Beauty

I have been birthed/unearthed
from air,

a mutation
my odd, atrophied limbs
are startling.

Like a fixture I stand
paralyzed
by motherless memories.

Yes, there is a tree here
but at fifty
I still can't grow.

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9883713-5-4 | 72 Pages | 7 in Stock

November 7, 2012: Červená Barva Press proudly announces the publication of our 100th book!

Two Colors of the Soul: The Selected Poetry of Dmytro Pavlychko Edited and with an introduction by Michael M. Naydan Červená Barva Press, 2012

Cover Art: Two by Olha Fedoruk

Translated from the Ukrainian by Svitlana Bednazh, Gladys Evans, Michael M. Naydan, Dzvinia Orlowsky, Mary Skrypnyk, Aliona Sydorenko, Martha B. Trofimenko, and Walter May.

Dmytro Pavlychko has been an editor, translator, literary critic, film scriptwriter, ambassador, and pro-democracy political figure. He was born in 1929 in a rural village close to the Carpathian Mountains. In 1944-5 he was imprisoned at the age of 15 by the Soviets on fabricated charges for alleged activities on behalf of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. He has published twenty collections of poetry, as well as several books of poetry translations and literary criticism. Many of his poems have been set to music and turned into songs, with ones such as "Two Colors" becoming national classics known by Ukrainians virtually everywhere. In 1977 Pavlychko received the Shevchenko Prize, the most prestigious literary award in Ukraine. Pavlychko served as ambassador to Slovakia from 1995-1998 and later to Poland from 1999-2002. He was elected a member of the Ukrainian parliament in 2005. He has received the designation of Hero of Ukraine from the Ukrainian government as well as honorary doctorates from Lviv National University and Warsaw University.

He continues to reside in the capital city of Kyiv and remains active in public life. Two Colors of the Soul: The Selected Poetry of Dmytro Pavlychko is his first book of poetry translated and published into English. From the Introduction: DMYTRO PAVLYCHKO: POET AND STATESMAN by Michael M. Naydan

In the tradition of poet-statesmen Neruda and Seferis, Pavlychko writes about his twin passions, love and history. Courageous, direct, and plain-spoken, he has long deserved a place on the international literary stage and Michael Naydan's skillfully edited selections should confirm it.
-Askold Melnyczuk, award-winning novelist, author and editor

Out of Stock, Please Order it from SPD Books:
http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780988371309/two-colors-of-the-soul-the-selected-poetry-of-dmytro-pavlychko.aspx

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9883713-0-9 | 90 Pages | Temporarily out of stock

Following Tommy a novel by Bob Hartley Červená Barva Press, 2012

Bob Hartley was raised on the West Side of Chicago. He holds an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Pittsburgh. He has been, among other things, a writer, actor, singer, teacher, bartender, mail room clerk, and soap mold washer. He currently makes his living as a respiratory therapist and lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and two children. Following Tommy is his first novel.

Following Tommy tells the story of the O'Days, two young brothers living in an Irish American, working class neighborhood on Chicago's West Side in the 1960's. As thieves they are the bane of the neighborhood until the arrival of the first African American family.

Following Tommy, is a powerful, mesmerizing debut novel by Bob Hartley. Sharp-edged and honed to perfection, this novel takes us back to the Irish ghetto of the West Side of Chicago in the early "˜60's. These characters pack-a-punch to the gut: tough, perceptive and shrewd. An unforgettable read.
-Meg Tuite, author of Domestic Apparition

In Hartley's novel, set in the heartland of America, we dive deeply into disturbing pathos of intriguing and relatable characters. His keen narrative balances so the lively dialogue, and we feel we know, or at the very least, can relate to so much of his book. I urge you to read this remarkable debut, "Following Tommy."
-Robert Vaughan, editor of Flash Fiction Fridays

Bob Hartley's Website: https://sites.google.com/site/bobhartleyfollowingtommy/

Reviews:

The Small Press Book Review:
http://thesmallpressbookreview.blogspot.com/2013/10/review-of-bob-hartleys-following-tommy.html

Gapers Block:
http://gapersblock.com/bookclub/2013/08/27/at_first_glance_theres_something/

Alt Hist; Historical Fiction and Alternate History:
http://althistfiction.com/2013/05/21/book-review-following-tommy-by-bob-hartley/

Books in Brief Review:
http://booksinbrief.net/2013/02/11/following-tommy-by-bob-hartley/

The Historical Novels Review:
http://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/following-tommy/

RALPH Review:
http://www.ralphmag.org/HH/tommy.html

Evergreen Review:
http://www.evergreenreview.com/b/following-tommy-by-bob-hartley-reviewed-by-kevin-riordan/

Ofi Press has archived its Following Tommy review:
Here is the new link. http://theofipress.webs.com/hartleybob.htm

Pittsburgh City Paper review:
http://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/novel-explores-racism-in-chicago/Content?oid=1580219

Boston University Radio Interview:
http://wtbunews.wordpress.com:80/2012/09/07/author-bob-hartley-discusses-new-book-following-tommy-racial-tensions-in-chicagos-west-side/

Pittsburgh Post Gazette Review:
http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/ae/book-reviews/bob-hartleys-following-tommy-sharp-as-chicago-651535/

Review by Irene Koronas: http://dougholder.blogspot.com/

August 23, 2012
"A Little Gem" by Noel Ignatiev, PM Press: http://www.pmpress.org/content/article.php?story=20120822160414534

Out of Stock, Please Order it from SPD Books:
http://www.spdbooks.org/Search/Default.aspx?SearchTerm=Following+Tommy

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9831041-8-6 | 104 Pages | In Stock

Talking Pictures by Roger W. Hecht Červená Barva Press, 2012

Roger W. Hecht grew up in Wheaton, Maryland, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. His work has been published in Denver Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mudlark, Diagram, Prick of the Spindle, and other on-line and off-line journals. He was the winner of Syracuse University's Delmore Schwartz Poetry Award. He is the author of a poetry chapbook, Lunch at the Table of Opposites (Red Dancefloor Press), and editor of The Erie Canal Reader: 1790-1950 (Syracuse University Press). Roger earned an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona and a Ph.D. from Syracuse University. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY, College at Oneonta. Roger lives with his wife, Joan Marcus, and two daughters near Ithaca, New York.

Roger W. Hecht's Talking Pictures is a vivid book of poems which draws us to "....this underworld." He invites us to have a glance, a look, and then we as readers are deftly taken elsewhere. The taking (and the "talking!") provides a keen sense of tempo and tone. The poetry is also often comic: in the strangely heroic poem "The Rumsfeld Sestina" (imagine!) the question is raised "What will they do once they catch you?" "You ask me what I knew and when I knew it" (from the same poem) hints at the kind of personal and impersonal worlds and factors which impinge, at least, on all of us. I return to Talking Pictures with pleasure. The variations Hecht employs in the poems' shapes and cadences intrigue.
-Michael Burkard, Author of Entire Dilemma and Unsleeping

Roger W. Hecht's vocal and evocative collection, Talking Pictures, collects all right, is stuffed with stuff. The things (not poems exactly and not so much prose either but some hybrid unbranded entity) collected here have a thing for thing-ness. It is as if Hecht has constructed an elaborate yet elegant filter that slows the speed of light, turning it into a rich syrup, a saturated plasma, and gorgeous chunks of heretofore unknown matter materialize out of the either or ether. Picture that!
-Michael Martone, Author of Four for a Quarter

$15.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9831041-5-5 | 50 Pages | In Stock

Now I See It Shaped Poems by Diana Der-Hovanessian Červená Barva Press, 2011

DIANA DER-HOVANESSIAN, author of 15 books of translations and ten volumes of her own poems, has been a Fulbright professor of American poetry twice and led workshops in poetry and the literature of human rights at many universities including Clark, Harvard, MIT, Southern Connecticut. Her awards include prizes from American Scholar, Prairie Schooner, the Paterson Prize, the Columbia U. Armand-Erpf Translation prize, N.E.A. and P.E.N. awards.

From the Forward
Poets have been playing with forms since the beginning of printed poetry. In the Middle Ages, many poems appeared in the shapes of altars and crosses, And in the fifties European poets began a combination of poster art and poetry, using flung words on the page and/or shaped verse.

Diana Der-Hovanessian in her twenty years as a visiting poet in the Massachusetts schools found her students, especially younger ones, not only were fascinated by the forms, but enjoyed shaping their own.

"Among our most readable and enjoyable American poets, Diana Der-Hovanessian stands high... if you think you don't like poetry, (her work) will quickly change your mind; if you're already a hopeless poetry addict, you'll be lavishly rewarded."
-X.J.Kennedy

"The range and variety, (of her poems) from the witty and wry to the sad and poignant create a unique portrait of our time, as only superb poetry can"
-F.D. Reeve

"Profoundly touching."
-Adrienne Rich

"A brilliant poet who has opened up the book of her people to the English speaking world"
-D.M. Thomas, London Times Literary Supplement

"Compelling , funny, sad, moving, doing all the things poems are supposed to do and usually don't"
-Joel Oppenheimer

Cover Art: Maro Dalley

$13.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9831041-6-2 | 33 Pages | In Stock

After Shakespeare: Selected Sonnets by George Held Červená Barva Press, 2011

George Held is a teacher, translator, writer, and poet whose work has appeared in such places as The Philadelphia Inquirer, Confrontation, Notre Dame Review, New York Quarterly, and Rattle, as well as on NPR and in two dozen anthologies. A five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he has published a book, ten chapbooks, and two e-books of poetry and edited Touched by Eros, an anthology of erotic verse. He holds a B.A. from Brown, an M.A. from University of Hawaii, and a Ph.D. from Rutgers, taught at Queens College for 37 years, was a Fulbright lecturer in Czechoslovakia (1973-76), and serves on the executive board of The South Fork Natural History Museum, Bridgehampton, NY. He lives in Greenwich Village, with his wife, Cheryl.

George Held's new collection of sonnets, After Shakespeare, is, at every turn, funny, surprising, and sharply observed. In poem after poem, Held follows Ezra Pound's injunction and "makes it new." Whether they are about Edmund Spenser on the E-train, painter Alice Neel or the Kennedy family, Held's poems delight with their music, and at the same time offer a deep wisdom. I love the way Held reinvents poetic tradition here and the way these poems, as he writes in "Discord," bring "joy beyond harmonic motion."
-Nicole Cooley

Beginning with his cheeky title (a chronological placement rather than a stylistic description) there is much to enjoy and admire in this new collection of sonnets from George Held. It is as though the awareness of his own belatedness is liberating to the poet, allowing him to explore all manner of interesting topics in a variety of sonnet forms and styles. Anyone interested in the vitality and accomplishment of the contemporary sonnet will want George Held's After Shakespeare.
-Charles Martin

To Hope

You're the thing with feathers, flying skyward
To inspire us when we lack the divine
Afflatus, lifting our spirits, like prime
Vintage or even swill like Thunderbird.

You're what springs eternal in the human
Breast, though eternity remains unproved,
Just hyperbole to cheer an unloved
One or fodder for some preacher's sermon.

But skeptical as we may be, inured
To loss of jobs and sinking stock prices,
Unfaithful friends and false mistresses,
Past the point where pride can still be injured,
Ears still prick up to your springtime twitter,
Unhibernating souls long in winter.

First Literary Review-East

After Shakespeare: Selected Sonnets by George Held
CervenÃ¡ Barva Press, Somerville, MA (2011)
ISBN #978-0-9831041-9-3

Reviewer: Arthur McMaster
Click here: Book Review - George Held's "After Shakespeare: Selected Sonnets"

$15.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9831041-9-3 | 71 Pages | In Stock

The Book of Arrows by Mike Amado Edited by Jack Scully and Nancy Brady Cunningham Červená Barva Press, 2011

Accept life
In all its beginnings
Accept life
In all its blooming
Accept life
In all its endings

-Mike Amado, December 2008

This was penned by Mike less than a month from when he left us. In this book we try to show you a picture of Mike's early life in Plymouth and his family (Beginnings). How his poetry evolved from the dark to tell us about things which he believed were wrong and should be changed, especially the wrongs done against "Native Americans" and the warehousing of kidney patients into dialysis units (Blooming). In October of 2008 Mike knew that his time was coming to an end and this book includes seven poems written during the last months before his death (Endings). Mike had almost 500 unpublished poems. In his final months he put some of them in collections on his computer in what he called books. Most of the poems in this volume were under the heading of The Book of Arrows; thus, our title. This collection is fondly dedicated to Michael "Mike" "Spokenwarrior" Amado (April 23, 1975-January 2, 2009).
Jack and Nancy

And if I were to cut the thread,/it'll be my best act of rebellion./I was brought up to be a fighter. Mike Amado was the bravest of poets. Not only for his writing, but also for the way he lived. He took on his doomed life with poetry of honesty and hope. The few times I was fortunate to meet him he was, outwardly, a happy man, not mutually exclusive from his suffering. Moreover he was a deep thinker and writer of great poetry. He truly was a fighter for those who needed a champion and against the illness to which he finally succumbed. His legacy is that bravery, his poetic career and this book of poems.
-Zvi A. Sesling, author King of the Jungle & Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

The Book of Arrows. No kidding. Mike Amado filled his quiver, took aim, and let these poems fly like his life depended on it. It did. An arrow for a childhood of poverty where he slept in the living room so he dreamed on the pillow/just underneath a picture of cats on a fence. An arrow for school which he loathed, often sick, embarrassed in pants from the irregular store, so he learned to learn on my own. An arrow for the dad who left him with only his name so he took his Native name Spider Song because Native custom says that name/passes from mother to child. Arrows for an awkward adolescence of denim jackets, tight jeans, mohawks, and heavy metal all beaten on his teenage passion, the drums! An arrow for European invaders, protesting, dressing and dancing in used regalia at the pow wow. Arrow after arrow for the disease that chased him down from the age of seventeen, challenging death, Who says the story ends? Who says indeed and Mike Amado wasn't giving in without having his say. I never understood when someone called a poet or poem brave. These poems are not acts of bravery, the living of the life of these poems is what's brave, a life of dreaming, loving, protesting, drumming, writing, standing on stage as the Spoken Word Warrior.
-David R. Surette, poet, author of The Immaculate Conception Mothers' Club

Mike Amado has left us an astounding body of work that is both insightful and unsettling. Each poem reads like a memoir tinged with an a keen awareness of the unspoken. Michael, from the Hebrew,/Who is like God,/an Archangel with a sword. To call his work compelling is an understatement. Mike's poems live. Mike's poems sing.
-January Gill O'Neil, author of Underlife

$15.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9831041-4-8 | 62 Pages | In Stock

Letters to Saida Poems by Denis Emorine Translated by Brian Cole Červená Barva Press, 2011

Denis Emorine is the author of short stories, essays, poetry, and theater. He was born in 1956 in Paris and studied literature at the Sorbonne (University of Paris). His theatrical output has been staged in France and Russia. He has a great interest for Eastern Europe. In 2004, he won first prize (French) for his poetry at the Facile Filiochta International competition. His poetry has been published in Pphoo (India), Blue Beat Jacket (Japan), Snow Monkey, Cokefishing, Be Which Magazine, Poesia, (USA). His texts also appear on ezines such as: Cipher Journal, Mad Hatter's Review, Milk, The Salt River Review, Istanbul Literary Review, Wilderness House Literary Review. http://denis.emorine.free.fr

"A language with a mysterious syntax" invades us, covers us with sensual charm, a nostalgic music: this is the new collection of Denis Emorine Letters to SaÃ¯da which invites us to decipher it, invites us to participate in its birth: "co-(n)naissance." Participative birth of the world, of life and of death through love. "I understand my life better/through you" (18) writes the poet and "I know that dying exists." And the words, taking their cue from his assertions "fall over themselves in (his) mouth," indomitably, and proceed to the dreamed syntax "to keep a small measure of eternity."
-Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, Professor of French at Northwestern University

$16.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9844732-5-0 | 60 Pages | In Stock

The White Cypress by Judith Skillman Červená Barva Press, 2011

Judith Skillman is the author of thirteen full-length books of poetry. Her collection, Heat Lightning: New and Selected Poems 1986 "“ 2006 was published by Silverfish Review Press. She is the recipient of an award from the Academy of American Poets for Storm, Blue Begonia Press, 1998. She has also received grants from King County Arts Commission and Washington State Arts Commission.

Judith Skillman's new collection, The White Cypress, is a finely textured weave that astutely examines the "seven deadly sins" from varying points-of-view. Certainty is erased as the reader is immersed in a mercurial blend of myth and personal history. Though we learn that "stunting" can be caused by denial, there is also a "violence in pleasure and leisure" as subtext. Each cherub embodies a nymph, the exotic the familiar. Using crafty fluctuation, these poems dislocate the reader so that firm ground is not an option. Skillman's world is strangely fluid, yet layered with complexities that complement one moment and subtly contradict the next. The White Cypress asks us to ponder the residual problems of naming (our) "sins."
-Katherine Soniat, author of The Swing Girl

Judith Skillman's poems are finely hewn, well-balanced, and compelling. Whatever her subject matter-ants, a lemon, September, a harbor, a plum tree-her pieces unfurl, progress, and culminate seamlessly; narratives, portraiture, and commentaries infused with palpable images, lines destined for epigraphy. This is poetry worth reading and rereading.
-John Amen, author of At the Threshold of Alchemy, editor of The Pedestal Magazine

Skillman's poem embrace matter rather than meaning, and all manner of matter-from the Hellenic to the Hebrew, from the heroic to the quotidian. All are pumped and stitched into the skillful skein of Skillman's work.
-Meredith Davies Hathaway, Poetry International

As one privileged to hold a front-row seat to the blossoming of Judith Skillman as an award-winning poet, I am always happy to treat myself to more of the apt language that she uses to illuminate the intricacies of human relationships. I saw the flowering of this talent, and am happy to add my voice as witness to its craft and its power.
-Jesse Glass, author of The Passion of Phineas Gage & Selected Poems, Professor, Meikei University, Tokyo, editor of Ahadada Press

Raven Chronicles:
http://ravenchronicles.org/Reviews/17-Daley-Skillman.html

The White Cypress is reviewed in The Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
Scroll down to: June 28, 2011
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/

$15.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9831041-2-4 | 67 Pages | In Stock

Counting Blessings by Morris Berman Červená Barva Press, 2011

Morris Berman is an essayist, novelist, social critic, and cultural historian. He has written ten books and more than one hundred articles, and has taught at a number of universities in Europe, North America, and Mexico. He won the Governor's Writers Award for Washington State in 1990, and was the first recipient of the annual Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies in 1992. In 2000, The Twilight of American Culture was named a "Notable Book" by the New York Times Book Review. During 2003-6 he was Visiting Professor of Sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and Visiting Professor in Humanities at the TecnolÃ³gico de Monterrey, Mexico City, during 2008-9. Counting Blessings is his first volume of poetry.

Counting Blessings is an expression of gratitude for a life lived away from the madding crowd. This poetry collection was penned about a year after Berman moved to a small town in Mexico. With the frenzy of American life receding into the background, he was able to sink into the stillness of his new surroundings, allowing long-dormant creative energies to surface. In addition to Counting Blessings, he also wrote a novel and a collection of essays questioning the values of American society, roughly during the same time.

As it turns out, only a few of these poems are about life in Mexico per se. For the most part, Mexico provided the backdrop, the peaceful context in which the author's unconscious processes were free to roam over the inner landscape, explore its contours and fine details. What emerged were vibrant memories of childhood and adolescence, of times lived abroad, of people who have come and gone. These lyrical poems capture the extraordinary essence of ordinary lived experience, and in doing so represent the true content of our lives, the simple core of what makes us human.

The poet Paul Christensen wrote of this work:

"The[se] poems are a kind of sketch pad for how one regains a life little by little from a culture that had wrapped its tentacles about you and squeezed out your breath. There is the slow process of putting oneself back together again, far from the screeching music of the television, the hard sell of the radio, the hysterical momentum of consumption as a stay against loneliness. All that abates as the exile sits in his [courtyard] with a good book, a quiet heart. The reader who pores over these memories aand observations will feel the ache to slip away to one's own courtyard in a foreign country, to sit and let the mind idle over its thoughts, to float back to the quiet and calm and, as Berman says, to count one's blessings."

The Courtyard

Sitting in the small courtyard that adjoins my house
is sometimes what I imagine heaven will be like.
I do it nearly every morning.
It's full of plants-
some of them quite tall-
and one occasionally puts forth deep purple flowers
more royal than the king's robe in ancient Egypt,
or maybe it was the emperor's in Rome, I forget.
The outside wall has no doorbell
but rather an actual bell, on a chain,
hanging in a kind of grotto,
the kind you might see in a campanile in Italy
or on display in Philadelphia
only much smaller, of course.
It's a ritual, after breakfast:
I plunk myself down in a wrought iron chair
next to a wrought iron table (one covered with a pane of glass)
and smoke a small cigar
while I sit and read.
Occasionally, someone rings the bell:
"¡Agua Ciel!" he cries
and I get up, and tell him
"no, gracias; tengo suficiente."
There is also a sculpted rosemary bush
that smells divine.
I can sit there all day, if I want,
in my bathrobe (the neighbors from across the street
looking down at me, from their upstairs apartment)
but eventually I get up,
water the plants,
go back inside,
and get dressed.
Sometimes I wonder who will inherit the house-
a friend, a lover-
and whether they will sit in the very same chair,
and look at the very same plants.
Of course, I plan to live to a ripe old age
having read, some years ago, Irving Berlin's obituary
and thinking I too could make it to 101.
Hopefully my Spanish will be better by then.
But if the nurse asks me,
as I'm about to wink out,
if I want more life,
I hope I'll just smile
and tell her as gently as I can,
"no, gracias; tengo suficiente."

Reviews and Interviews

Dissident Voice, July 12, 2011:
Dissident Voice

Pointing A Way: A Review of Morris Berman's Counting Blessings
By Gary Corseri
Published in Dandelion Salad and The Greanville Post
Dandelion Salad
The Greanville Post

Also in:
Hollywood Progressive
Smirking Chimp

Review of Counting Blessings
Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
July 9th, 2011: http://dougholder.blogspot.com/

Morris Berman Interview on KPFA.org program "Against the Grain", hosted by C. S. Song:
website is http://www.juliollosa.com/; click on "Morris Berman" on the left hand side of the page; then on "Audio Interviews"; and then scroll down and click on "Poetry reading at Moe's Books."

Click here to order this book from Amazon.com

$16.00 | ISBN: 978-0-578-08091-8 | 44 Pages | In Stock

The Jew Who Was Ukrainian or How One Man's Rip-Roaring Romp through an Existential Wasteland Ended in a Bungled Attempt to Bump off the Exceptionally Great Leader of Mother Russia by Alexander J. Motyl Červená Barva Press, 2011

Alexander J. Motyl (b. 1953, New York) is a writer, painter, and professor. He is the author of four novels, Whiskey Priest, Who Killed Andrei Warhol, Flippancy, and The Jew Who Was Ukrainian; his poems have appeared in Counterexample Poetics, Istanbul Literary Review, Orion Headless, The Battered Suitcase, Red River Review, and New York Quarterly. Motyl's artwork has been exhibited in solo and group shows in New York, Philadelphia, and Toronto. He teaches at Rutgers University-Newark and lives in New York.

The Jew Who Was Ukrainian is a devilishly witty intellectual farce in which historical meditation faces off with madcap lampoons of past and present political rogues and assassins. Motyl's wildly imaginative riff on a century of East European history is a must read. The Moral of the Popcorn reigns!
-Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy
Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Russian Literature, Barnard College

Only Alexander Motyl could conjure up this delightful mixture of ghoulish, existential madcappery with insightful, satirical brilliance. This is a fantasy for the adventuresome, geopolitical reader who's eager to have his mind bent and tickled.
-Jed Feuer
Composer, New York City

This hilarious and poignant anti-historical novel is a vertiginous journey through the Russian Revolution, Stalin's purges, Nazi concentration camps, underground anarchist gatherings, and the KGB network. A great master of tragicomedy, Alexander Motyl shows with eminent irony that twentieth-century history was funnier than Joyce imagined and much more horrible than Orwell prefigured. His main character, the laughable Volodymyr Frauenzimmer, works through his excruciating guilt, split hence irreconcilable identity, and obfuscating desire to settle accounts with history. Pondering the question of whether to kill or not to kill the next Russian dictator, Volodymyr transcends the border of the real and enters a realm where infamous political terrorists and their famous victims come together to discuss the self-destructive power of hatred. This book is a cold shower for anybody who still thinks you can change history and passionate encouragement for all those confident that you can do nothing about it.
-Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern
Associate Professor in Jewish History, Northwestern University

Candide meets The Terminator-in the funhouse of history, ethnic prejudice, ethics"¦ and the dysfunctional family. An intellectual thriller (camps and assassins included).
-George G. Grabowicz
Professor of Ukrainian Literature, Harvard University

Alexander Motyl is a master of seduction by the preposterous.
-Myrna Kostash
Writer, Edmonton, Canada

Reviews

July 18, 2011:
Review by Michael Johnson in The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/archives/2011/07/18/a-romp-through-history/

June 2, 2011:
The new Pathway Ukrainian Weekly
http://www.infoukes.com/newpathway/22-2011-Page-7-1.html

May 24, 2011, Ukrainaian Candian TV
Interview with Alexander J. Motyl in Ukrainain:
http://www.youtube.com/kontaktukrainianTV/#p/u/15/UrKYpUe1WPs

April 27, 2011
Review in the Kyiv Post:

The Jew Who Was Ukrainian is a blackly comedic, anti-historical, and absurdist novel about a tortured Jewish-Ukrainian man who struggles vainly to find meaning at the intersection of Hitler's Holocaust and Stalin's Gulag. The hero of this preposterous story is Volodymyr Frauenzimmer, a man with a preposterous name and a preposterous past. His Ukrainian mother was a Nazi concentration camp guard and hates Jews. His Jewish father was a Stalinist butcher and hates Ukrainians. Poor Volodymyr doesn't know how to cope with his dreadful past until he discovers the redeeming power of hatred and resolves to kill the Exceptionally Great Leader of Mother Russia-the fish-eyed Pitoon, a half-Russian, half-German dictator whose name happens to...
Read more: http://www.kyivpost.com/news/opinion/op_ed/detail/102945/

Out of Stock

$16.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9831041-1-7 | 181 Pages | In Stock

White As Silver by Rane Arroyo Červená Barva Press, 2010

This is Rane Arroyo's eleventh published book of poetry. Additionally, he published a book of fiction (How to Name a Hurricane) and selected plays (Dancing at Funerals). Arroyo has been translated and published internationally; he has also won many awards including the Carl Sandburg Prize in Poetry, the John Ciardi Prize and an Ohio Arts Council Excellence Award, among others. An openly gay, Puerto Rican and Midwestern author, Arroyo's work has been well received by many constituencies, including the Affrilachian Poets. Arroyo was co-founder and co-publisher of New Sins Press. A creative writing professor at The University of Toledo, Arroyo was named Distinguished University Professor shortly prior to his untimely death on May 7, 2010. He leaves behind a plethora of unpublished works-poetry, plays, versions of memoirs and even a rumored novel.

White As Silver

December, how easily you
dissolve this sad shining day.
It's just dense snowflakes melting
on my expensive boots.

Storm warning-a theater of
cold is on tour from Utah and
I loved there before I knew
the below-the-waist was mine.

I'm my own home. Icy clouds are
eclipses, white as silver. Snowmen
refuse to believe humans are their
creators. Taxis don't know where

Paradise is, should be. I know
that this opaque city will shine.
I was unknown when with you.
Soon, there's tinsel and eggnog.

February 12, 2011
Review by Michael T. Steffen:
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/

$15.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9844732-2-9 | 54 Pages | Out of Print

Clear Eye Tea by Mary Bonina Červená Barva Press, 2010

Mary Bonina has published poetry, memoir, and fiction in Salamander, Hanging Loose, Gulf Stream, many other journals, and in several anthologies, including Voices of the City from Rutgers University Center for Ethnicity, Culture, and Modern Experience. Winner of Boston Contemporary Authors, a public art project, her poem "Drift" was selected to be inscribed in a granite monolith now permanently installed outside a busy Boston subway station in Jamaica Plain. Bonina is a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and is a member serving on the Board of Directors of the Writers' Room of Boston, Inc. She holds an M.F.A. from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

"Mary Bonina's Clear Eye Tea celebrates the everyday events in our lives: a father returning from work; family members grown frail; a girl weeping on the train. And yet in her hands, the daily has a miraculous tinge. The sharp vision she was praised for as a child, when she was called "the one with good eyes" who could spot the "tiny spider floating/in the cup of wine" has developed into a kind of x-ray that illuminates the secrets, the motivations, the bare bones inside our common gestures. I closed this book with a feeling of more than happiness, something very close to joy, and I can think of no greater praise."
-John Skoyles, Poetry Editor, Ploughshares, author of The Situation

"Here is poetry that does what the title of this book suggests: it gives us a careful steeping in the real, and shows us also how hard it is to stay in emotional touch with it. Here is childhood, for example, seen as if one has finally found a way to open a door on what it was really like. Here also is mortal dread and loss, each embraced without flinching, and here too is praise for gentleness and love, neither any less real than the suffering they are interwoven with. Here then is the "clear eye tea" of Mary Bonina's poetry."
-Fred Marchant, Author of The Looking House

"Mary Bonina's poems, written with a strong, authentic voice and a compass-eyed gaze, balance between presence and absence: dirty plastic pretend ivory thing ("Shop of Small Pleasures"); You will hear, too, the dove/its awful sad cry, because/in the rainforest even the sadness/of a dove has more muscle. ("Sorcery"), and between whole and fractured lives: What on earth were they doing with the gun?/They were friends and it was an accident ("Shrine in Cambridge"). Line by line these poems breathe, and it is in this breath the reader's imagination shares the gifts of revelation, reconciliation, and ultimately, grace."
-Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Convertible Night/Flurry of Stones

November 8th, 2010: Interview with Mary Bonina by Lex Schroeder

October, 24, 2010: Review by Rene Schwiesow

$15.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9844732-9-8 | 69 Pages

Temporarily out of stock

Everything Happens Suddenly by Roberta Swann Červená Barva Press, 2010

Roberta Swann was program director of the Great Hall at Cooper Union and co-founder of the American Jazz Orchestra. Her poetry and fiction appear in many literary journals. She has taught at the Cooper Union, Indiana University, The New School, Baruch College and the Bennington Writing Workshops.

"Roberta Swann's poems have a welcome vivacity; they are deft and full of charm and humor. But not entirely. Many of the poems record appealing moments of the natural world and yet sometimes, as she writes, "˜Abandonment is Nature's way.' In a poem that begins with recognition of the failing state of her mother, the last stanza begins "˜A bear is at the bird-feeder.' It is this mixture of light and dark"“the embrace of all of it"“that is her special gift. Much pleasure lies within the pages of her book."
-MARY OLIVER

"What's the secret to Roberta Swann's funny, inventive and moving poems about the natural world? I think it's her voice, full of humorous aplomb and unflinching honesty. She knows how to balance sadness with happiness. Just as she moves back and forth from city to country, she can also gracefully cross the dangerous bridge between despair"“at a beloved mother's decline"“and joy"“at the antics of a big brown bear or a grizzled old squirrel. She's able to see herself inside of nature, not outside. "˜You'll be stardust. I will too'."
-MAURA STANTON

$15.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9844732-4-3 | 72 Pages | In Stock

Profane Uncertainties by Luis Raúl Calvo Translated from the Spanish by Flavia Cosma Červená Barva Press, 2010

Calvo surveys the world and finds Heaven and Hell located close to home - in our own lives - that is to say, in our relationships to others. This significant poet is here brought home for English readers, thanks to the dexterous and careful translations of Flavia Cosma, a distinguished poet herself - in Romanian and English.
-George Elliot Clarke, E. J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature, University of Toronto

Luis Raúl Calvo is a profound poet, possessor of a grand lyrical power, preoccupied by the existential limits of the contemporaneous man and by the deepest, implacable layers of his consciousness. All of these are exposed in a concentrated and natural manner, in an original language, with a very personal style which distinguishes this poet from the traditional, run of the mill poetical discourses. Calvo's poetry will never receive the kiss of death, of resignation of enunciation or frivolity, but will soar with the eternal emotion of innocence and dedication.
-Geo Constantinescu, Professor Spanish Literature, University of Craiova, Romania

This book was funded by the SUR Translation Program in Buenos Aires, Argentina who awarded the translater, Flavia Cosma and Červená Barva Press funding for the publication of this book.

October 25, 2010
Review by Zvi A. Sesling http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2010/10/profane-uncertaintiesby-luis-raul-calvo.html

$15.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9844732-7-4 | 45 Pages | In Stock

Triage by Tam Lin Neville Červená Barva Press, 2010

Tam Lin Neville lives and writes in Somerville, MA. Journey Cake, her previous poetry collection, was published by BkMk Press (University of Missouri, Kansas City). She has received a Somerville Arts Council grant. Her poems have appeared in Harvard Review, Mademoiselle, American Poetry Review, Ironwood and Sulfur, among others. With her husband, Bert Stern, she co-edits Off The Grid Press, a press for poets over sixty. She also works for Changing Lives Through Literature, an alternative sentencing program.

Tam Lin Neville's new book, Triage, reminds us that our cherished notions of freedom, happiness and plenty actually conceal large communities of entrapment, misery and poverty where many are simply left to die "“ triaged, if you will "“ in front of our eyes. An observant neighbor, a journalist, and above all, a poet of great skill and heart, Neville speaks for those who cannot speak for themselves. Few poets writing today have the patience and talent to guide us toward such a civilizing compassion.
-Roger Mitchell

Behind this remarkable book is a mind that has long contemplated the humanity of those she meets every day "“ neighbor, stranger, friend. Yet she speaks from a respectful distance and this enables her to write poems with no self-interest, only clear sight and generosity. Her language is spare, stripped of all aesthetic preening, creating a poetry that is both accurate and visionary.
-Betsy Sholl

Triage is a tough, uncompromising book, but one that's also big-hearted, despite the sorrow so evident in the title and in many of the individual poems. Written with great economy and precision, the lyric here is not merely a display of skill, but a form of wisdom literature, a site map to help us navigate these difficult times. I hear the voices of Dickinson and Niedecker "“ stern mentors, indeed. In Neville's poems their legacies are gracefully and fearlessly served.
-David Wojahn

Just wanted to tell you how much I like your book, Triage. I read it through twice, both times with deep appreciation for the attention your poems demanded, for all their seeming simplicity, and with deep interest in their subject matter. I'm full of admiration and even soul expansion from the achievement of the poems. How spare you are in descriptions of human beings and their plights, how delicately you give us scenes, characters, trajectories of lives that I, for one, have always wanted to turn away from to avoid the deep disturbance I've felt. I love how you order the poems. The book reads like a story. I love your internal rhymes, a soothing, lullaby quality in some of them. I am thrilled at how you ended the book, which lifts it high toward hopefulness in a thin gruel world. Good for you, Tam. Good for us. I hope your publisher enters your book in various contests for 2020 books. Integrity - that's the word I want. Trustworthiness. Not always apparent in poetry. I am nourished by it.
-Sondra Zeidenstein Editor, Chicory Blue Press

$15.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9844732-3-6 | 51 Pages | In Stock

What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock & Dori G by Susan Tepper and Gary Percesepe Červená Barva Press, 2010

What May Have Been is a novel in letters exchanged between the artist Jackson Pollock and his fictional lover, a young woman called Dori G.

Susan Tepper and Gary Percesepe have created a sexy and luminous love story that takes place sometime during the late 1940's, in that sandy wonderland at the eastern tip of Long Island known as The Hamptons.

Advance Praise for What May Have Been

"In this extraordinary novel, Pollock tells his lover that things like paint and wives are very small in the scheme of things. Gary Percesepe and Susan Tepper show how the great scheme of things is, in fact, in literary art, captured in paint and wives and a Montauk surf and a silky scarf and narrow hips and a cold water flat and a used Ford. Brilliantly conceived, brilliantly executed, this is a stunning book about art and about life."
-Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

"The fictional letters between Pollock and an imaginary Dori G come out in a hailstorm of paint flecks, lockets, long looks, kisses, blowing sand. Dori sees Jackson in his distance and his nearing, and his return to her like the visit of one of the Greek gods to his mortal lover, as piercing and as fatal."
-Mary Grimm, author of Left to Themselves and Stealing Time

"How to convey the irresistible pleasures of this novel in letters? The language mimics the slashing, dramatic immediate heroic gestures of abstract expressionism, is an extraordinary act of poetic invention, and tells a sexy and doomed love story."
-James Robison, author of The Illustrator and Rumors

"These two fervent voices exude the splendor and gloom of adulterous love."
-Mark Wisniewski, author of Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman

Reviews, Articles, and Interviews

April 18, 2011: Connotation Press
Book Review & Interview with Susan Tepper and Gary Percesepe
http://connotationpress.com/fiction/845-book-review-a-interview-with-susan-tepper-and-gary-percesepe

April 11, 2011: WJFF Radio Interview with Susan Tepper

Issue #50 - March 18, 2011 Dan's Papers
By The Book
by Joan Baum

March Minis
What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock & Dori G (Červená Barva Press), a slim paperback collaboration that grew out of e-mails between two writers who met on the social media site Fictionaut, describes an imaginary love affair carried on mostly by letters (sometimes only a line to a page) between the famous artist and a highly neurotic, self-centered young girl, 17. "Your legs are like white asparagus stalks," Pollock writes when he first sees her in a supermarket amid fruit. Though she says he's "old, old, old,""¦
Gary Percesepe writes Dori's letters, Susan Tepper, Jackson's.

Desert News And Telegraph: http://desertnewsandtelegraph.blogspot.com/

January 26, 2011: Listen to Susan Tepper's interview on the Trevor Joe Lennon Radio Show

January 19, 2011: Susan Tepper Radio Spot on Trevor Joe Lennon Show
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=491899158820&comments

January 15, 2011: Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/

What May Have Been: An Interview with Susan Tepper and Gary Percesepe by Steve Almond September 25, 2010: http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/

"An Appreciation of What May Have Been" by James Robison:
http://www.fictionaut.com/stories/james-robison/an-appreciation-of-what-may-have-been

Fictionaut Blog. September 3, 2010:
http://blog.fictionaut.com/2010/09/03/checking-in-with-what-may-have-been/

Daily s-Press. September 6, 2010: http://dailyspress.blogspot.com/

goodreads: goodreads

$15.00 | ISBN 978-0-9844732-8-1 | 104 Pages

Released May 11, 2010

Live Landscape by Andrey Gritsman Červená Barva Press, 2010

Andrey Gritsman is a poet and essayist, born and raised in Russia. He lives in New York City and works as a physician. He has been widely published in Russia, including five collections of poetry. Poems, essays and translations in English have appeared in Manhattan Review, New Orleans Review, Denver Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Poet Lore, South Carolina Review and many others and were anthologized in Modern Poetry in Translation (UK), in Crossing Centuries (New Generation in Russian Poetry), The Breath of Parted Lips: Voices from the Robert Frost Place and in Stranger at Home: American Poetry with an Accent. Collections of poetry and essays Long Fall was published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2004 and recent poetry collection PISCES by Numina Press. Andrey's work was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2005, 2006 and 2007 and was on the short list for the Joyce Osterweil/PEN American Center Prize in Poetry in 2005. He runs the Intercultural Poetry Series in a popular literary club Cornelia Street CafÃ© and edits international poetry magazine INTERPOEZIA.

Cover Art: Natasha Gasteva

Andrey Gritsman is quite literally a groundbreaking poet. From Moscow to New York is a steep distance but Gritsman makes us aware of the threads that link seemingly disparate occasions. Fresh perceptions create new styles and Gritsman's is more than a synthesis of two cultures: it is an art that probes delusions and pleasures by a poet who has been around some daunting blocks.
-Baron Wormser, author of Good Trembling and many other collections of poetry.

Andrey Gritsman's poems are unwavering in their honesty, relentless in their assessment of contemporary life, and clear-eyed in their approach to human love and mortality. We instantly recognize the terrain he is negotiating. Perhaps only Gritsman, with his unprejudiced immigrant's eye, can describe the empty, arid landscape of the American West. These are poems that peer into the abyss behind the official public happiness of American life, the compulsion to be always hopeful, positive and bubbling over with good spirits. That is to say: they are real poems, and make no accommodation with fanciful dreams. Read "˜em, and weep.
-Kurt Brown, poet, editor of several anthologies, founder, Aspen Writers' Seminar

Gritsman's poems are tenderness in transit. They fully inhabit their evoked circumstances so that their significance keeps expanding and resonating before the quality of attention given over to them. He so quickly is able to penetrate to the depths in the poems, it is as though working with a large, oiled, sharp shovel while the rest of us are working with miniature dull and rusty spoons. The use of brevity in some of these poems remind me of my beloved Denise Levertov. His poems are "time-flooded" and remind me that whether we look backward or forward in time always the beloved figures are diminishing, disappearing, and the shadow growing from our own foot soles moves among the company of many other shadows. "Constant departure," as he says it, is our state, and all we can do is stand for our count, make our song, and salute each other.
-Jeanne Marie Beaumont, author of Curious Conduct (BOA Editions)

FOR MY FATHER

After you've been gone,
I've been flying alone back and forth
above the waters and the continents.
Both of us: me here and you there
know too well that this is a waste of time
and space.
I may be flying, looking for you
for the rest of my life
or death, and still never see you.

Nothing can be undone,
and I can't take it.
Nor I can take the fact
that every time I see my close ones, I know,
it may be the last time I see them.

Don't worry about me. While I fly,
an angel in uniform attends me,
gives me some water and bread,
and smiles to me.
She takes care of me
until it's time to get out,
get in line for the luggage
and then to disappear into crowd
which lives on the exhaust,
cyclic persistence
and canned expectations.

The latter is something
I live on myself, expectation
melting slowly into waiting
as I keep on flying
in the space given
for the time being.

$15.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9844732-1-2 | 73 Pages | In Stock

Released March 30, 2010

Jefferson's New Image Salon Matchups & Mashups by Mark Pawlak Červená Barva Press, 2010

Mark Pawlak is the author of five previous poetry collections of which Official Versions is the most recent. He is also the editor of numerous anthologies, including When We Were Countries, fourth in a series of the "best" poetry and prose by high school-age writers, and Present/Tense: Poets in the World, an anthology of contemporary American political poetry. His work has been translated into German, Polish, and Spanish, and has appeared widely in English in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, and For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Anthology of Poetic Journals and in such literary magazines as New American Writing, Mother Jones, Poetry South, The Saint Ann's Review, and The World, among many others. He supports his poetry habit by teaching mathematics at UMass Boston, where he is director of Academic Support Programs. He lives in Cambridge.

When will we pass Raphael's Silver Cloud Lounge and Goya Cosmetics? Do we have time for a quick stop at Unicorn Hair & Nails? Do you ever wonder what's on the menu at the CafÃ© Magritte? Have you put in your holiday order with the butcher at Bosch's Meat Market? Do you secretly want to sneak into Grendel's Den or buy the latest discount item from Golem Sales? This is America, and, as Mark Pawlak makes amply evident, it just keeps getting stranger and stranger. If you are trying to get to Vampire Manor or need the phone number of Sasquatch Taxidermy, this is the only accurate guidebook available today.
-John Yau

In Jefferson's New Image Salon, Mark Pawlak transforms a one-trick pony into a circus of surprising yokings, which on further inspection turn out to be not only surreal-Shylock's Hair Designs, Onan Gasoline Engines-but poetic and real. The preposterous, often hilarious names of American businesses Pawlak found in doing his mixing and matching make Edsel seem a great name for an automobile.
-Charles North, author of Complete Lineups

Cover Art: "Coda," Digital Collage by Daniel Y. Harris, www.danielyharris.com

$15.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9844732-0-5 | 32 Pages | In Stock

Released December 31th, 2009

They're Dropping Bombs Not Ham Sandwiches A play by Michael Nash Červená Barva Press, 2009

Michael Nash, originally from Hampshire, has written several works for the stage including "˜Public Heroes Private Friends,' and "˜Signs of Fire,' a musical about the last year in the life of Van Gogh. Nash has been employed as a writer, a teacher of Drama and English, a publisher, and all around artist. His interests include cooking, computing, and travel, especially to Turkey and Istanbul, where Nash received a degree from Istanbul University. Involved in over twenty stage productions, onstage and off, Nash has been an active participant appearing in both amateur and professional productions including "˜Under Milkwood,' "˜A Man for All Seasons,' and "˜The Pajama Game.' "˜They're Dropping Bombs Not Ham Sandwiches' takes place in a hospital corridor and is a dialogue between a WWII veteran and a young man embroiled in the troubles of Northern Ireland. This is Nash's tenth completed work for the stage. Michael Nash currently resides in Middlesbrough.

They're Dropping Bombs Not Ham Sandwiches, set not so very long ago, between a World War II veteran and a youth caught up in the troubles of Northern Ireland. The play takes place in a hospital corridor and the story illustrates the Second World War through flashbacks.

It is a heart-rending awareness of World War II as seen through the eyes of an elderly hospital patient in 1989. His recollections are shared with a youth who is, as the play eventually reveals, a victim of a terrorist bomb attack in Northern Ireland. Scenes from the war years are illustrated by poetry, dialogue, and action in fantasy sequences, and enacted by the two central characters and three of the hospital staff.

$14.00 | ISBN: 978-0-578-00416-7 | 90 Pages | In Stock

Released December 16th, 2009

Treating A Sick Animal Flash and Micro Fictions by Timothy Gager Červená Barva Press, 2009

Timothy Gager is the author of four books of poetry. "Treating a Sick Animal" is his fourth book of fiction. He hosts the Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts every month and is the co-founder (with Doug Holder) of the Somerville News Writers Festival.

Timothy is the current fiction editor of The Wilderness House Literary Review, the founding co-editor of The Heat City Literary Review and has edited the book, "Out of the Blue Writers Unite: A Book of Poetry and Prose" from the Out of the Blue Art Gallery.

A graduate of the University of Delaware, Timothy lives on www.timothygager.com and is employed as a social worker.

Timothy Gager's stories came at us like a brisk punch to the heart. His characters are profane and tender, dazed and confused, out of work and short on options. And yet they remain stubbornly vibrant, these damaged children of Bukowski, illuminated by their desires and inflamed by unreasonable hopes.
-Steve Almond, author of The Evil B.B. Chow, Candy Freak, and Not That You Asked

This book is a trip-- or actually it is 40-plus quick and vivid trips into Timothy Gager's untamed fictional terrain. Sometimes surreal, sometimes all-too-real, these Flash Fictions always surprise. Fasten your readerly seatbelt, choose your own adventure and enjoy the wild rides.
-Elizabeth Searle, author of Celebrities In Disgrace and Tonya & Nancy: The Rock Opera

Timothy Gager's flash fictions are full of flashes of insight into the great human predicament.
-Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody

Timothy Gager is a compelling and unforgettable writer. These bold and witty little stories limn the peculiarities, and sometimes alarming behavior, of our human species.
-John Sheppard, author of Small Town Punk

As good an orator you'll find, Timothy Gager flashes a gleam in the eyes while carrying a slouch in the shoulders. His fiction connects to the giggling man as well as it does to the sad man.
-Matt DiGangi, editor, publisher and founder of Thieves Jargon

$15.00 | ISBN 978-0-578-04207-7 | 140 Pages | In Stock

Released December 15th, 2009

Van Gogh's Ear by Pamela L. Laskin Červená Barva Press, 2009

Pamela L. Laskin, a teacher, writer, cyclist, swimmer and avid reader, has had many poems, short stories and children's stories published in journals and magazines. She is a lecturer in the English Department at The City College, where she directs The Poetry Outreach Center. Central Station, her first book of poetry, was the winner of the Millennium Poetry Prize. Remembering Fireflies, her second collection, was published by Plain View Press, and Ghosts, Goblins, Gods and Geodes, her third collection, was published by World Audience Press. In 2009, Plain View Press published her fourth collection, Secrets of Sheets. Three poetry chapbooks, five picture books and two young adult novels have been published as well. She edited a collection of original fairy tales, The Heroic Young Woman, published by Clique Calm Books. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, Ira, while her children, Craig and Samantha, are away at school completing their degrees.

Pamela Laskin is equally able to grasp the big picture -- "born/ out of millions of years/ of old thumbs and cortexes" -- as well as the small, luminous detail. She writes with vivid immediacy about the people and places around her, so that each poem, "Each bead is like the cell of a body/ passing through a busy street/ on a quiet day." It is a pleasure to spend time with and have one's senses sharpened by this book.
-Elaine Equi

Pamela Laskin's new poems move richly and swiftly through memory and presence, through family, romance, friendship, and art, through Brooklyn and the rest of the world. They are passionate, quiet, thoughtful, intelligent. I want to say there is something modest about them, but it's the modesty of someone who knows she knows and will lift the screen for a second if only to see if you can figure it out. Van Gogh's Ear is a fine and generous collection.
-Mark Statman

In a Glass Ball

Clouds stuck in the sky
summer has evaporated
anorexic trees,
children gone from the streets.

Soon I will be snowed under
as I am, perhaps, already
staring out the window

like the woman trapped in a glass ball
which people turn over, indiscriminately
watching the tiny flakes
scatter haphazardly

observing
the unsettling appearance
of a woman
going nowhere.

$15.00 | ISBN: 978-0-578-04084-4 | 74 Pages | In Stock

Released October 24th, 2009

Pentakomo Cyprus by Irene Koronas Červená Barva Press, 2009

Irene Koronas is the poetry editor for the Wilderness House Literary Review and Ibbetson Street Press. She is the author of self portrait drawn from many (Ibbestson Street Press, 2007). She also has several chapbook publications, the latest being, Zero Boundaries (Cervena Barva Press, 2008). Irene's work has been widely published in numerous literary journals including Lummox, Free Verse, Posey, Arcanam CafÃ©, Spearhead, Index poetry, Unblog, Haiku Hut, Lynx and the anthologies Bagels with the Bards and WHLR Anthology, 2006. Articles written about Irene have appeared in The Boston Globe, What's Up With Your Words, Sedaca, The Alewife, Spare Change, The Somerville News, and the Cambridge Chronicle.

These poems of beauty and strength unfold one into another as Irene weaves an engaging, thoughtful cacophony of experiences lived out over six weeks in Cyprus. I was drawn into a visual arrangement of days by an extraordinarily gifted communicator. I couldn't put this book down until I lived through all the wonder and discovery on display.
-C K Johns, author

Irene Koronas writes with the confidence of a life-long poet. She knows the ground on which she stands. With tenderness and honesty she takes her readers to the churches, kitchen, and dusty paths of her ancestral village. Orange trumpet flowers, rusty rocks, pregnant dogs, figs, saints, kneaded dough, peacocks, icons, olive oil and old women pepper the pages of Irene's poetry painting a generous, complex, vibrant picture of Irene's recollections of six weeks in Cyprus. At its heart, this is a love story. It traces the passion, ambivalence, and longing of desires that cannot be resolved simply. In recounting her journey, Irene invites us to look for the remains of our own histories, our own relinquished passions.
-Jennifer Peace, Ph.D.

In, Pentakomo Cyprus, Koronas finds her way through each day, image by image, sound by discrete sound, giving us the crystalline collection of things, our mixed media realities. The collection is a mobile of emotions made small and delicate or large and brusque. It is this honesty that lets the reader into a life that is wondrously and marvelously made, tiny step by tiny step, great leap by great leap.
-Afaa Michael Weaver

$15.00 | ISBN 978-0-578-02262-8 | 50 Pages | In Stock

Released June 12th, 2009

Pretty Little Lies Ten Generations Of Southern Hypocrisy by W. R. Mayo Červená Barva Press, 2009

Pretty Little Lies, as told from the perspective of a member of the southern Mayo clan, reads like a gothic novel spanning centuries. In a take no prisoners accounting. W. R. Mayo's memoir is a serious undertaking that makes for fascinating reading. Though not from an old southern family, I, for one recognize much of what we all carry in our DNA.
- Susan Tepper, author of DEER

In his biting family memoir, Pretty Little Lies, W. R. Mayo courageously puts a dagger into the heart of the southern plantation myth. By unflinchingly facing his own dysfunctional past, Mayo gives the romantic, idealized version of ante- and post-bellum life below the Mason-Dixon Line a well-deserved paddling. In moving prose, he reveals the underbelly of the "big house"- a way of life created and sustained by traffic in human slavery and one reliant upon the manipulation, or far worse, of the land and those who lived and toiled upon it. Pretty Little Lies is a must read for anyone looking to see past the mythology of the Old South.
- J. B. Hogan, author

Unflinching. Revealing. In this exhaustively researched family history, Mayo charts the rise of a Southern family from its roots in England to the founding of a plantation in Southeastern Arkansas in the middle of the nineteenth century. Through the degradations of the Civil War, two world wars, and countless family conflicts still raging to this day, Mayo lays bare the mythology of Southern "Nobility." He frankly examines the treatment of slaves by his family which led to "the other Mayos," a family of blacks descended from these slaves, and describes the uncompromising natures of his progenitors. From his mother who never apologized for anything, considering it a waste of time to his racist, domineering father, Mayo chronicles the infighting, manipulation, and xenophobia prevalent in his family's past. Mayo digs to the core to face head-on not only the lies, exaggerations and conscious-salving stories of "pride" passed down within his family, but also to uncover the real story of Southern history. As Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. In fact, it's not even past." Mayo's past is certainly not dead, though this book is an attempt to put a stake through it's heart.
- C. L. Bledsoe, author of Anthem, Riceland and editor for Ghoti Magazine

$15.95 | ISBN 978-0-9773695-4-0 | 211 Pages | No longer available

Released June 12th, 2009

Anthem poems by CL Bledsoe Červená Barva Press, 2009

CL Bledsoe has published work in over 200 journals and anthologies, including The Cimarron Review, Nimrod and The Arkansas Review. Winner of the Blue Collar Review's Working People's Poetry Contest, he is also a 3-time Pushcart Prize nominee. He is an editor for Ghoti Magazine. http://www.ghotimag.com and the author of a chapbook entitled_______(Want/Need)

CL Bledsoe's Anthem is succinct, shrewd and contemporary. Bledsoe is a modern-age poet with the unique ability to bring the reader smack into the moment with him ... Anthem's poems are no exception. Often confessional, occasionally biting, Bledsoe proves once again that he is the poet for generation X, Y and whatever lies beyond.
-Patricia Gomes, editor of Adagio Verse Quarterly and poetry moderator of iVillage's Poet's Workshop

Fresh, funny, hip, anarchic, jaded, secretly hopeful, angry, wry, laid-back: to read CL Bledsoe's Anthem is to enter a world that may make you twitch - but will surely help you keep on keeping on. These songs of punked-out innocence stage-strut across the page, even when they claim they're simply slacking on the couch. Join Frog and Death and the absinthe squirrels on a savvy, consciousness-jolting road-trip through the landscape of right now. I loved this smart and artful book. I bet you will to. Open it. Find out.
-Jeanne Larsen, winner of the AWP poetry book award

$15.00 | ISBN 978-0-615-25796-9 | 65 Pages | In Stock

Released June 12th, 2009

Anezka Ceska by Jaromir Horec Translated into English by Jana MorÃ¡vkovÃ¡ Kiely as Agnes of Bohemia Červená Barva Press, 2009

Jaromir Horec was born on December 18, 1921 in Chust, in Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, which in 1919, at the treaty of Versailles, had voted to become part of the newly formed Czechoslovak Republic with an enlightened, freely elected government led by the humanist philosopher, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk.

Throughout the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, JaromÃr Hoec was active in the underground anti-Nazi youth movement. After World War II, Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia was not returned to Czechoslovakia but was annexed by Stalin to the Soviet Union. Thus Horec, living in Prague, became an expatriate in his own country. He was a prolific poet, who was not allowed to publish for two periods of twenty years each: 1948-1966 and 1969-1989.

In 1977, he signed Charter 77 and two years later, he founded the Czech underground press Ceska Expedice for which he was imprisoned in 1981. His many works of poetry, include Anezka Ceska, and Chleb Na Stole, as well as many other publications, such as Why I Am Not a Communist and Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia-an Unknown land have been coming out only since 1989.

$15.00 | ISBN 978-0-578-02262-8 | 54 Pages | ~~In Stock~~

Temporarily out of stock, will be in stock by February 4, 2016

Grief Hut by Nancy Mitchell Červená Barva Press, 2009

Nancy Mitchell is the author of The Near Surround (Four Way Books, 2002) and her poems have appeared in Agni, Poetry Daily, Salt Hill Journal, Great River Review, and are anthologized in Last Call by Sarabande Books. She has received an Artist in the Schools grant for Virginia, and residency fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, Virginia and in Auvillar, France. Mitchell teaches in the English Department at Salisbury University, Maryland, and has taught in the Stonecoast MFA program in Maine. She resides in Salisbury, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, with her husband John Ebert, a filmmaker.

The Grief Hut stands on an imaginary beach, where women help each other to give birth to their griefs: the birth of sorrows here is given words with a growing power, intensity, and wisdom, a wisdom still wired to its human love and memory.
-Jean Valentine

Mitchell is blessed with a vivid--and haunting--memory--of particulars, the things of our past, and of the more complex feelings the things generate. She refuses nothing, she is deadly accurate, yet she sings. We should read her.
-Gerald Stern

The poems in Nancy Mitchell's book Grief Hut are so lucidly and deeply felt that they cut directly to the bone of the experiences they are recounting. This is a true and an incredibly beautiful book.
-Malena MÃ¶rling

Her descriptions of people, the details and detritus of their lives are studied and stunning. May we hear more from this talented poet.
-Doug Holder/Ibbetson Street Press

Review of Grief Hut:
http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/cr/bookreviews/griefhut.html

$15.00 | ISBN: 978-0-615-25797-6 | 66 Pages | In Stock

The Curvature of Blue by Lucille Lang Day Červená Barva Press, 2009

Description: The Curvature of Blue traverses an arc from the personal to the social and historical to the cosmic and philosophical. As a scientist and poet, Lucille Lang Day goes beyond celebration of the natural world to explore the intersections of science, nature, and human experience, and to meld scientific accuracy with intuition and emotional response. Whether writing about jellyfish, war, or her own experience, she draws attention to important questions and inspires us to think more deeply about what it means to be human and how our choices affect the planet Earth.

"In Lucille Lang Day's poems, stunning transformations of language cross the placenta barrier between the worlds of science and human emotion. She thinks and feels in color, enabling us to inhabit the complexity of the universe-as experienced at breakfast with a lover, in the wild with caribou, or in meditations on acts of historical horror-all made radiant by her lyric gifts and wisdom."
-Teresa Cader

"Intelligence enjoying itself, awareness at play, attentiveness dancing through life's minefields: smiling at itself in its new black car ("Nor have I shunned onyx jewelry. That would be foolish"), Lucille Lang Day will at first glance make you smile and smile again. Then, with her scientist's mind, her woman's heart, her pain at injustice and evil, and her poet's eye and ear, she will carry you "through the mountains and canyons of space-time" to a fuller humanity. The Curvature of Blue is a wonderful book and I feel lucky to have read it"
-Alicia Ostriker

"Is the sky blue? Day's poems paint it a hundred different ways, full of geometry and change, structure and feeling, as plangent as a sunset, as secret as an electromagnetic field. Divine love holds the physical parts together, even as human love and its marvelous stories are the substance of our lives. Here are witty, intelligent, affectionate poems making grand, skeptical comparisons and painting us and our shadows in brilliant colors--perfect poems for our time."
-F.D.Reeve

$15.00 | ISBN 978-0-692-00181-3 | 90 Pages | Out of stock

Sarasota VII by Lo Galluccio Červená Barva Press, 2008

Reading Sarasota VII is like watching, no staging, a play that happens to be written in poetry. By playing with structure, Galluccio has done something akin to Calvino where the structure itself is a character and a part of the plot, and you're right in the thick of it. You need to read it.
Ralph-Michael Chiaia, poet, Ten Poems & Ampersands, Coatlism Press.

Passionate, poignant and concise, Lo Galluccio's Sarasota VII presents us with a story of loss and raw delinquent energy, woven into a great surreal web of metaphors and magic. Crafted with care and lucid honesty, this poetic prose offers its readers an intense vision of real and imaginary journeys across universal and interior landscapes. "We write as if it matters, so it does. We love as if it matters, so it does," declares the author.
Flavia Cosma, poet of Gothic Calligraphy and Season of Love

As in the heavens, there is much beauty and much destruction, where even light cannot escape black holes, and "nothing's pure and nothing's stable." Galluccio takes the reader on a journey from a hotel room in Florida into the expansive cosmos of the soul, revealing a woman caught up between passion and intellect, raging to be free while seeking to merge; loving, losing, dominating and submitting in her evolution to reconnect and be whole.
Karen Bowles, Publisher Luciole Press

So this is what Anne Boleyn whispered to the men who took her head-both her husband and her executioner-so this is what the henchman replied; for nowhere has sinner and saint been so exquisitely linked than in Lo Galluccio's Sarasota VII. As the curtain parts, it is not polar opposites that are revealed but a single conjoined child. Traversing Sarasota VII (it has less in common with reading, more so the navigation to heaven or the surrender into hell) is like giving definition to the word "˜passion.' This is how to say profoundly simple words with often incomprehensible meanings: Love. Desire. Hate. Birth. Destruction. And who hasn't attempted this- to grasp the single rose in the pit of thorns. And who hasn't, on occasion, failed and been banished? But Lo's beautiful, prophetic prose lulls us, even as we burn, and she tells us to "Fossilize the monster" and "Tend our rings like vain kings." She is right. We must. For something so terrifyingly beautiful should, forever, be.
Coleen T. Houlihan

$12.00 | ISBN 978-0-615-26369-4 | 57 Pages | In Stock

Bird Scarer by Glenn Sheldon Červená Barva Press, 2008

MARTHA COLLINS-Structurally and emotionally expansive, Bird Scarer covers more territory than most first books. Beginning as a displaced Bostonian who finds himself in Chicago, where a "terrible blankness fills my eye," Sheldon next moves into a more abstract landscape, where he finds a "permanent address" that is both actual and mental. Finally, he opens his emotional eye to the variety and vibrancy of Latin America, where his travels become the metaphorical basis for a "Geography of Desire." Though often playful, the book is carefully observant and edgily serious: "I'm alert," the poet says, "like a bus rider / with a drunk driver making up / the names of the streets." Metaphors like this, usually emerging from setting, as well as less easily defined conceits ("The anarchists' picnic is / a disaster: Where? Why? When?"), turn these well-grounded poems into delightfully non-linear narratives that keep the reader as alert as the poet.

SUSAN AZAR PORTERFIELD-I am impressed by Sheldon's form. Always the stanza, always very regular, tercets or quatrains, etc., which seems to suggest a kind of control as does his use of short lines as well as short sentences. It suggests a kind of control and even terseness, but what I like is his unexpected bloom or rush of thought and/or feeling that really comes through. In other words, he gets us to ride on this seemingly tidy little train, but then the journey takes us on a wilder ride than we anticipated. I like the surprise of that. I also like what I perceive to be his tone and voice. Quiet, a bit sardonic, but also heavily emotional, Bird Scarer is lovely.

JIM DANIELS-Bird Scarer is an impressive collection of poems. The voice is wise and mature. The structure of the book both clear and sophisticated. One of the things I look for in a book of poetry is an accumulation of momentum from beginning to end, and I found that here. The book creates interesting tensions in terms of place-the links between physical places and emotional landscapes are explored in all their complexities. Sheldon has a fresh voice-quirky and disarming, frank and witty. And always precise. I was struck by the consistent use of tight, packed language, and his careful use of the poetic line. I love the understated humor in many of the poems, and how he uses form to reinforce that humor. The depth and tonal richness of the comparisons seem effortless and natural, yet carry enormous weight in these poems. They roll through these poems, one after another, creating surprise, discovery, insight, throughout. And fun.

LUIS URREA-Glen Sheldon's earlier poetry is certainly filled with promise. We find a full voice in play. Perhaps the poems are shaded by his expertise in Thomas McGrath. Still, this influence does not in any way dull the poems' brio. It is as an American poet that Glenn Sheldon will ultimately be remembered (and revered). He will have a major career as a poet, as Bird Scarer reveals his full maturity and trajectory.

$14.00 | ISBN: 9780615171678 | 60 Pages | In Stock: 20

A Careful Scattering by Philip E. Burnham, Jr. With illustrations by Louise and Elizabeth Burnham Červená Barva Press, 2007: Each year, for the forty-two Christmases of our married life, my wife, Louise Hassel Burnham, illustrated the poems I wrote to celebrate the festival season of the years' ending and beginning, the Solstice, Christmas, and New Year. Her illustrations were in a variety of media: line drawings, block prints (both wood and vegetable), collage and paint. Many of the drawings represent views of our house in Newton, Massachusetts, including such details as the front door, a mirror in the hall, the fireplace. Others include the names and places of family and friends woven into trees. Louise's final card, from 2001, is a gathering up of many earlier cards. While the original intent of these cards was to celebrate a single year, together they sum up our lives over four decades. We discussed their publication before her death, and it was she who chose the title, "A Careful Scattering." In their publication I want to remember our partnership, and to dedicate this book to her memory with love.
$16.95 | ISBN 978-1-4357-0003-1 | 98 Pages | In Stock: 30

The Season of Love by Flavia Cosma Červená Barva Press, 2008

Once again in The Season of Love, Flavia Cosma offers us those momentary glimpses and sensations briefly felt and viewed which hide and yet reveal the testament of life. Through the transient sensations of reality, the poet lures her readership deep into the mystic world of her eternity. Each poem serves to lead the reader through the pain, suffering and loneliness of life while searching for truth's hidden mysteries which serve to make life meaningful and beautiful, yet remain to be discovered in that continual renewal and rebirth of life.
David Mills, poet and critic
Toronto, Canada

One of prevailing themes in Flavia Cosma's poetry is love, but not as a banal, run-of-the mill experience. Instead, it has the elemental intensity of natural phenomena, which best picture both the breakdown of feelings and the undying hope. And that's where the poet places her wise optimism.
Dr. Irena Harasimowicz-Zarzecka
PHD Philology, University of Bucharest, Romania
Toronto, Canada

Excerpt from the Introduction:

"...Cosma employs

No such wasteful rhetoric. Her poetry-

Analytical, elegant, eloquent-

Is as superb as poetry demands.

Her devotion delights; her lines instruct.

The Season of Love is a fresh gospel,

Skewering our pretensions forcefully.

Its lush richness of imagination,

Singing through Cosma's and Siedlecki's English,

Is compelling and a consummation,

Marrying music and morality."

George Elliott Clarke
E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature
University of Toronto
Laureate, 2001 Governor-General's Award for Poetry

Flavia Cosma is an award winning Romanian-born Canadian poet, author and translator. She has published thirteen books of poetry, a novel, a travel memoir and three books for children. Her book, 47 Poems, (Texas Tech Press) received the ALTA Richard Wilbur Poetry in Translation Prize. Červená Barva Press published her chapbook, Gothic Calligraphy and will be publishing her newest collection, Songs at the Aegean Sea.

$15.00 | ISBN: 978-0-615-20097-2 | 89 Pages | In Stock

The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel by Doug Holder Červená Barva Press, 2008

Order online at Lulu.com: http://www.lulu.com/content/2651312

For years that image of the man in a small plastic booth in the fume-filled Midtown Tunnel that connects Queens to Manhattan in NYC haunted me. As a kid traveling into the city from the sheltered, well-manicured lawns of Long Island to the enigmatic, cosmopolitan world of Manhattan, I couldn't help but wonder about that blue- uniformed lone figure pacing the perimeter of his plastic cage. I think he represented to some extent my fear of the world outside the comforts of my family, and the staid, small town I lived in, Rockville Centre.

I have always admired writers like the New Yorker's Joseph Mitchell, who wrote about the outsiders, the denizens of the old Bowery, the ner-do-wells, the poseurs, the dandies, and the stumblebums, who make the city a both fascinating and frightened place. I always wondered as a kid if I would wind up in the middle of a metaphorical tunnel, a man in a cage, looking for the light. And I guess to some extent we all do in one-way or the other, whether we like it or not.

So I thought this image would be a perfect focal point for my poetry collection, a sort of "Spoon River Anthology" that would consist of character studies of the many men and women I have met, watched and imagined in my time across this stage. I include myself in this collection, because I have always identified with that man and I see his ghost wherever I roam.
Doug Holder

"I am enjoying The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel -- perfect poems, particularly in that ambiance."
-Dan Tobin, Chairman, Writing and Publishing Program at Emerson College

"Aside from being the founder, publisher, and co-editor of the prestigious and influential Ibbetson Street Press, Doug Holder writes poetry with a passion and insight that deserves prestige and influence all its own."
S. Craig Renfoe, Jr., Main Street Rag

"Holder's work is rich with textual imagery"¦ a master poet who sees the world clearly and shares that vision generously with readers.
Laurel Johnson, Midwest Book Review

"A great poet and a Boston legend."
Joe Gouveia, host of "Poet's Corner," Provincetown radio

"I don't think I send you kudos enough because I take your magical perceptions of the ordinary, your unique take on the everyday, as something you do time and time again always in surprising ways.... from toilet to pay phones, to the fluid connection to all things human is utterly Doug Holder and there isn't anyone out there remotely doing what you do so beautifully...so dryly and always with human regard."
Linda Larson, former editor-in-chief of Spare Change News

Now available as a talking book for the blind:
http://webopac.klas.com/id1aopac/title/summary.jsf;jsessionid=feeaf4946520e01dff3aa80219f9?id=142445757.9032

Order online at Lulu.com: http://www.lulu.com/content/2651312

$13.00 | ISBN: 9780979531361 | 72 Pages

Chapbooks

New Release: NOT FOR AMNESIA by Lo Galluccio (Chapbook)

NOT FOR AMNESIA by Lo Galluccio Červená Barva Press, 2023

Lo's first published release is Hot Rain, a poetry collection on Ibbetson Street Press, followed by Sarasota VII a prose poem memoir on Červená Barva Press. In 2010, Alternating Current Press released Terrible Baubles which was also made into spoken word CD with music. She's been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes in poetry. Her other two CDs as a vocalist are Being Visited on the Knitting Factory label and Spell on You, a self-release. They can be heard on Bandcamp, Spotify and Amazon Prime. Lo served as Poet Populist of Cambridge between 2013-2015. She completed her MFA in creative writing from Stonecoast in July 2019. Her work has appeared in Litkicks.com, www.strangeroad.com, The Heat City Literary Review, The Solstice Literary Review, Night magazine, Home Anthology, Eden Waters Press, Lungfull magazine!, Constellations Journal, Wilderness House Literary Review, Ibbetson Street, The Oddball Review, Muddy River Review, among others. She's performed at the Boston Poetry Festival and the New York City New Year's Day Poetry Marathon for the Poetry Project. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA with her cat Lucy, an aloof tabby, but has drawn most of her inspiration from New York City where she lived between 1991 and 2001 on the Lower East Side.

Lo Galluccio is the bad girl tearaway from the furnished souls of Cambridge ladies, and found refuge in the haunted spirits of Sexton and Plath. Now she's knocking on your door with her box of angry candy — fifteen poems leap out and bite before you've had a chance to taste them. Sweet with venom that cures, brutal and bruised into beauty, you'd be wise to flee from her offering — but at what cost? She has been to bedlam and comes all the way back. NOT FOR AMNESIA is not so much a collection of poems but the major arcana of her personal tarot offering guidance; a set of branding irons so you will never forget.
—Richard Cambridge, author of Pulsa: A Book of Books

Once again Ms. Galluccio with her heady images and songlike poems, marches into your psyche Her latest offering of poems, small sacrifices on the altar of memories and forgetting, does not disappoint. Her poems blend into a crooning song about lust, love, remorse, and sometimes anguish – "My desire/comes before /the world wars." Reading Galluccio is like discovering a modern-day Goth poetess and wondering why it took you so long to find her.
—Julia Carlson, author of Little Creatures

To crave blankness, to paint desire orange, pain yellow or to find grounding in going "home a waiter/from a bad shift, grotesque,/no good tips," Galluccio's language attests to spontaneity and unusual responsiveness to the unexpected. She heeds an essential call to poets: Take language, which makes and keeps us familiar, and deliver it rather strangely, singingly ("Because she may break he waits,/and the and the trees stiffen in all directions"), to open the eye asleep in its everyday gaze. To waken the eye.
—Michael Todd Steffen, author of On Earth As It Is

$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-81-9 | 30 Pages

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: 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

Original Sin Selected Poems by Michael Foldes

Original Sin Selected Poems by Michael Foldes Červená Barva Press, 2022

Michael Foldes (b 1946) is an American poet, publisher, author and businessman. Born in Baltimore, MD, he grew up in Endwell, New York, later graduating from The Ohio State University in anthropology. In 2004, Foldes founded Ragazine.cc, a free, global, online magazine of art, information and entertainment. The bimonthly zine ceased publication in December 2019. Partial archives remain online at www.ragazine.cc.

Foldes's publications and projects include the anthologies "Stopped Dead: The End of Poetry," "In an Early Hour," and "Sand and Snow"; Sleeping Dogs: A true story of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping" (Split Oak Press, Ithaca, NY, 2012), and Sandy: Chronicles of a Superstorm in collaboration with artist Christie Devereaux. In 2017, he completed "Fashions & Passions" a series of ekphrastic poems in collaboration with artist Christopher Panzner. Panzner and Foldes recently completed a second collection titled "End Game," 75 poems with images created by Panzner in response to the poems. His poetry collection Some Stuff is available as a Kindle edition on Amazon.

Foldes's articles, editorials, poems, reviews, interviews and stories have appeared in publications worldwide, some in translation in Romanian, Hungarian, Japanese, French and Spanish. Publishing credits include l'Oeil de la Photographie, Where is the Jazz Festival, Mobius, Southern Literary Review, the Village Voice, High Times, The Seventh Quarry, Paterson Literary Review, CLH/Romania, We Are You Poetry anthology, From the Finger Lakes, Folazil (France), and Rosebud, among others. An interview with Foldes by Carol Smallwood appeared in the Scarlet Leaf Review, and in Wilderness House Literary Review.

His jobs have included lifeguard, grocery store bagger, potato peeler, construction worker, magazine editor, newspaper editor, social worker, electronic component sales rep, and medical video products sales engineer. One of his favorite gigs was bartending at the National Poetry Society in Earl’s Court Square, London, where the Guinness was warm and the patrons amazing.

He and his wife have three children and two grandchildren. They live in New York's Southern Tier a few hundred yards from the Susquehanna River.

Don't expect to find a bouquet of poems neatly tied together by a common theme or style; if anything brings these highly divergent poems together, it is probably the date of their creation as the fruits of the same harvest season, a recent one. Mike Foldes always tends to be very eclectic, open to any style, any theme, but in each of his poems, no matter how unique, his voice sounds authentic whether he speaks of personal experiences or editorializes on current political events. None of the poems are made to order; they all just seem to have burst out from the creative nook of the poet's mind and dictated their own style. Some readers-whether they be critics or just lovers of poetry-may find themselves at a loss faced with such wide range of eclecticism, but I applaud it and the poet's unhesitating answer to an inner call; however, my favorites are the short spiffy ones that say more by telling less, such as the footballer and gravity: "...when gravity / takes me where / all things go, / pray / what's there / will make me / the believer / you said / i would become."
-Paul Sohar, a fellow poet and occasional critic; author of "In Sun's Shadow"

Mike Foldes's chapbook, "Original Sin," weaves a fine-spun and well-designed American "poetic" carpet knit together with vibrant words, which are not mild incantations, but rather words that allow readers to confront their greatest fears (i.e., aging, illness, impotence, war, loveless love, betrayal, darkness, or the current global rise of right-wing totalitarian fascism). For instance, in precise "clear-cut" language, in the poem "The Sedition Edition," Foldes captures the full anti-American treasonous horror of January 6, 2021's U.S. Capitol insurrection.
-Jose Rodeiro, recipient of an NEA, Fulbright Fellowship, and an Oscar B. Cintas Fellowship in painting

"where do we go/ from here?/ where is the ladder?/ where are the stars?" asks the final poem in this thoughtful, outrageous chapbook. Original Sin deftly encapsulates the pandemic, a year like no other, filled with love lost, insurrection, aging, drugs, death, and, yes, love found again. Foldes asks the hard questions. His answers might surprise you.
-Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of Explicit: New & Selected, poetry editor, Cultural Daily

Cover Art: Christopher Panzner

$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-73-4 | 45 Pages

Juchitan Medusa by Alan Catlin

Juchitan Medusa by Alan Catlin Červená Barva Press, 2022

Alan Catlin is retired from a long career in his unchosen profession in the "hospitality industry." He has published well over sixty chapbooks and full-length books of poetry and prose. Most recently his fictional memoir/ novel Chaos Management was published by Alien Buddha and is available on Amazon, as are many of his recent publications on a wide variety of subjects from art, to bar wars, to self-portraits that aren't self-portraits, to a series of book length memories which aren't "memories" per se, among many others. He won the 2017 Slipstream Chapbook Award for Blue Velvet, the first of eleven chapbooks channeling noir movies. Two of his books were named Most Neglected Books of the Year by the late Marvin Malone, editor of the legendary Wormwood Review.

Cover Photography: Susanna Lewis

$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-72-7 | 29 Pages

Nomad Moon by Doug Mathewson

Nomad Moon Stories by Doug Mathewson Edited by Sally Reno Červená Barva Press, 2022

Doug Mathewson writes short, and even shorter fiction. His work has appeared here and there, now and then due to the kindness and forgiving nature of numerous editors to whom he is most sincerely grateful. He is the editor of Blink-Ink www.blink-ink.org Also he sweeps up and does odd chores for The Mambo Academy of Kitty Wang. More of his work can be found at Little 2 Say www.little2say.org

Nomad Moon is a collection of twenty four short stories by Doug Mathewson. They have been described as "True stories from imaginary lives." Every one is true except for the pretend and made up parts. Some stories are sad, and some humorous, but all showing the authors love of life and human kind.

$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-56-7 | 27 Pages

RIOT WAKE by Nina Rubinstein Alonso

RIOT WAKE by Nina Rubinstein Alonso Červená Barva Press, 2022

Nina Rubinstein Alonso's poetry and stories have appeared in Ploughshares, The New Yorker, U. Mass. Review, Writing in a Woman's Voice, Nixes Mate, Ibbetson Street, Broadkill Review, Southern Women's Review, Peacock Journal, Sumac, Wilderness House, The New Boston Review, Pensive Journal, Taj Mahal Review, etc. Her book This Body was published by David Godine Press, her story collection A Dancer's Notebook and a novel Balancing on One Leg are in the works. She's the editor of Constellations: a Journal of Poetry and Fiction and has published the 11th issue. She taught at Boston Ballet for eleven years and continues as director and teacher of Fresh Pond Ballet.

"Do you ever feel a "wow moment" when reading a poet's work? It might be an idea, poetic lines or a usage of words that say this poet is unique. Nina R. Alonso's Riot Wake is full with such lines as: "seeing women in black veils/ wrapped like moths at night." Alonso's observations of people and places is like walking the Earth with a magnifying glass. Her poetry is intriguing, inspired and insightful. It is a book not soon forgotten."
-Zvi A. Sesling

Riot Wake is outstanding. The poems are intelligent, lyrical and so precisely observed. The collection as a whole is carefully organized to give us the arc of the story: beauty and repression. Nina Alonso speaks to us personally and frankly out of each one of these perfect poems. These poems will echo in your heart forever. The collection is timely and will be a classic for years to come.
-Kathleen Spivack, author of Unspeakable Things

"The word "unique" may be used till the devil take it, but here it applies appropriately to Nina Alonso's "Riot Wake" which portrays an inner journey through sites as disparate as El Camino in Spain and a Harvard Square reduced to rubble by rioters. There's psychic pain and suffering as these poems ride their course, while in greater measure there's delight in how they honor the eye and ear, line by line, with masterly performance. This is a goddam good chapbook."
-Tomas O'Leary

"Nina Alonso is a dancer. And in the case of her poetry there seems to be a slow motion, wandering sensibility to her work. And indeed as she traveled through Morocco and Spain with her late husband her wanderlust brings the reader to the face of intriguing and beautiful imagery. In Tangiers, she sees "women in black veils/ wrapped like moths at night." She resurrects an acid trip in a fluorescent diner that dances with light and distortion. There is a sense of mystery throughout this collection...of seeing the unseen...the past with all its pain and allure."
-Doug Holder

$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-34-5 | 50 Pages

New: How to Jump from a Moving Train by Oriana Ivy

How to Jump from a Moving Train by Oriana Ivy Červená Barva Press, 2022

Oriana Ivy was born and raised in Poland. She came to the United States when she was 17. Her poems, essays, book reviews, and translations have been published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Best American Poetry, Nimrod, Spoon River Review, The Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, Los Angeles Review of Books and many others. She’s the prize winning author of the chapbooks April Snow (Finishing Line Press) and From a New World (Paper Nautilus). A former journalist and community college instructor, she leads an online Poetry Salon. Her poetry-and-culture blog, oriana-poetry.blogspot.com, has gained an international audience. She lives in Southern California.

How to Jump from a Moving Train offers an interweave of immigrant experience with a complex mother-daughter relationship, with a secondary interweave of history and myth. The speaker was born and raised in Poland, and came to this country when she was seventeen. Her poems often address the "doubleness" of being an immigrant, the deep cultural divide that the experience tends to produce.

I love these poems. Each one is astounding, a whole treasured world unto itself, rendered in language that's been honed and polished until it shines. There's an intimacy in this work that keeps opening out - from the deeply personal into something enormous, not grandiose but so human that it hurts, it blesses, it heals.
-Cecilia Woloch, author of Tzigan, Sacrifice, Carpathia, Earth and Late

Amongst the tens of thousands of poets at work in the United States in the twenty-first century, there are still a handful who began writing well before the Berlin Wall came down. How long ago that seems! Though Oriana Ivy's poems are embedded in the playing out of European history after World War II, they speak to the crisis that is at the heart of the "ghetto of time." With a poet as reticent as Oriana Ivy to be visible within the horde of contemporary working poets, it's hard to know exactly how many poems she has written that are as fine as the ones in this collection. Several dozen more? Two hundred more? No matter. These poems alone would serve to preserve any poet's name on the reading list of every astute lover of poetry.
-William Mohr, author of The Headwaters of Nirvana: Reassembled Poems and Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992

$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-65-9 | 30 Pages

New Release: Ifs, Ifs, Ifs musings by David G. Walker

Ifs, Ifs, Ifs musings by David G. Walker Červená Barva Press, 2021

David G. Walker's first poems were published in 2014: just after the ink was drying on his MFA from Southern Connecticut State University. Since that time, he has published work sporadically with high points and dry spells abounding. His previous two chapbooks - Pause: A Collection of Moment Poems and Donating Organs in Boxes - were published by Finishing Line Press. In 2016, his poem "California" won the Steel Pen Conference Creative Writing Contest and his poem "Cathedral" was nominated for Best New Poets in 2018. Currently, he lives in Massachusetts with his wonderful wife, Caitlin; his two children, Mikey and Ellie; and his cat, Eva.

Those throw-away nuggets of thought you have at 3am were the seeds of the poems found within Ifs, Ifs, Ifs by David G. Walker. The manuscript is a mad dash through fairy tales, car accidents, and form rejection letters - with a pit stop at a cult-leading leaf. Imagination pulses through the poetry in this collection as Walker attempts to explore the elusive ifs we all shove in the dark corners of our brains. What emerges is anyone's guess.

David Walker tells us at the start, "I reach higher and lower states," and thankfully, that reflexivity applies to his comedy, as well as to his states of consciousness. From a highbrow conversation with Emerson to a lowbrow satirical rejection letter, or a poem about a suicidal Santa, Walker tears through decorum and expectations to make us cringe, and laugh. The pathos exorcised in this short collection get right up close to the pain. A carpenter puts a nail through his thumb and keeps hammering, and the taxidermist whistles while he works. In between we're treated to beautiful rhymes and imagery like "I mark me up in a soft pink highlighter, barely noticeable, my time in running cars. / I flip me and draw a dash through flower-shop doorbells, / Through Crunch bars, fun-size." And fun it is, indeed!
-Michael Filas

Imagine you're eating a bowl of cereal and skimming the morning headlines when you feel a sudden urge to slip outside of yourself and ask, "What if?" In David Walker's most recent poetry collection we're invited to navigate mundane life as Emerson's transparent eyeball--absorbing what surrounds us as well as what sits quietly (and not so quietly) below the surface. Our questions have the potential to be life-altering (what if we passed the deer on the roadside minutes before the accident?) and wildly speculative (maybe we'd have all the answers if we'd finished reading Paradise Lost in college). And in our brief time as ultra-meta-floating-eyeball, we become increasingly self-aware and foresightful ("I feel the water in my body tugging towards the faucets") as Walker takes on the guise of an all-knowing editor who insists that we "stop trying to romanticize the 'moonlight'" and record what we see, as we see it. Dear Writer, you "soulless thing," you, "it's either/or, there is no middle ground."
-Meg Cowen

Ifs, Ifs, Ifs takes wing into the hypothetical realms of the Out-of-the-Ordinary, the Double-Take-Head-Spin, and Irreverence-R-Us. The poems in this collection float and sink at the same time. They bob and weave and come straight at you slantwise. Even as they take on some of life's thornier existential concerns, they are a pleasure, joyously serious and seriously joyful.
-Jeff Mock

$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-49-9 | 32 Pages

New Release: SHALOM, MY TEARDROP! by Mimoza Erebara (Chapbook)
Translated from the Albanian by Arben P. Latifi

SHALOM, MY TEARDROP! by Mimoza Erebara (Chapbook) Translated from the Albanian by Arben P. Latifi Červená Barva Press, 2021

Mimoza Erebara, Jewish / Albanian, was born in Tirana, Albania. She is the author of the following books: "To accompany a hope" (poetry), "Cry of love" (poetry), "Adventures of 10x10 and the Upside Down Munuriro" (Fairy Tale), "Wrongly in Love" (Stories), "Torn Reason" (poetry)), "Symbrapshti" (fairy tale), "Dry rent" (stories), "Peace without a Prophet" (poetry), "He and She: Love Messages" (poetry), "Shalom, my tears” (poetry), “Spirit in the Desert” (poetry), “Philosophy in Metaphor" (literary studies and criticism) and Anthology of Hebrew Poetry. Mimoza has been published in numerous literary magazines in Albania and abroad. He has received "Gold Medals" for poetry from the European Academy of Arts, Paris, France, and many awards in the country. Holds the title "Ambassador of Peace." Mimoza works as a journalist in the daily press in Tirana and editor of many volumes.

Arben P. Latifi graduated in English Studies from the State University of Tirana, Albania [1985]. As an Albanian and US citizen, he is passionate about traveling, world culture, and literature. He has taught English in Albania, USA, Oman, and China. Currently Arben settled back in his native Albania. His Albanian-English, English-Albanian translations, mostly poetry and history, reflects accuracy and faithfulness to the original text, while enhancing its merits through elements such as cohesion, imagery, vocabulary, and musicality. Arben is fluent in English, Albanian, Italian, Greek, and Russian.

Shalom, my tears!

The essence of this poetic volume is the universal human love of the individuals who venerate themselves, their past, jealously preserving their identity even in the extreme conditions, is the daughter's love for the father, nation and the Holy Land.

It is the search for a deeper understanding of this inalienable spiritual connection. It is the foremost belief that only this way you can profess eternal love, attaining peace even though you are at war. It is the desire to feel free, where freedom itself morphs its dimensions taking you along for the journey.

This volume accentuates the unconditional love, the sacrifice to keep it inviolable. After all, it is the soul and life of the poetic oneself, the author.

It is the discovery of the soul that transcends us to this. The chance to have all the images in different realms of everyday life that beautifully merge with the divine through elegant details.

A poem that dwells into the mind and sensations of the reader. The visualizations of Israel, country of origin of the author, replace one another, war and peace also shapeshift through significant details.

Prophecies are extant, unforgotten like the Holocaust that transpires through the verses. The historical essence of the holy land itself is vividly ubiquitous.

$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-27-7 | 28 Pages

New Release: How The Twins Grew Up A collection of short stories for children by Milutin Durickovic (chapbook)

How The Twins Grew Up A collection of short stories for children by Milutin Durickovic Červená Barva Press, 2021

Milutin Djurickovic was born on 1967 in Decan. He earned his doctorate at the Faculty of Philosophy in East Sarajevo. He works as a professor at the College of Professional Studies for Educators in Aleksinac. Member of the Serbian Royal Academy, World Union of Poets, Association of Writers of Serbia and the Association of Journalists of Serbia. He published 60 books for children and adults (poems, novel, story, critic, monography, anthology...). He lives in Belgrade.

$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-47-5 | 32 Pages

Everyday Divine by Noel Sloboda Červená Barva Press, 2021

Noel Sloboda earned his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis. His dissertation about Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein became a book. He sat on the board of directors for the Gamut Theatre Group for a decade, while serving as dramaturg for its nationally recognized Shakespeare company. Sloboda has published two poetry collections, six chapbooks, and hundreds of poems in journals and magazines. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at Penn State York.

In Everyday Divine, Noel Sloboda presents a sequence of poems about saints. These figures stand with one foot in the realm of the secular, the other in the realm of the sacred. At the same time, Sloboda pushes hagiography outside of familiar contexts, revealing myriad new saints out there just waiting to be discovered. Readers of Everyday Divine will catch "The Patron Saint of Shoplifters" filching a candy bar, listen to rumors spread by “The Patron Saint of Gossip,” and find themselves stuck in traffic behind "The Patron Saint of Rubberneckers." In some of Sloboda's saints, readers will also identify parts of themselves, thereby glimpsing connections to others.

I've been a fan of Noel Sloboda's work for about ten years. Everyday Divine is a series of "patron saints," portraits of everyday people told with insight and gentle humor. Sloboda serves up fresh text with lively, palpable metaphors. The result is enjoyable, very readable poetry.
-John Philip Johnson, Pushcart Prize-winning poet, author of The Book of Fly

Through everyday characters, Noel Sloboda's Everyday Divine makes the reader reconsider what he or she takes for granted. Whether it be a character reevaluating his anxieties, a shoplifter stealing out of need and transforming the act into performance art, or because of line breaks like "Always says never imagine // this will not happen / again," the reader's expectations are upended. Like all good art, these poems challenge the reader’s everyday habits of perception for the better.
-Tom Holmes, editor of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics

$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-06-2 | 30 Pages

New Release: Leaning West by Michael C. Keith (chapbook)

Leaning West by Michael C. Keith Červená Barva Press, 2020

Michael C. Keith is the author of 15 story collections and an acclaimed memoir (The Next Better Place). He retired emeritus professor in the Communication Department at Boston College. Prior to his four decades in academe, Keith was a radio broadcaster. He has been nominated for several awards for his fiction and is the recipient of numerous accolades for his books on media subjects.

"Stories set in the West inspired by landscape that has long intrigued and beguiled the author."

"The short imaginative bursts in Leaning West capture the feel and mystique of the west. The book filters the western experience through Michael Keith's unique and somewhat twisted view. His stories are humorous, thought provoking, weird, and always entertaining. I grew up in the west. The stories ring true and I can relate to the places he takes us. For anyone interested in the west, or simply a unique perspective on life, this is a great read."
-Michael Brown, Emeritus Professor, University of Wyoming

Cover Art: Susanne Riette

$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-28-4 | 29 Pages

New Release: Tales from the Teacup Palace by Karen Friedland (chapbook)

Tales from the Teacup Palace by Karen Friedland Červená Barva Press, 2020

A nonprofit grant writer by day, Karen's poems have been published in Writing in a Women's Voice, Nixes Mate Review, Vox Populi, The Lily Poetry Review, Constellations, and others. Her previous book, Places That Are Gone, was published in 2019 by Nixes Mate Books. She lives in Boston with her husband, two dogs, two cats, and a few too many plants.

An ordinary neighborhood on the edge of the city comes to life in Karen Friedland's Tales from the Teacup Palace-its dogs, trees, houses, spouses, and people, living and gone. With humor and insight, Friedland mines the nuances of her particular terroir as well as her own memories, all while striving to follow Forster's dictum, "only connect." This is a collection of vivid, contemplative poems that were expressly written to be enjoyed.

Karen Friedland's poems invite us into her West Roxbury neighborhood where the teacup sized yards mark the spaces between houses and we witness the "frail human connection" between neighbors. For Friedland "words on a screen, on a page are the lightest of filaments, that connect us, that make us, that save us." And that is what these quotidian poems achieve - they bring the reader into a Zen state and entrap us in the amber light of 1970s photographs where we hear the poet's confession that "Eros and the arts are my main forms of transportation." We are transported through the neighborhood, through the seasons, through memory and loss where we are reminded that poetry is a testament to the living, stronger than disease, and poetry is what we need to appreciate the fragile beauty of daily life where "nothing is in fact preordained - it's all just happenstance magic."
-Annie Pluto, author of The Deepest Part of Dark

Philosophical, cautiously optimistic, Tales from the Teacup Palace reveals Friedland's native intelligence, deep attachment to home, and other places on and off her map. Heart drives this stunning new poems collection.
-Susan Tepper, author of Confess and What Drives Men

In Tales from the Teacup Palace, Karen Friedland returns to the wistful imagery that serves as the foundation of her poetic work. Within these pages Friedland shares her formative years growing up in the 1970s, the quiet comforts of her humble home, and the small wonders of nature's beauty. We see it all. Whether conveying the blessing of springtime or ruminating on the correlation between "Eros and the Arts," Friedland's observations give readers a heightened awareness of life's small but critical moments. These poems serve as a precious chronicle of landscapes, both organic and contemporary. With subtle humor, robust femininity, and acute kindness, Tales from the Teacup Palace explores the finest nuances of our human experience.
-Renuka Raghavan, author of Out of the Blue and The Face I Desire

$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-42-0 | 27 Pages

The Snow Dead by Marc Zegans (chapbook)

The Snow Dead by Marc Zegans Červená Barva Press, 2020

New release: Confess by Susan Tepper

Confess by Susan Tepper Červená Barva Press, 2020

Susan Tepper grew up amidst the dairy farms and wild strawberry fields of Long Island, when it was still a mystical finger in the water. A multitude of careers that include actress, singer, flight attendant, airline marketing manager, Cable TV producer, overseas tour guide, interior decorator, rescue worker and more have informed her poetry and fiction. An award-winning author, Tepper lives with her husband in the New York area. For more information please visit www.susantepper.com

"In the poems comprising her newest collection, Susan Tepper is elegiac and lyrical (...a lake I carry on my back/one of stillness), often contemplating winter and its darkness with the necessary intervention of birds, foods and the mysteries of human relationships—your arms hold secrets. And now and then a tough humor shines a light as well (Bury me in a giant keg—I'm lonely.) One feels her physical and inner landscape acutely, and one has to confess that here's a poet who really knows, to the bone, how breathing in the stories is done to the benefit of us all."
—Tim Suermondt, author of Josephine Baker Swimming Pool

"There is an extreme sense of intimacy in the poems of Susan Tepper. You can literally feel on the scrim of your skin her engagement with her senses—the natural order of things. She is no ham-fisted poet, but brings a subtle, dark beauty, like a trail of deep, deep blue. She is in constant conversation with the world, and only a poet who is deeply in tune to herself, and the signs the universe sends us, can bring this accomplished work to the plate."
—Doug Holder/Ibbetson Street Press/ Lecturer in Creative Writing, Endicott College

"Susan Tepper's book of poetry, CONFESS, is a handful of pearls in a hand extended as a gift bearing opalescent light, specks of muted colors, sometimes questioning who we are in shaping our destiny, and what escapes from our dark corners, as in her poem "Course": ...the heart meets itself, blankly, hears its name in the crumpled page... In "Egg," a beam creaks, mindful in the quiet of the passage of time. There still exists in "Part & Parcel" Two suitcases, side by side / Have yet to be unpacked, and in "Each Sky" Tepper plucks from the ever changing sky her keen perception of what is a visual poem."
—Judith Lawrence, Lilly Press, editor/publisher

At The Inkwell Review by Matthew Hamilton

$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-38-3 | 21 Pages

New release: Dancing in Santa Fe and other poems by Beate Sigriddaughter (chapbook)

Dancing in Santa Fe and other poems by Beate Sigriddaughter Červená Barva Press, 2019

Beate Sigriddaughter, www.sigriddaughter.net, was poet laureate of Silver City, NM (Land of Enchantment) from 2017-2019. She grew up in Nürnberg, Germany, where she began her trajectory of enchantment a five-minute walk from the castle. Alternate playgrounds, even closer to home, were World War II bomb ruins. Contrasts in her life became the norm. Her writing has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations and a handful of poetry prizes. Keenly interested in women and their situation in the world, she created the blog Writing In A Woman's Voice where she publishes other women's work.

This life a sacred loan./ I vow to celebrate" the poet proclaims in this exquisite chapbook. These are powerful poems of loss and transcendence. Sigriddaughter's singular brilliance lies in making the cosmic fiercely personal; she shines a light.
-Alexis Rhone Fancher, poetry editor, Cultural Weekly, author of Junkie Wife

Skillfully balanced between facing the ominous facts in world news and her enthusiasm for the spirit and beauty in her surroundings, Beate Sigriddaughter’s short collection is filled with clear-sightedness. The title poem brilliantly juxtaposes an inherited German history with her current New Mexico situation filled with affection and natural wonders. These pages are for all who seek something both uplifting and realistic; a lyrical wisdom that acknowledges a debt to fairy tales spanning light and darkness.
-David Chorlton, author of Reading T. S. Eliot to a Bird

Radiant writing! Beate Sigriddaughter is unafraid of the dark, and so is able to illuminate with rapturous language the hidden perplexities of the heart. Her vision is clear, her observations cut to the core with insights into nature and human nature seen through a focused lens of hard-earned joy. I found these poems astoundingly moving!
-Eve West Bessier, Poet Laureate of Silver City, NM

Beate Sigriddaughter's Dancing in Santa Fe and other poems will make you remember what it is to be alive in this world. Insightful, rewarding poetry. These poems moved me. They are filled with heart and care and apology and exquisite writing. They explore the darkness as well as the awesome beauty of life, and how, as human beings with a soul and memory, we must learn to live with both. These poems question and consider, looking inward as well as to the physical world, and to the mystical and spiritual. Ultimately, they lift a dark curtain, and are laced with love.
-Kari Nguyen, Contributing author, The Best of Boston Literary Magazine (Volume One) and New Hampshire's Emerging Writers Anthology (2018)

Were I forced at the point of King Arthur's sword to sum up Beate Sigriddaughter's poetic voice in three words-not counting the audible gulp at such a daunting demand-my response would be a strong, defiant, "Redolent of Life!" (The exclamation point my proud, subversive fourth.)
-Mathew Paust, author of Executive Pink, whose blog Crime Time is at https://mdpaust.blogspot.com

$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-23-9 | 34 Pages

New release: Rita by Ellen Devlin (chapbook)

Rita by Ellen Devlin Červená Barva Press, 2019

Ellen Devlin's poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The Cortland Review, Ekphrasis, Lime Hawk Review, PANK, The New Ohio Review, The Sow's Ear and Women's Studies Quarterly Review. One chapbook is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press, "Heavenly Bodies at the MET." She lives in Irvington, New York, with her husband, Charles.

Ellen Devlin's Rita is as subversive as it is wise. Rita's sassy "talk backs" to heroines from the canon may be feminist retellings but Devlin's project is more complex. Each insightful warning, discussion, or interrogation (with female characters of carefully chosen seminal texts) explores necessary questions of identity, agency, free will, power, and complicity. These poems are instruments of power-asserting, imagining, describing what it's like to be a woman today. I wish I read this book when I was a young woman. This is no ordinary debut collection; Devlin's attention to craft is masterful and her language fresh and fierce. "The windows and doors are locked and I can feel/ my mother's life barreling towards me."
—Jennifer Franklin, author of No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018)

It isn't often that a book of poems introduces us to a character we get to know as deeply as we know our closest intimates, or ourselves. Ellen Devlin achieves this with Rita, wielding an unfailing eye for detail and ear for voice. Rita is a middle-aged woman, uncelebrated in her world and ours, living with "a pile of ideas about being seen/not seen." As a reader, she talks back to a series of heroines who, tempted by "luminous sin," seem poised to stumble (as we know they will) into the perils that can befall the desirous female body. She shops at the supermarket, goes to her book club, nurses her memories. She accepts both horror and pleasure with her unique intensity and detachment. In the end, this unique sensibility is what saves Rita and burnishes these poems. She compels our interest, our awe and our love.
—Kathleen Ossip, author of The Do-Over (Sarabande Books, 2015)

Photograph and cover design by Hugh Scully

$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-13-0 | 36 Pages

April 13, 2018: 4 new chapbooks from Červená Barva Press

The Elusive Heroine: My Daughter Lost in Magritte by Linda Nemec Foster

The Elusive Heroine: My Daughter Lost in Magritte by Linda Nemec Foster Červená Barva Press, 2018: Linda Nemec Foster has published ten other collections of poetry including Amber Necklace from Gdansk (finalist for the Ohio Book Award in Poetry), Talking Diamonds (finalist for ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year), and The Lake Michigan Mermaid (co-authored with Anne-Marie Oomen). Foster's work has appeared in such journals as The Georgia Review, Nimrod, Connecticut Review, New American Writing, The North American Review, Paterson Literary Review, and Quarterly West. Her poetry has also been published in anthologies in the United States and Great Britain, translated in Europe, and produced for the stage. She has been honored with Pushcart Prize nominations and has received awards from the Arts Foundation of Michigan, ArtServe Michigan, National Writer's Voice, the Polish-American Historical Association, and the Academy of American Poets. Foster was selected to serve as Grand Rapids, Michigan's first Poet Laureate from 2003-05. Her chapbook, Contemplating the Heavens, was the inspiration for jazz pianist Steve Talaga's original composition which was nominated for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Foster's project, Cry of Freedom, is a collaboration with Hungarian musician Laszlo Slomovits and was released on CD in 2013. Foster is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College and in 2015 received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Dyer-Ives Foundation for her work as a poet and advocate for the literary arts.
$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9984253-9-9 | 40 Pages

Seen/unseen (a father and son converse) poems by Benjamin Ostrowski and Steven Ostrowski

Seen/unseen (a father and son converse) poems by Benjamin Ostrowski and Steven Ostrowski Červená Barva Press, 2018

Steven Ostrowski is a poet, fiction writer, painter and songwriter. His work appears in numerous literary journals and magazines, and he is the author of three previous chapbooks—two of poems and one of stories. New chapbooks from Island Verse and, with Ben Ostrowski, Black Magic Media, are scheduled for 2018. He teaches at Central Connecticut State University.

Benjamin Ostrowski is a current PhD student studying Organizational Behavior at Carnegie Mellon University. He has poems published in The American Journal of Poetry, The Gyroscope Review, Blue Muse, The Dark River Review, and others. He has a forthcoming chapbook co-authored with his father, Steven, from Black Magic Media.

Seen/unseen is an ecstatically authentic conversation, poetry full of unapologetic humanity. This is not just call and response but challenge and answer, parry and thrust. Two voices calling each other higher, reveling in each other's performance. We could not ask for more from such a talented father-son team.
-Will Hicks, author of Stargazer's Kitchen

Seen/Unseen gives us the visions that occur when each participant closes their eyes, opens themselves to the world and speaks from one soul to another. The commonplace and the miraculous intertwine in this exchange of the gifts the father brings the son, and the son brings the father, when both open their souls to the other and view what they hold in their hearts.
-Gian Lombardo

$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-692-08026-9 | 31 Pages

The Day She Decided to Feed Crows by Hope Jordan

The Day She Decided to Feed Crows by Hope Jordan Červená Barva Press, 2018

Hope Jordan is in the Creative Writing MFA program at UMass Boston. Her poems have recently appeared in such publications as Nine Mile, Comstock Review, Naugatuck River Review, and Red Headed Stepchild. She was the first official poetry slam master in New Hampshire.

Hope Jordan's small book is stripped to the bone precise-yellow jackets and sweet grass, ice fishing holes and old Buicks mark the landscape of people struggling in small towns where "Housewives overdose after Halloween." These are razor sharp poems that tell us only just enough, restrained by love, and terror.
-Sean Thomas Dougherty

$7.00 | 31 Pages

Small as Hope in the Helicopter Rain by Lisa Akus

Small as Hope in the Helicopter Rain by Lisa Akus Červená Barva Press, 2018

Lisa Akus has published poems in Congeries, Lake Effect, Redactions, and in the anthology Double Kiss: Stories, Poems, Essays on the Art of Billiards (2017 Mammoth Books). Her poem "Killdeer" received an honorable mention for the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Erie, PA with her partner and sometimes collaborator Sean Thomas Dougherty, and their daughters Amara Rumi and Andaluzja Akhmatova who provided much inspiration for these poems.

Small As Hope In the Helicopter Rain

Among the tall grass and clover flowers our youngest sits picking. She squints an eye shut and holds one up to the light twisting at its stem. Slow and careful. She wants to know how the sunlight breaks through its petals and so begins pulling them out one by one. Her sing-song voice counting them until they are all gone. What she takes from this she will tell no one. Then a helicopter seed. And a new question as she continues to pick it up and toss it into the air. Despite it's falling back to the ground, every time. But soon they are falling all around her. A strong wind has brought them almost fluttering in a way she seems somehow familiar with. And suddenly she is spinning with them. She, this girl we worried so much about her walking late. Always tripping over nothing, and even now still unable to come down off her toes. And yet she is spinning, and stretching her arms out as if to welcome something back. Something we at some point lost? Something, small as hope in the helicopter rain.

$7.00 | 29 Pages

July 11, 2017:
The Sound of Angels by Ruth Chad

The Sound of Angels by Ruth C. Chad Červená Barva Press, 2017

Ruth Chad is a psychologist who works in the Boston area. Her poems have appeared in Montreal Poems, Lyrical Somerville, Ibbetson Street, The Bagel Bard Anthology, The Aurorean, Constellations and The Psychoanalytic Couple and Family Institute of New England, Connection, December 2015. Ruth grew up in Montreal, Quebec and now resides in Newton Highlands, MA. with her husband Mark Friedman.

"Ruth Chad is a poet of whispered intimacies, of living and of dying, of laughter and of sorrow, of the natural world and the metaphysical beyond. She writes as both observer and participant in the ordinary and extraordinary dramas of our existence. Her portraits of her family and especially of her dying father are poignant reflections of experience like our own. There is a tenderness in all of her writing as her short stanzas tumble out into our consciousness to demonstrate and to remind us of our human condition and the contexts within which we live. Hers is a sensitivity to the world about her as she answers the question posed to a spider in her poem 'The Children Have Grown.' She asks the spider to teach her to spin. She has, in fact, spun a web of poems full of insight, fine writing and intimacy."
-Philip E. Burnham, Jr., Winner of the Loft Poetry Prize

"There is both deep sadness and sweetness in Ruth Chad's meditative, moving, imagistic poetry. The sadness comes from loss-lost youth, the change of seasons, children moving away, a parent dying-but that loss breeds a deeper appreciation of life's sweetness, often symbolized by affecting natural imagery. I can't imagine anyone reading these poems without feeling more alive."
-Lawrence Kessenich

$7.00 | 39 Pages | In Stock

March 31, 2017:
The Path of Thunder by Susan Donnelly

The Path of Thunder by Susan Donnelly Červená Barva Press, 2017

Susan Donnelly's latest publication is the chapbook Sweet Gooseberries from Every Other Thursday Press. She is the author of three full collections: Eve Names the Animals (Northeastern University Press), Transit and Capture the Flag (Iris Press), and three other chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry and many journals, anthologies and textbooks in the U.S. and abroad, as well as on websites, in academic courses, and on blogs. They have also been featured several times on Garrison Keillor's The Writers Almanac. A frequent reader of her poetry in the Boston area and beyond, Susan lives, writes, and offers poetry classes and consultations in Arlington, Massachusetts.

One writer's experiences finding a path in racially divided America.

"The heart opens/ in such unlikely places" writes Susan Donnelly and her poems give us what she sees and understands in those moments, offering us a way to grasp the world in which the heart might stay open. These are poems to be shared across a table, to knit us together, to face us toward the truth of our common life. This is, as Roque Dalton suggested, "Poetry like bread." Wine, too. What a sublime and nourishing book of poems.
-Richard Hoffman, author of Gold Star Road and Emblem

$7.00 | 27 Pages | In Stock

September 21, 2016:
Benign Protection by Anne Elezabeth Pluto (Anya Vladimirovna Pluta)

Benign Protection by Anne Elezabeth Pluto (Anya Vladimirovna Pluta) Červená Barva Press, 2016

Anne Elezabeth Pluto is Professor of Literature and Theatre at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA where she is the co-founder and artistic director of the Oxford Street Players. She was a member of the Boston small press scene in the late 1980s and started Commonthought Magazine at Lesley 24 years ago. Her chapbook, The Frog Princess, was published by White Pine Press. She has been a participant at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 2005 and 2006. Her ebook, Lubbok Electric, was published by Argotist ebooks in 2012. Her latest work appears in, The Buffalo Evening News, Unlikely Stories: Episode IV, Mat Hat Lit, nycBigCityLit, and Pirene's Fountain.

Cover Artist:
Bryson Dean-Gauthier has been an artist since childhood, and as an adult has worked in the fields of graphic design, corporate communications, television and education. She has been a graphic design teacher for 15 years, currently with the Art Institute of Pittsburgh Online Division, and is also an instructional design consultant at New England Institute of Technology in Rhode Island. Bryson's current creative work explores photography, digital imaging and mixed media, and takes inspiration from the intersections of fine art, design, mystery, spirit, the natural world and technology.

Benign Protection is a ripe and vivid collection of 32 poems fraught with multi-generational hauntings. "Each breath is a prelude," as Pluto "gnaws through me to my bone." The intricacy of her language is rich on the tongue. Pluto is meant to be read aloud. Resonant and unforgettable.
-Meg Tuite, author of Bare Bulbs Swinging, Artistically Declined Press (2014)

Anne Pluto is one of the finest poets I know. I highly recommend Benign Protection.
-Kay Kinghammer, author, The Wenachee River Anthology, Melinda Cochrane International (2014), Inside the Circus, Loyal Stone Press (2013)

From the opening poem, "The River Styx", in Anne Elezabeth Pluto's Benign Protection, we are led into a sphere of grief artfully rendered by Pluto's deft hand. There are poems of domesticity that are welcome relief, but the breathing room is small. Grief is Pluto's handmaiden and we are enriched by such an exquisite companionship in this finely-wrought volume.
-Clare L. Martin, editor, MockingHeart Review. Author, Seek The Holy Dark, Yellow Flag Press (2017), Eating the Heart First, Press 53, (2012)

$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9981027-0-2 | 55 Pages | In Stock

September 21, 2016:
Housing for Wrens Poems by Edward Morin

Housing for Wrens Poems by Edward Morin Červená Barva Press, 2016

Edward Morin was born in Chicago and, while growing up, spent summers in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He has graduate degrees in English from The University of Chicago and Loyola University (Chicago) and has taught at seven Midwestern colleges and universities, including The University of Cincinnati, Wayne State University, and The University of Michigan.

His previous titles include Labor Day at Walden Pond (poems), The Dust of Our City (poems), and Transportation: Hot Tunes and Blues from Motor City (recorded songs). He is editor and co-translator of an anthology, The Red Azalea: Chinese Poetry since the Cultural Revolution (University of Hawaii Press). He has co-edited the anthology, Before There Is Nowhere to Stand: Palestine/Israel: Poets Respond to the Struggle (Lost Horse Press, 2012).

He has won prizes in nine national poetry contests and has had poems in Hudson Review, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, Poetry Northwest and many other magazines. His co-translations of Chinese, Arabic, and Greek poetry have appeared in Iowa Review, New Letters, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arab Literature. His articles and reviews have been published in The Georgia Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Detroit News.

The author has worked as a writer for a few corporations. He has acted and sung in productions of several regional theatre and opera companies. He co-hosts The Crazy Wisdom Poetry Series in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and is editor of Peninsula Poets, the journal of the Poetry Society of Michigan. He lives with his wife in Ann Arbor.

Edward Morin has assembled lyrics and narratives touching on subjects you and I like to read about. The exquisite title poem prepares us for engagements with blue jays, bank swallows, wood thrushes-and also the pleasures of singing, fishing, even of aging. The language is to be savored and the hard-won wisdom taken to heart.
-Laurence Goldstein, author of Poetry Los Angeles: Reading the Essential Poems of the City

The poet uses eyes, "the most spiritual of the senses," and ears-"this recluse trills its two voice boxes / like Pan's double flute"-to present reflective narratives of the world in and around us, in backyards, at workplaces. Witnessing compulsions and hardships of contemporary life, Morin evinces winged sensibilities and deep-rooted compassion. His praise of a fellow poet ("Poetry Man") could apply to his own poems' "fire smoldering in the belly" rising "to enchant the heart and brain."
-Lyn Coffin, poet, playwright, fiction writer, and translator

Some of my favorite contemporary poems are in earlier books by Ed Morin, and this fresh chapbook offers several more, especially the family and love poems, poems of conscience and responses to the violence of needless war and domestic crimes. The poems have remarkable range in portraying a holdup, which almost cost his life, and his avocation as an actor and professor. This collection is a distinguished addition to the Cervena Barva Series. I hope it inspires a longer Collected Poems, for this poet deserves honors and attention.
-David Ray, author of 20 books including Music of Time: New and Selected Poems

$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9966894-7-2 | 44 Pages | In Stock

New release June 15, 2016:
Duino by Martin Burke

Duino by Martin Burke Červená Barva Press, 2016

Poet and Playwright Martin Burke is from Ireland but has lived for many years in Flanders (the northern Flemish speaking part of Belgium) a region with which he strongly identifies. More akin to the broad European visionary tradition than to any form of social realism, his work is noted for his insight and lyricism, qualities which are to the forefront in this version of the famous work by Rilke. He is currently working on a book-length poem The April Calends.

Who from the angels will hear me?
Into what existence may I vanish?
Why is it that, though it can, beauty does not destroy us?
Why does terror spring from every angel's mouth in joy?
Yet this is the world's landscape where, somehow, we endure
And the lovers, who annihilate annihilations
Lock time like a prisoner in their arms but their hearts are birds in air
Spring and its stars require us and the mission of music also
As we require mirrors to hold our expectations
As sinful and profane are our chosen companions
Where Antaeus is livid in air but renewed on the ground (oh let there be praise for such falling for this is no elegy)
As lovers are (oh pleasurable earth that such joy be yours!)
Sap to earth-mould that love rise again in any space, region or occasion through which its arrow passes
To focus on the unseen voice prompting a saints' ecstasy
Listening only to the secretive breath of the world
Speaking histories and chronicles-but what will they tell of you?
Let them tell that you were enraptured and quivered
In the arrows flight within you.

$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9966894-9-6 | 22 Pages | In Stock

New release March 22, 2016:
Cimmeria by T. M. De Vos

Cimmeria by T. M. De Vos Červená Barva Press, 2016

T.M. De Vos is a 2015 Sozopol Fiction Seminars fellow; Co-Editor-in-Chief of Gloom Cupboard; and staff member of The Atlas Review. Her work has appeared in Juked, The Pacific Review, burntdistrict, Moonshot Magazine, Quiddity, Hawaii Pacific Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and the Los Angeles Review, among others. She has been named as a semifinalist for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and the Paumanok Poetry Award. De Vos is also the recipient of fellowships from Murphy Writing Seminars, Summer Literary Seminars, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. She is currently working on her first novel.

"Some poets jump up and down, make faces, pretend to act smart, or witty, or stupid as they write. T.M. De Vos comes up to your table as you sit alone in a cafe, sits down in the empty chair, and starts talking to you in near whisper. You're surprised at first, don't know how to react, but are soothed by the softness of her voice, the warmth it projects, push out of your mind the din than surrounds you, and let yourself be drawn in by her words. There isn't a single lie, a hint at pretense in what she says. It is all so honest and simple. Her story is yours but she tells it in a way you would have never thought of and you see yourself differently. You're amazed. You're grateful to her for having sat down at your table. You've gained a friend."
-Yuriy Tarnawsky, author of The Placebo Effect Trilogy

"An illuminating collection, Cimmeria inspects human intimacies. These poems are at once clinical and compassionate as they slip from the ordinary to horror, from a boy's red balloon to his bag of blood. T.M. De Vos enlarges as she vexes our grounding in the everyday."
-Renato Rosaldo, cultural anthropologist and author of Diego Luna's Insider Tips

"Cimmeria plumbs modern relationships from intimate perspectives. The poems talk from across the room, then sit down and whisper unexpected truths. Where the 21st century keeps the bright and beautiful at the forefront, De Vos provides a rich depth of field that shows there is nothing of significance to fill the vacuum left from loss."
-John Gosslee, editor of Fjords Review and author of 12: Sonnets for the Zodiac

"In her collection Cimmeria, poet T.M. De Vos opens up a complex world of brutal emotional pain delivered in elegant, precise, yet emotive language. We are taken through a landscape scarred by anguish and littered with memories ground down to a powder by unsuccessful, at times stifling relationships. But the look back upon this scorched earth of ardent scars is that from a vantage point of forgiveness and transcendence. De Vos is magically able to simultaneously condemn and absolve the cruelty that lives within all of us."
-Alex Pruteanu, author of Gears

"T.M. De Vos reaches beneath the surface of experience to examine what is primary and primordial in everyday-and not so everyday-actions. Her examinations sometimes cut like a surgeon's knife, other times magnify like a biologist's microscope, to reveal what (often) has been taken away from those who try to give. The precision of her language and clarity of her imagery open our eyes to what has remained hidden, buried and closed off for too long."
-Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Haywire, Tetched, and Roughhouse

"T. M. De Vos sounds the depths of what we truly know. With tremendous tenderness, yearning and passion in her voice, she gives us the visceral truth, including the literal blood, bone and guts of experience. By knowing where the limits of desire come from, herself, she is able to wisely accept what it is that life offers."
-Jeffrey Ethan Lee, author of Towards Euphoria

$7.00 | 36 Pages | In Stock

New release March 15, 2016:
The Last Gun by Anne Harding Woodworth

The Last Gun by Anne Harding Woodworth Červená Barva Press, 2016

Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent being Unattached Male (Poetry Salzburg, 2014). The Last Gun is her fourth chapbook after Up From the Root Cellar and Herding, both from Červená Barva Press. A selection from The Last Gun won the 2015-2016 COG Poetry Award out of Cogswell College, San Jose, CA, judged by poet A. Van Jordan, who wrote: "You'll find that The Last Gun is 'a gathering place for... admirers, rememberers, the once-armed.'" Harding Woodworth lives in Washington, D.C., where she is a member of the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

"Just when you thought you knew all the arguments in America's gun debate, here comes Anne Harding Woodworth's powerful chapbook, The Last Gun. In these haunting poems, the "last" gun clears its throat and speaks. He speaks his fears and hopes in a voice as unexpected as it is unsettling. We almost feel sorry for him as we follow his arrest, imprisonment, and more. These poems aim straight at the rhetoric. They trigger some laughs but mostly they lament a country in which we hear too much from guns. Guns usually get what they want. But here, in this smart, insightful collection, Anne Harding Woodworth only appears to show the gun's humanity. Actually, she shows us our own."
-Joseph Ross, Author of Ache, Gospel of Dust, and Meeting Bone Man

An excerpt from The Last Gun was the winner of the 2015-2016 COG Poetry Awards (Cogswell Polytechnical College, San Jose, CA), judged by poet A. Van Jordan, who wrote:

The Last Gun opens with smoke and closes with a bang. These poems toggle between the spirits of the living and the spirits the living carry into death "to ask questions, to contemplate/ a state of being that is no more." These poems care about what we carry with us on our journeys and how others hold us in memory. As a reader, you'll find that The Last Gun is "a gathering place for... admirers, rememberers, the once-armed," and this poet has prepared us both "for the journey... where it will be judged," and for the "deeds on earth."

$7.00 | 37 Pages | In Stock

New release December 29, 2015:
Chaos and Evolution by Olivia Bush

Chaos and Evolution by Olivia Bush Červená Barva Press, 2015

Olivia Bush is currently a junior at Simmons College, an all-women's college in Boston, Massachusetts, and is studying English and Communications. After she graduates, she aspires to become an editor. Born and raised in Central New Jersey, many of her poems are inspired by its scenery from the factories on the Turnpike facing the city skyline, to the picturesque shore. She is a poetry buff, who enjoys reading and draws inspiration from works from a variety of eras. Besides writing, she is an immature distance runner, and currently works as the director of a mentoring program for ninth and tenth graders. Despite the usually dark undertones present throughout most of her works, she enjoys a good comedy, and one of her long-term dreams is to write for a cartoon.

The Pin

Your peculiarity stuck me like a pin,
As I am a peculiar soul;
It met my delicate skin, drawing blood,
Which dripped to the floor

It was surprising: just a pin
drew such abundant blood;
but the bleeding roused my fancy,
as it poured from veins to the air

When it collected in a puddle, stained the rug;
I knew I had to do something
To stop the bleeding-
I eventually learned bandages only go so far

$7.00 | 18 Pages | In Stock

New release November 6, 2015:
THE EYES OF KEYHOLES by Milorad Pejić Translated by Omer Hadžiselimović

THE EYES OF KEYHOLES by Milorad Pejić Translated by Omer Hadžiselimović Červená Barva Press, 2015

Milorad Pejić was born in Tuzla, Bosnia, in 1960. Since 1992 he has lived in Sweden. His books of poems include The Vase for the Lily Plant (1985), The Eyes of Keyholes (2001, 2012), and Hyperborea (2011, 2013), for which he received the "Slovo Makovo-Mak Dizdar" prize in Bosnia in 2012.

Omer Hadžiselimović, formerly a professor at the University of Sarajevo, is now an adjunct professor of English at Loyola University Chicago and at North Park University, Chicago. He has published works in American studies, English literature, and travel writing. In recent years he has been translating poetry from Bosnian into English and from English into Bosnian, published in various venues.

FISHING VILLAGE

I mourn for the cypresses I brought
from Hvar: under tiny days, like through
sunglasses deficient they grow, breathing
with deaf leaves as if through a button.
From their horrible disease, like a thin trail
of ink spilled on a newspaper, they bleed out
at night over the yard wall into the moonlight.

The long winter is drying out the boats down
at the lake, a small church above smoking
roofs looks like a fishing buoy. No one from
anywhere to unlock me from the cypresses.
Planted in the snow, they traipse after me with
their shadows' needles like after a vial of lavender.

$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9966894-1-0 | 44 Pages | In Stock

New release July 24, 2015:
Natural Histories by Mark Pawlak

Natural Histories by Mark Pawlak Červená Barva Press, 2015: Mark Pawlak is the author of seven poetry collections and the editor of six anthologies. His latest books are Go to the Pine: Quoddy Journals 2005-2010 (Plein Air Editions/Bootstrap Press, 2012) and Jefferson's New Image Salon: Mashups and Matchups (Červená Barva Press, 2010). His work has been translated into German, Polish, and Spanish, and has been performed at Teatr Polski in Warsaw. In English, his poems have appeared widely in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Anthology of Poetic Journals and in the literary magazines New American Writing, Mother Jones, Poetry South, The Saint Ann's Review, Solstice, and The World, among many others. For more than 35 years Pawlak has been an editor of the Brooklyn-based Hanging Loose, one of the oldest independent literary journals and presses in the country. He supports his poetry habit by teaching mathematics at UMass Boston, where he is Director of Academic Support Programs. He lives in Cambridge.
$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock

New release February 10, 2015:
Until It Does Us In by Myles Gordon

Until It Does Us In by Myles Gordon Červená Barva Press, 2015

Myles Gordon's book-length book of poetry, Inside the Splintered Wood, was recently published by Tebot Bach (Huntington Beach, CA), as winner of the press's "Patricia Bibby First Book Competition." His chapbook, Recite Every Day, was published by Evening Street Press (Dublin, Ohio) in 2009, as winner of the press's "Helen Kay Chapbook Competition." He is a past winner of the Grolier Poetry Prize, and honorable mention for an AWP Intro Award "“ Poetry. He currently teaches English in a Massachusetts high school.

Praise for Until It Does Us In

Myles Gordon's ambitious and affecting sonnet sequence not only conveys "“ sometimes with beautiful formal understatement, other times with bitter directness "“ the horrors of Jewish history, but also, heartbreakingly, how those horrors infiltrate the present. In Until It Does Us In, moving sonnets about the suicide of a hip, pot-smoking, peace-sign wielding older cousin function as continuations and repercussions of what is captured in this exquisite final couplet: "the Jews of Brest Litovsk; the German gun./The shadows dwindled, thinned. Then there were none."
-Jacqueline Osherow, Author of Whitehorn

The humanity and sense of loss in Gordon's poems is so forceful and fresh, we feel like rising up and saving each other.
-Yehoshua November, Author of God's Optimism

This little book of sonnets startles and reaches the reader in ways that no other medium can. It is the naked truth, the full story, condensed in a few lines. It weaves the horror of the Holocaust through the fabric of generations, linking past atrocity to present day tragedy, laying bare all pretenses and deceptions that are attempt to disguise it.
-Dr. Dori Laub, Founder "“ Fortunoff Video Archive For Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University

How is it we evolve from violence? Myles Gordon asks then answers in 25 tightly controlled sonnets. Compassionate and unflinching, Until It Does Us In seeks to answer one of the most heart-wrenching of questions: How is it that someone whose family was nearly murdered out of existence ends up taking his own life?
-Catherine Sasanov, Author of Had Slaves

Myles Gordon directly confronts the afterlives of the Holocaust through this deftly woven family saga, crossing continents and centuries. Gordon maps the "DNA of tragedy," determining the difference between what we inherit and what we control, forever searching for the legacy of the Holocaust to end.
-Alyssa Pacy, Archivist "“ Cambridge Public Library

$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9861111-0-5 | 35 Pages | In Stock

October 7, 2014:
THE AFTERIMAGES Poems by David P. Miller

THE AFTERIMAGES Poems by David P. Miller Červená Barva Press, 2014

David P. Miller's poems have appeared in print in Meat for Tea, Stone Soup Presents Fresh Broth, Ibbetson Street, the 2014 Bagel Bards Anthology, and Durable Goods, and online in the Muddy River Poetry Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Oddball Magazine, and the Boston and Beyond Poetry Blog. He has twice been a featured reader at Stone Soup in Cambridge, Mass., where he is a semi-regular on the open mike. His three "micro-chapbooks" - Caution: Many People Walking, Probably Not Haiku, and Reversible Folded Poem, are available online thanks to the Origami Poems Project. David was a member of the multidisciplinary Mobius Artists Group of Boston for 25 years, visits with the Bagel Bards in Somerville, Mass., and is a member of Tom Daley's Tuesday night poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education. He is a librarian at Curry College, in Milton, Mass.

Cover Art: Jane Wiley

SEE YOUR HEARING

Listener, burnish the sense
where it is felt, each jewel, sound-being.
Air's voices shift as skull pivots,
left side and right, six directions
set in unwavering mind.

My scatterhead's listening checklists
church chimes' humid auroras,
mosaic clatter of startled bird babies,
flat thump of cardboard on plastic.
Heard that. Heard this. The roster ticked.

Packed earbuds guard concentration's thin gate.
Play it again: repeat, fade, decay.
Repetition manufactures foreplay for the ears,
but with bare attention stillness' pulse shines.

Now you, see your hearing. Introspect
sound in your skull's heaven: lustrous percepts.
Each beat, rasp, slide, crack, sigh,
manifest like honey, like water, like night.

$7.00 | 43 Pages | In Stock

August 12, 2014:
Midway Through Life's Journey 24 poems by Michael Estabrook

Midway Through Life's Journey 24 poems by Michael Estabrook Červená Barva Press, 2014

After 40 years of working for "The Man" and sometimes "The Woman" Michael Estabrook is finally free. No more useless meetings under florescent lights in stuffy windowless rooms. He can concentrate instead on making better poems and on pursuing his other interests including: history, art, music, theatre, opera, and his wife who is still the most beautiful woman he has ever known.

Midlife Crisis

Wasn't until my mid-fifties
that Sam-the-Tattoo-Artist
from Cambridge, Massachusetts, etched
my first tattoo onto my left shoulder:
a pair of red roses encircling one another
on a mat of shimmering green leaves.

Robin, our youngest daughter,
was in cahoots with me,
driving me to the tattoo parlor,
in the room watching the whole while.
Our other daughter, Laura,
was excited and gleeful, yelling
to her husband, "Chris come and see,
you're not going to believe it,
my Dad got a tattoo!"
On the other hand, my son
was stunned, dumbfounded,
not sure what to say.

While my wife, my poor wife,
she's away on business, hasn't seen it yet,
doesn't know of it either. But she can't
be too mad, I reason, seeing as this tattoo
was drawn by her, not as a tattoo,
of course, but as an embellishment
for a book of my poems. So she can't
be too upset because it's her art and,
as Laura said, "it is such a romantic thing
to have Mom's art on your body, forever."

$7.00 | 35 Pages | In Stock

July 30, 2014:
Herding by Anne Harding Woodworth

Herding by Anne Harding Woodworth Červená Barva Press, 2014

Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of five books of poetry and three chapbooks. She lived on a farm in New York State during much of her childhood, where her fondness for cows began. It has stayed with her in spite of living in New York City; Detroit; Athens, Greece; and Frankfurt, Germany. She now divides her time between a cabin in the mountains of Western North Carolina and a home in Washington, D.C., where she is a member of the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library. (www.annehardingwoodworth.com)

In Herding, cows rush in where angels fear to tread, as Anne Harding Woodworth finds the human in the cow and the cow in the human. Cows serve as figurative and literal witness here, be they standing by during a speaker's contemplative walk through a country morning or dressing up as a contest winner's best man, "forced to masquerade / as a bull masquerading as a best man // wearing a tailor-made bovine tuxedo." Woodworth's poems are funny and even ridiculous at times, but don't be fooled into thinking this is light verse. Here, we find the essential: our place on and of the earth, and in the immediate and more general human relationships that make up our personal herd.
-Ruth Foley, Managing Editor of Cider Press Review and author of Dear Turquoise

$7.00 | 32 Pages | In Stock

March 31, 2014:
The Art of Waving by Tim Suermondt

The Art of Waving by Tim Suermondt Červená Barva Press, 2014

Tim Suermondt is the author of two full-length collections: TRYING TO HELP THE ELEPHANT MAN DANCE (The Backwaters Press, 2007) and JUST BEAUTIFUL from New York Quarterly Books, 2010. He has published poems in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Blackbird, Able Muse, Prairie Schooner, PANK, Bellevue Literary Review and Stand Magazine (U.K.) and has poems forthcoming in Gargoyle, A Narrow Fellow and Plume Poetry Journal among others. After many years in Queens and Brooklyn, he has moved to Cambridge with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.

"Tim Suermondt's poems in this new collection are open, friendly and inviting, in "the voice of our familiarity," but always with a profound or humorous twist. He is devoted "to a bravery found only in the details," to the "the raspberries and the ball games," or his wife "in a strange and beautiful hat," as well as to the dreams, disappointments and possibilities of everyday existence. Not for him the modish pessimism and linguistic difficulties of much of contemporary poetry. "When my wife puts on some Schubert," he says, "I'm sure the world will never end/ and neither will we." Here is a poet who communicates directly and has some hope for us. The apparent simplicity and genial humor of these marvelous poems are grounded in an artful subtlety that reflects the way life really is."
-Norman Stock

Cover Art: "Skull in a Landscape" (1946) by Edward Burra

$7.00 | 28 Pages | In Stock

December 10, 2013:
Incompetent Translations and Inept Haiku by Bill Yarrow

Incompetent Translations and Inept Haiku by Bill Yarrow Červená Barva Press, 2013

Bill Yarrow is a Professor of English at Joliet Junior College where he teaches creative writing, Shakespeare, and film. He is the author of Pointed Sentences (BlazeVOX, 2012) His work has appeared in many print and online journals including PANK, Poetry International, Thrush, DIAGRAM, Contrary, and RHINO.

"Incompetent Translations and Inept Haiku is a masterfully competent and original course in comparative poetics, an erudite inside joke that will make you laugh out loud. Hilarious and apt send-ups of Whitman, Rimbaud, Lermontov, Yeats, and Bishop and Yarrow's own poetic voice make this literary tour a tour de force-funny, moving, and unique."
-Larissa Shmailo, In Paran

"With brilliant wit and deadpan humor, Bill Yarrow captures our ripe imperfections and absurd beauty. This is a collection to be read over and over. Hilarious, unflinching, and right on the mark!"
-Meg Tuite, Bound by Blue

Bonnie ZoBell recommends Incompetent Translations and Inept Haiku in The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review:
http://thedoctortjeckleburgreview.com/2014/03/31/eckleburg-book-club-the-whack-job-girls-by-bonnie-zobell/

$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9910091-1-4 | 45 Pages | Out of Print

September 12, 2013: Dead Letters by JP Reese

Dead Letters by JP Reese Červená Barva Press, 2013

JP Reese earned an MFA from The University of Memphis. Her poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, book reviews, and writer interviews have been published or are forthcoming in many online and print journals such as Metazen, Blue Fifth Review, A Baker's Dozen: Thirteen Extraordinary Things, and The Pinch. Reese is Associate Poetry Editor for Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, www.connotationpress.com, and Guest Fiction Editor for Scissors and Spackle. Reese's poetry chapbook Final Notes was published by Naked Mannekin Press in 2012. Reese's flash fiction has won the Patricia McFarland Memorial Prize and her poetry has won The Graduate School Creative Writing Award from The University of Memphis. Her published work can be read at Entropy: A Measure of Uncertainty, jpreesetoo.wordpress.com. Reese lives and works in Texas.

"In the new collection Dead Letters, the music of JP Reese's poetry never strikes a false note. The voice in her writing is always unmistakable, genuine, and penetrating. These poems "“ and you will keep them close to you "“ serve as maps for journeys over dark and grieving landscapes. This is a strong poetry that promises and delivers a place, finally, of human faith, of hope under 'the arid bone of flowered stars'."
-Sam Rasnake, poet and author of Inside a Broken Clock from Finishing Line Press.

"There is a sort of formal antiquity and modern lyricism at play in JP Reese's Dead Letters-lovers and family, mythology, allusion, and everyday moments so minute that it is only the persistent ache a reader experiences that alerts her of her own transport elsewhere. Reese's poetry is subtle that way. And powerful. A departure."
-Heather Fowler, poet and author of the new short story collection This Time While We're Awake from Aqueous Books.

Midnight, 1960

The lamp spreads its yellow halo
over my mother's dark curls.
Smoke swirls around her face
as she reads, a tea pot in its cozy,
rose-painted cup and saucer near.
Pall Mall butts lie discarded
in the ashtray, tipped with Avon's
latest red. Unthinking,
she raises delicate fingers
to her pink tongue, dabs a sliver
of tobacco from its tip. Never
taking her eyes from the book
cradled in her lap, she lives
another life. My father
sleeps, rooms away, unaware
of the change taking place
in the cooling, midnight air.

Reviews:

Your Own Back Yard ~ Writing and Art ~ Michael Gillan Maxwell: http://michaelgillanmaxwell.com/2014/03/07/book-review-dead-letters-jp-reese-2013-cervena-barva-press/

$7.00 | 33 Pages |In Stock

June 29, 2013:
This is Not a Situation in Which You Should Remain Calm by Michelle Reale

This is Not a Situation in Which You Should Remain Calm by Michelle Reale Červená Barva Press, 2013

Michelle Reale is an academic librarian on faculty at Arcadia University in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of publications both in print and online, including Nano Fiction, Smokelong Quarterly, Pank, Gargoyle, The Pedestal, elimae, JMWW and others. Her work was included in Dzanc's 2011 Best of the Web Anthology. She is the author of four collections of short fiction and prose poems. She has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She blogs on immigration and Migration and Social Justice in the Sicilian context at www.sempresicilia.wordpress.com

Cover Photo: Isabella Reale

"Michelle Messina Reale's poems evoke a deep confessional visitation between the connecting North African landscape and Southern Italian Etruscan bloodlines. She has taken the sparse stones found among the terrain's ruins and placed them one by one, each carefully aligned in unique prosaic consciousnesses that offer new and alluring formations of the old. Her rhythms are rough in prose, often at the edge as a stone cut at various angles, yet continuous and steadfast. The sensation of the hard and quick gallop of a horse through this horizon of remains and longing is heard. The fortitude of trudging onward, of seeing ruinous sights combined with delicious heated passions, leave the reader sweltering and swollen, understanding the validity of bruises."
-Sonia Di Placido, author of, Exultation in Cadmium Red

"In the title poem Michelle Reale, This is Not a Situation in Which You Should Remain Calm writes: Breathed it in to my pulsating lungs. You will want to breathe in to your pulsating lungs each beautifully crafted poem in this chapbook. You connect with the speaker of these poems on many levels and are drawn into each poem, I found myself holding my breath many times while reading this collection of achingly beautiful poems that encompass the human condition and all that it entails."
-Helen Vitoria, Poetry Editor, Thrush Poetry Journal

"Michelle Reale's poems are imbued in the "now" as much as they are journeys to the long-gone world of our ancestors. The stories she paints are harrowing and touching: alive as lizards and intoxicating as wild flowers. There is an exquisite touch to them: the robust flavor of wine, the taste of the nibbled food and the omnipresent homage to Sicilian religiosity. The beauty of this collection's landscapes and soulscapes left me yearning for more."
-Alessandra Bava, Author of Guerilla Blues

This is Not a Situation in Which You Should Remain Calm

We held hands until the intersection. He dropped his first. I pulled
my coat around me tight, for something to do, the buttons long
gone. My breasts were sore and I shuddered. Don't do that, he said.
He pointed with his head to the ATM machine across the street
from where we stood. Make it enough this time, he said. I hurried
across the street. I heard him greet some men in the street. The
keffiyeh's they wore waved like flags in the wind. They spoke
guttural and urgent. I could hear them over the vibrating traffic, cars
negotiating difficult turns. I stood with my coat open and the wind
ripping a gaping hole through me. I had the money in my hand. He
waved off his friends and came to me. He stood outside the market.
I chose some meat in a plastic package, pink tomatoes small and
premature, grown somewhere far from where we found ourselves.
There was a name for this in my language, but I forgot what it was.
At home I fried the meat. I sliced the tomatoes, cut my finger and
sucked the blood. He made a face, called me simple. Picked his
teeth right in front of me and I thought of what my father might say.
He stared at me, his face softening by degrees. I pulled down the
neck of my blouse, revealing my bruised breasts. Purple and green
and yellow flowers bloomed like a night flower. He set his toothpick
down. It wasn't me, he said. His coffee boiled over on the stove. I
smelled the scorch. Breathed it in to my pulsating lungs. Salvaged
what was left. Served it the way he'd become accustomed to; hot.
A curl of lemon skin. Never sugar.

$7.00 | 32 Pages | Out of Print

New Release: The Last Day by Krikor Der Hohannesian

The Last Day by Krikor Der Hohannesian Červená Barva Press, 2023

Krikor Der Hohannesian’s poems have appeared in over 275 literary journals including The South Carolina Review, Atlanta Review, Louisiana Literature, Connecticut Review, Comstock Review and Natural Bridge. He is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and author of three books, "Ghosts and Whispers" (Finishing Line Press, 2010), "Refuge in the Shadows" (Cervená Barva Press, 2013) and "First Generation" (Dos Madres Press, 2020). "Ghosts and Whispers" was a finalist for the Mass Book awards poetry category in 2011. "First Generation" was selected as a "must read" by Mass Book Awards in 2021.

Cover art: "City Landscape" by Garabed Der Hohannesian

$16.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-20-8 | 37 Pages

May 27, 2013:
Refuge in the Shadows by Krikor Der Hohannesian

Refuge in the Shadows by Krikor Der Hohannesian Červená Barva Press, 2013

Krikor Der Hohannesian lives in Medford, MA and has been writing poetry for some 40 years though only submitting work over the past several years. Since then, he has had poems published in many literary journals including The Evansville Review, The South Carolina Review, Atlanta Review, Peregrine, The New Renaissance, Hawaii Pacific Review and Connecticut Review. He also received honorable mention for the New England Poetry Club's Gretchen Warren Award for best published poem of 2010. His first chapbook, "Ghosts and Whispers," has been published by Finishing Line Press (2010). He also serves as Assistant Treasurer of the New England Poetry Club.

Cover Art: Garabed Der Hohannesian

"In Krikor Der Hohannesian's poetry, we hear things we might not be able to hear otherwise. "A man is down" signals the wind and rain coming in from the east, and the poet listens. In another poem a wife is keening, a child is crying, and the poet listens, listens with all his imagination and his heart. We hear colonial whispers emanating from the Granary Burial Ground. We hear the particular beauty of the names of the winds in many languages, and in another poem we hear the equally specific sadness of parents grieving a lost child. We hear final words, and words that should have been said, and we hear in several of these poems the long, agonized memory traces of the Armenian genocide. In all there is a deeply empathic imagination at work, and these poems give the poet and the reader alike a place of refuge, a place in the shadows in which to hold onto what is so profoundly dear and filled with meaning."
"“Fred Marchant, Author of The Looking House

CRATERS OF THE MOON

""¦and the dead tree gives no shelter"
T.S. Eliot "“ The Wasteland

the land is not quite black here,
more the deathly gray of volcanic ash
that mimes the absence of color.
Hiroshima might have looked like this
the morning after. Squeezed hard

between fissures in a vast mantle of tuff
haphazard scrub pine stretch gaunt fingers
skyward, clawing for what they cannot eke
from leached earth. Forlorn natural scarecrows

with no birds to scare off nor crops to shade
forsaken even by black buzzards
looping in futile parabolas.

Craters of the Moon National Monument Idaho

Reviews

Boston Area Small Press And Poetry Scene
Review by Dennis Daly
June 9, 2013
Refuge in the Shadows: by Krikor Der Hohannesian
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/

$7.00 | 44 Pages | In Stock

May 27, 2013:
Imaginary Planet poems by Alan Elyshevitz

Imaginary Planet poems by Alan Elyshevitz Červená Barva Press, 2013

Winner of the 2011 CervenÃ¡ Barva Press Poetry Contest

Alan Elyshevitz is a poet and short story writer who was born in New York City and now lives in East Norriton, PA. He is the author of a short story collection, The Widows and Orphans Fund (Stephen F. Austin State University Press), and two poetry chapbooks, The Splinter in Passion's Paw (New Spirit) and Theory of Everything (Pudding House). He is a two-time recipient of a fellowship in fiction writing from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of English at the Community College of Philadelphia.

"To put it in baseball terms, Alan Elyshevitz is a five-tool poet: his poems smooth as silk, whether he's imagining Akhmatova, trying to make sense, as we all are, of this often confusing world, or acknowledging that while pizza may be bad for you, it's heavenly and he's going to enjoy some slices. How can you not love a poet who writes, "The soul cranes its neck to observe/the maximum number of yellow bikinis"? Imaginary Planet is full of such nuggets, a book with intelligence and compassion to burn. Elyshevitz is a poet to savor and be thankful for."
-Tim Suermondt, author of Just Beautiful

Reviews

Review by Doug Holder: http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2013/06/imaginary-planet-poems-by-alan.html?spref=fb

$7.00 | 35 Pages | In Stock

March 7, 2013:
Microtones by Robert Vaughan

Microtones by Robert Vaughan Červená Barva Press, 2013

Robert Vaughan leads writing roundtables at Redbird- Redoak Writing. His writing has appeared in hundreds of journals. His short prose, "10,000 Dollar Pyramid" was a finalist in the Micro-Fiction Awards 2012. Also, "Ten Notes to the Guy Studying Jujitsu" was a finalist for the Gertrude Stein Award 2013. He is senior flash fiction editor at JMWW, and Lost in Thought magazines. His book, Flash Fiction Fridays, is at Amazon. His website is at: http://www.robert-vaughan.com/

"Hip, rousing, and utterly winning, Microtones reveals Robert Vaughan as a sly master of concision, a nimble ringmaster of short-takes and X-ray-savvy mini-portraits. Buoyant, brimming with clear-eyed humor ("I have a bachelor of arts in folding laundry") and a larkish cinema veritÃ© candor, leavened with small gusts of compassion and social acumen, this is a chapbook Frank O'Hara would have loved."
-Cyrus Cassells, author of The Crossed-Out Swastika

"Robert Vaughan sucks us into his luminous vortex with guts, humor and grit. Microtones is as much about transcendence as falling. Vaughan blasts through the subterfuge of the unsaid and lets us "face gravity head-on." This is a fearless, unparalleled collection reminiscent of Lydia Davis that takes us on a "free fall" of a ride we want to jump back on over and over again. Read it!"
-Meg Tuite, author of Domestic Apparition

Legacy

An observer would have
thought her unsuited
for that frame.

I wondered why my
parents kept the photo on
the piano. She'd died over

ten years ago. Died on her
own, by her own stupidity.
A visitor would have

thought her adorable,
precocious, serene.
Unable to see the contagious

recklessness. Unable to see
the damage she inflicted.
How my family came undone.

I slip her photo into
the desk drawer. Underneath
a stack of report cards.

Reviews

Sabotage Review:
http://sabotagereviews.com/2013/08/07/microtones-by-robert-vaughan/

Flash Fiction Chronicles:
http://www.everydayfiction.com/flashfictionblog/book-review-microtones-by-robert-vaughan/

Counterexample Poetics:
http://www.counterexamplepoetics.com/2013/07/meg-tuite-interviews-robert-vaughan-for.html

"Microtones," reviewed by Michael Gillan Maxwell
Your Own Backyard
June 9, 2013
http://michaelgillanmaxwell.com/

$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9883713-9-2 | 36 Pages | In Stock

March 7, 2013:
amores gitano (gypsy loves) by Roberto Carlos Garcia

amores gitano (gypsy loves) by Roberto Carlos Garcia Červená Barva Press, 2013

Roberto Carlos Garcia's work has appeared in Connotation Press- An Online Artifact, Wilderness House Literary Review, Poets & Artists Magazine, Metazen, Atticus Review, and others. His fiction is included in the anthology "The Lost Children," a book of 30 short stories to benefit children's charities PROTECT and Children 1st U.K.

"Amores Gitano (gypsy loves)" is his first chapbook.

A native New Yorker, he now lives and works in New Jersey where he is pursuing an MFA in Poetry and Poetry Translation at Drew University's Low Residency MFA Program.

You can follow Roberto Carlos Garcia on Twitter at @thespokenmind. His website is www.robertocarlosgarcia.tumblr.com

"In his chapbook, amores gitano, Roberto Carlos Garcia breathes adult passion into the craft of desire, these poems strip themselves, naked. They flirt and they want and each section a near erotic frame of determined risk ready to widen the realm of the reader's senses. Here is a poet who can dress and undress the lyric with his mind, hands and tongue."
-Thomas Sayers Ellis, Author of Skin Inc. Identity Repair Poems and The Maverick Room

"Roberto Carlos Garcia gives us twenty stunning gypsy loves in amores gitano that together construct a language so wrought with desire it swaggers. This is a luminous book that marks the emergence of a new and important voice that is sure to stir up all kinds of bad."
-Sean Nevin, Author of Oblivio Gate

18.

There's a cruelty
about her
that's always hungry.

When she finally takes,
finally tastes flesh
& is full,
what's left of me
is loved again,
her cruelty abates.

In many ways
I'm a keeper
in a zoo.

Once the lions are fed
I can enter the cage
but still,
I'm leaving my life
to chance.

$7.00 | 30 Pages | Out of Print

January 25, 2012:
Except for That Poems by Rachel Goldstein

Except for That Poems by Rachel Goldstein Červená Barva Press, 2013

Cover Artist: Rachel Goldstein

Rachel Goldstein is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She was born in Germany in 1946 in a displaced person's hospital. At the age of two, she moved to La Paz, Bolivia with her parents. Five years later, her family emigrated to Montreal, Canada, where she completed her education with a degree in English Literature from McGill University. Her poems have been widely published. In 2005, she won Second Prize in the Robert Penn Warren Award.

"The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Rachel Goldstein writes with a searing authenticity haunting in its evocative power. Her spare, elegant poems provide intimate and poignant insights into a harrowing time and lives lived bravely afterward."
-Barbara Wallace Grossman, Professor of Drama, Tufts University; Presidential Appointee to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2000-2005)

"In this biographical collection, the author chronicles her parents' experiences before, during and after World War II. She helps the reader understand, "you were not there [when] eyes tilted toward the impossible." Each and every one of them was a "skin-thin weight [with] miles of wind in their bones." Their story will not die as long as "the willows still stand faithful in leafy gowns" and daughter-poet "sing what will not be redeemed.""
-Michal Mahgerefteh, Publisher Poetica Magazine

Reviews

Feb. 2, 2013 Doug Holder Blogspot Review:
Review of Except For That by Rachel Goldstein

$8.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9883713-1-6 | 33 Pages | In stock

November 19, 2012:
Posture a fiction chapbook by Ateet Tuli

Posture by Ateet Tuli Červená Barva Press, 2012

Winner of the 2011 Červená Barva Press Fiction Contest
Judge: Catherine Sasanov

Ateet Tuli lives and works in New York City.
Cover art by Ateet Tuli.

Fortune Teller

Perfume bomb whose silk surface protects a silver subcutaneous and is surrounded by parchment, you draw me close with evocations of mother preparing Dal for the week. The remembered architecture of you below cinnamon, against cardamom, below lime draws me so close I overlook your anger, which makes me cry.

You are capable of destruction, of warping a weft of garlic and chilies. I could cool you, put you in the fridge till you cannot overwhelm me. I could heat you, sweat you till natural sugar caramelizes and you can tell me nothing. I could hurt you also, dear onion. A mutual respect actualized as we grasp each other.

Pulled from a womb of dirt, you also have roots in ancient Asia. In eating you, I eat my relatives; their ashes fed your ancestry where they were spread. The dance of eating and burning you within my own burning body fertilizes the future, when in turn I will feed your children.

I dissect you, your rings akin to those of a tree, until I reach and consume your center. Its delicate youth lingers on my breath and is a flashlight for my tongue.

$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9883713-3-0 | 22 Pages | In Stock

August 23, 2012:
Burden of Solace Poems by Teneice Durrant Delgado

Burden of Solace Poems by Teneice Durrant Delgado Červená Barva Press, 2012

Teneice Durrant Delgado is a co-founder and poetry editor for Blood Lotus: an online literary journal, and a proud graduate of Spalding University's Low-Residency MFA. She is the publisher and managing editor for Winged City Press Chapbooks and also serves on the editorial board for New Sins Press.

Teneice is originally from Akron, Ohio but currently lives in Dayton, Ohio. Her poems have appeared in the Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Heartland Review, The Furnace Review, Pirene's Fountain, Glass, Pisgah Review, Soundings East and in two chapbooks: Flame Above Flame and The Goldilocks Complex. She is currently pursuing a degree in Community Counseling at the University of Dayton.

Author's Note
I have strived to make this chapbook as historically accurate as possible. There is not much information on the Irish Slave trade, but I found Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl by Kate McCafferty and To Hell, or Barbados: the ethnic cleansing of Ireland by Sean O'Callaghan to be particularly insightful. I'm also grateful to Dr. Natalie Zacek for meeting with me after a random email and an even more random trip to Manchester, U.K.

"In Burden of Solace, Teneice Delgado's poems guide us through the brutality of the Irish slave trade while making a clear and poetic argument for human resilience and dignity under seemingly unendurable circumstances. This poet's ear is clearly tuned to the past. Delgado tells a story that needs to be heard and she gives deft voice to the resigned and defiant."
-Kathleen Driskel, Associate Professor of Creative Writing, Spalding University

"In Burden of Solace, Teneice Durrant Delgado boldly examines pain, fear, inevitability, and the soul's arduous endurance. These poems yield an understanding of human captivity from new, devastating angles, and they vividly convey the ways in which hope can wither and flare."
-Marcus Jackson, Cave Canem Fellow

It is ironic that theorists proclaim we may be in a post-racial society. Since poets are truth-seekers and truth-tellers, more and more books being published - and lauded - investigate race. Teneice Durrant Delgado's latest effort, from her poems "Susan" through "Jamaica," delve both deeply and deftly into the Irish slave trade, which has not been widely discussed. The poems in this collection, "Solace," offer us the opposite. The Ship's name remains one thing, while the planks rattle and the "air stood thick." Reading work like this is what we need to do. We must remember slavery, for it is "something ancient and rage-filled," but also current and must become forever "forbidden."
-Glenn Sheldon author of Angels of Anarchy

Not John

I admire
the way he takes flogs
without flinching, hate him
for his strength when I cry
out. I wait, watch
his eyes. They are the color
of boiling molasses. He won't lean
into any white womb. He spits on my
red face on his way through the field.
He doesn't speak much
English, not many of us
slaves, white or black, do. But
he knows enough to say
I am not John. The mulatto driver
laughs with his whip. Get in line,
Not John.
Not white, he says,
not John. Not John won't
say his real name. Barbados
isn't big enough. He will not waste
his mothers' tongues
on rotting, sugar
sharp mouths.

Reviews

Poetry Matters: Poetry Book Reviews and Interviews
http://readwritepoetry.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-review-of-burden-of-solace-and.html

Review by Barbara Bialick:
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2012/08/review-of-burden-of-solace-poems-by.html

$7.00 | 26 Pages | In Stock

July 9, 2012:
The Land of the Four Rivers by Matthew A. Hamilton

The Land of the Four Rivers My Experience as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Armenia (2006-2008) by Matthew A. Hamilton Červená Barva Press, 2012

Matthew is an MFA candidate at Fairfield University and a poetry reader for Mason's Road and Drunken Boat. Prior to graduate school, he served as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Armenia (2006-2008) and the Philippines (2008-2010). He is also a former Legislative Assistant on Capitol Hill and a Benedictine Monk.

A 1999 graduate of Belmont Abbey College (BA History) Matthew is currently the librarian at Benedictine College Preparatory, an all-male, Catholic military high school. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.

The Land of the Four Rivers

I crawl out of the plane and walk
through a terminal that reminds me
of a prison I once visited in Moscow.
I smell soviet uniforms pushing people
out of moldy bread lines.
I see a black and white picture of two soldiers
beating a man in the frozen gulag.
I follow the line from baggage claim
out into the diesel air packed with greetings
and logistics, firm handshakes.
I throw my bag under the bus and take my seat,
fall asleep as we pull away toward the rising sun.
I wake up and look out the window.
Mt. Ararat is protruding
from the earth like a newborn's tooth,
searching for the lost city of Noah,
the eyes of red delicious.
I see sun shadows, blue tears
of Eden dance in fields of cognac
and gold, the crevices of echoing snow
and yellow skies nourishing the navel
of the world.

Reviews

The winner for Peace Corps Writers 2013 Best Book of Poetry:
http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/pc-writers/2013/09/12/matthew-a-hamilton/

Fairfield University Review:
http://blog.fairfield.edu/inspired/?p=912

goodreads:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15846136-the-land-of-the-four-rivers-my-experience-as-a-us-peace-corps-voluntee

Christopher Allen interviews Matthew A. Hamilton on his blog "I Must Be Off"
http://www.imustbeoff.com/#!/2012/05/expat-author-interview-with-matthew.html

$7.00 | 42 Pages | In Stock

June 16, 2012:
All This Dark 24 Tanka Sequences by John Elsberg & Eric Greinke

All This Dark 24 Tanka Sequences by John Elsberg & Eric Greinke Červená Barva Press, 2012

This chapbook is a companion piece to Catching The Light: 12 Haiku Sequences by John Elsberg and Eric Greinke, which Červená Barva Press published in 2009.

Eric Greinke has been active on the literary scene for nearly fifty years. He has been a bookseller, a publisher, an editor, a creative writing teacher, a book reviewer and a social worker for special needs children. His published work includes poetry, fiction, translation, social criticism and poetics, and has appeared in many books and chapbooks and in journals such as The Hurricane Review, Abraxas, Chiron Review, New York Quarterly, Wilderness House Literary Review, Main St. Rag, The South Carolina Review, California Quarterly, Mad Poets Review, Home Planet News, The University of Tampa Review, and the Paterson Literary Review. He has won several prizes, most recently a 2012 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award from the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. His most recent books are Traveling Music (2011), Beyond Our Control - Two Collaborative Poems (with Hugh Fox, 2012) and Conversation Pieces - Selected Interviews (2012), all from Presa Press. He is known for his collaborations with other poets, including Ronnie Lane, Brian Adam, Mark Sonnenfeld, Harry Smith, Richard Kostelanetz, Marine Robert Warden and Hugh Fox. All This Dark is his second collaboration with John Elsberg. They are working on a third. Website: www.ericgreinke.com.

John Elsberg is a poet, reviewer, editor, and historian. He is the author of over a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, and his work has been in a number of anthologies. He was the host of open poetry readings at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland, for almost twenty-five years. He also has led various writing workshops, including explorations of experimental poetry with high school students. In the late 1970's he was the fiction editor of Gargoyle. He has since been the editor or poetry editor of several other literary magazines, ranging from Bogg to The Delmarva Review on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where he and his wife Connie now spend a good part of their time. As a young man he taught for the University of Maryland, and then he spent many years as an editor/publisher of history books. His poems have appeared in a wide range of journals, such as Hanging Loose, the New Orleans Review, Lost & Found Times, Edgz, RAW NerVZ (Canada), American Tanka, and the Lilliput Review.
boggmag@aol.com

All This Dark

all this dark
stubble in winter sun
but I know
beyond the next turn
the wheat is neon green

cardinals
stay with us through
the winter
an oriental bush
that blooms in fall

late geese
across a rising moon
long trumpets
playing in a royal court
they exit left on cue

Reviews

Verse Wisconsin:
http://versewisconsin.org/Issue111/reviews/elsberg_greinke.html

Review by Dennis Daly:
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2012/07/all-this-dark-24-tanka-sequences-by.html

$7.00 | 32 Pages | In Stock

March 3, 2012:
Circle Straight Back by Noel Sloboda

Circle Straight Back by Noel Sloboda Červená Barva Press, 2012

Originally from Massachusetts, Noel Sloboda lived in Missouri while earning his Ph.D. from Washington University. He currently serves as dramaturg for the Harrisburg Shakespeare Company and teaches at Penn State York. The author of the poetry collection Shell Games (sunnyoutside, 2008), he has also published several chapbooks. Learn more here: http://www2.yk.psu.edu/sites/njs16/

"In that ghostly area between flash fiction and prose poems, you'll find the work of Noel Sloboda. At his best, his dry humor and easy way with a sentence propel you forward from each piece into the next. Not only will Sloboda show you where you've been in the world, he'll let you know a bit about the future, too. His characters, "˜hungry for redemption,' are the real achievement in this kind of short work. Solidly real, honest and forthright, they'll stick with you like early childhood memories recalled by chance in the day-to-day struggle of living."
-Rusty Barnes

Of Species

A tyrannosaurus and a triceratops put their heads together and guessed what would inevitably happen to all the dinosaurs, but the two could not agree how the end would come about.

It will surely be a flood, boomed the tyrannosaurus.

I rather suspect meteors will rain down, countered the triceratops in a loud contralto.

They debated for some time, before finally agreeing to disagree, since preventative measures-they decided-were more important, ultimately, than causes. United, they resolved to construct a massive canoe with a great umbrella mounted in its middle. They called their craft The Salvation, and as soon as it was seaworthy, they eagerly launched. In their haste, they forgot to bring paddles, and so the tyrannosaurus and triceratops drifted into the deeps, then drifted and drifted some more.

"It seems," said the triceratops with an ironic smirk, "we've designed our own undoing. Surely, we'll both starve out here."

"One of us won't," said the tyrannosaurus, a gleam in one of his yellow eyes, which had a center shaped like a sharp tooth.

When he had finished his meal, the tyrannosaurs sighed heavily, regretting that his arms were too little to wipe his chops. Then he took down the umbrella and waited for the meteors.

Reviews

Flash Fiction Chronicles:
http://www.everydayfiction.com/flashfictionblog/book-review-circle-straight-back-by-noel-sloboda/

$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock

November 20, 2011:
Baptism by Michael J. Atwood

Baptism by Michael J. Atwood Červená Barva Press, 2011

Michael J. Atwood is the author of the short story collection, HiStory of Santa Monica (Aqueous Books 2010) and a columnist and editor for the website, FastertThanForty.com. His work has appeared in a number of literary magazines and online journals. He is a graduate of the University of Southern California's Master of Professional Writing program, where he focused on fiction and screenwriting. As an undergraduate, Atwood studied at Boston College, majoring in English and interning for The Boston Globe. He now resides in North Attleborough with his wife, Melanie, and children, William, Megan, and Kelsey and is an English teacher in the Boston area. He is currently working on his first novel. For more information see www.mjatwood.com and www.historyofsantamonica.com.

Forward
"Baptism" was a story written out of hunger. I had been working on a collection of short stories for around seven years and no one wanted to publish it. It was lacking that final story, the single that every band needs to make their album a success. In fact, the only success I had realized as a writer was a story published by Gloria Mindock on her online journal called Istanbul Literary Review. The story was entitled "Ancient Hibernians." It the story of a young comedian's return from Santa Monica, California back to Boston to attend his favorite Irish uncle's funeral. With the recent capture of Whitey Bulger in that very same seaside city where I drafted "Ancient Hibernians," a Boston-Irish mob tale, "The Shebeen," and "Baptism," the fact that I wrote it and other tales about crime, addiction, and death seems quite eerie. As we all found out recently, Whitey Bulger lived anonymously just eight blocks away from me during the years 2002-2005 (we both had highly sought after "rent-control" apartments). For all I know, the leader of the Winter Hill Gang smiled walked past me as I pushed my son, William in his carriage on the 3rd Street Promenade.

"Baptism" is a story of an addict healing, being born again, and returning to his roots, his family. It is about a sacred Catholic ritual that few choose to take part in. Gabriel Bradley is a hesitant godfather in this story but he's also the baptized as he meets a new love and is anointed by the cold New England rain as he stares out to the Charles River thinking about his failure in sunny California. In the end, Gabriel has found himself again and realigns his values that have been corrupted by Hollywood and his semi-success there.
-Michael J. Atwood
June 2011

$7.00 | 31 Pages | In Stock

October 23, 2011:
The Hallelujah of Listening by Preston H. Hood
CD Version available also!

2012 Maine Literary Awards:
The Hallelujah of Listening by Preston H. Hood won the Book Award for Poetry!

The Hallelujah of Listening by Preston H. Hood Červená Barva Press, 2011

The Cover Art is a photo of G. Buddy Swenson's Elusive Liberty (August, 2001) Paint on Wood Panel (48"X"36")

Preston Hood was born in Fall River, Massachusetts and grew up in Swansea, Mass. He served in Vietnam with SEAL TEAM 2 (1970), and was a graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Bachelor of Arts in English, Magna cum laude, the University of Southern Maine, Bachelor of Science, and the University of Maine, Orono, Master of Education. For fifteen years, he was a member of Veteran's for Peace. He published a poetry CD, Snake Medicine (2002), which was recorded by Berred Ouellette, and produced by Master Mind Audio. Summer Home Press published his first book of poetry, A Chill I Understand (2006). The Hallelujah of Listening is his first Chapbook (2011).

The Hallelujah of Listening by Preston H. Hood CD Version

A CD of Preston H. Hood reading his poems is also available for $7.00. It was recorded by Berred Ouellette and produced by Disc Makers. The cover art of the CD face is a photo of G. Buddy Swenson's Elusive Liberty (August, 2001) Paint on Wood Panel (48"X"36").

After attending The William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences for 9 years, he edited with Jacqueline Loring and Gary Rafferty the Summer Home Review I (2002), and II (2005).

Through the Cape Cod Writer's Center, he was interviewed with John McHugh, Secretary of the Henrich Boll Association, County Mayo, Ireland for Books of the World Television Program in Harwich MA (2006).

With Jacqueline Loring, he co-presented an overview of the Sixties Beat Poetry for The Wrinkle in Time: San Francisco Summer of Love (1967) Conference at Osher Life Long Learning Institute at University of Southern Maine. At the same workshop, he served on a panel discussion of both Civil Rights Issues and Why We Were in Vietnam (2009).

His poetry has been published in national and international journals and anthologies. He is a retired teacher and administrator currently writing his memoir. He spends his other time bicycling, kayaking, and hiking with his spouse Barbara J. Noone. He lives in Lyman, Maine.

The Hallelujah of Listening

From Dooniver we're lured
   by angels in the sun-dappled wind. They dance
      with shadows, their radiant hair,
         a seascape of waves & salt sundog air.

Some of us walk through Achill's mist
   anointed by the whispering surf. Or charge into a valley
      of an image, rave about the lowered moon
         behind Slievemore's cloud-covered top.

Like first-light finches, I dart
   into the thicket, feel the cool
      morning silence. I climb with pilgrims
         under a salmon-coral sky, voices chant invocations.

The red-bellied fuchsias lift & sway
   on this steep path, bloodstones of penance. Even sheep
      turn to listen. I wish I knew if Croagh Patrick could be mindful
         of them, & us, rapt in our chorus of hallelujahs.

With this stunning collection, THE HALLELUJAH OF LISTENING, Preston Hood will take his place among the greatest of the poet-warriors and poet veterans of our times. Hood's poems bear witness to how the human spirit survives that which would kill it. One speaker stitches up the opening in the sky "before the dead crawl out" ("Opening in the Sky"). Another, painting naked in the yard among the blue jays and bees, draws "a door in the sky to enter," hoping to "find what's lost" ("first born"). I'm awed by the poetic joining of courage and beauty in these fierce and precise poems.
-Cynthia Hogue, Professor, Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, Tempe; Or Consequence (2010).

I love Preston Hood's new poems, and I cherish the spots of time he has been able to hold still in these poems just long enough to change your life. (From the Forward)
-Bruce Weigl

With Preston Hood's The Hallelujah of Listening, I see a newfound confidence in the expression of his art. His beautiful images are often intimate and passionate, illusive and questioning, then shocking, real and haunting. As with other veteran poets, even when Preston's poem is not about war, it forces you to think about warring, keeps you out of your comfort zone. In this new book, Preston asks us to "enter the mist, sit down in the fire of thought" to "let go of sorrow, let sorrow go" and promises, "the spirit lives to a renewal." The journey is worth taking.
-Jacqueline M. Loring, Poet, Playwright, and Editor, Summer Home Review Anthologies, Volumes I and II

The poetry of Preston Hood's The Hallelujah of Listening is indeed a "climb from the struggle into the marvelous" as he says in his poem, "Our Singing." His new book reads almost like the scripture of Psalms such is its beauty and transcendence. Indeed, "a tongue of the sky" slipped into his mouth and our soul is awakened to the realms in which only poetry has a voice.
-Lamont B Steptoe, Publisher/founder of Whirlwind Press, Winner of the American Book Award (2005)

Reviews

Hayden's Ferry Review:
http://haydensferryreview.blogspot.com/2012/03/book-review-hallelujah-of-listening.html

$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9831041-7-9 | 56 Pages | In Stock

Buy the Book for $7.00 >
Buy the CD for $5.00 >
Buy the Book & CD for $12.00 >

May 24, 2011:
A Palace of Strangers Is No City by Stephen Frech

A Palace of Strangers Is No City by Stephen Frech Červená Barva Press, 2011

Cover Art: Stanislav Lahoda

Stephen Frech has earned degrees from Northwestern University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Cincinnati. He has published three volumes of poetry: Toward Evening and the Day Far Spent (Kent State University Press) won the 1995 Wick Poetry Chapbook Contest, If Not For These Wrinkles of Darkness won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize, published in 2001, and The Dark Villages of Childhood won the 2008 Mississippi Valley Poetry Chapbook Prize. He has been the recipient of the Elliston Poetry Writing Fellowship, the Milton Center Post-Graduate Writing Fellowship, and grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and the Illinois Arts Council.

He is founder and editor of Oneiros Press, publisher of limited edition, letterpress poetry broadsides. Oneiros broadsides have been purchased by special collections libraries around the world, among them the Newberry Library (Chicago), the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the University of Amsterdam Print Collection.

Stephen Frech is Associate Professor of English at Millikin University.

Stephen Frech Website: www.stephenfrech.com

Stephen Frech in his sequence of prose poems called A Palace of Strangers Is No City gives us a Kafkaesque world, signaled by the very first poem that ends with the frightening uncertainty of whether an unknown "you" is having a carrousel maker's dream, or whether the carrousel maker is having a dream of the "you." ["¦] There are of course many fine works that have dealt with imaginary and oppressive landscapes, but what makes Frech's book wonderfully creepy is that the oppression is so deeply existential. ["¦] Another prose sequence, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities comes to mind, and with Frech's mastery of the prose poem, it's not an exaggeration to say A Palace of Strangers Is No City ranks with that masterpiece.
-Peter Johnson, from the Introduction

A Palace of Strangers Is No City is a one-of-a-kind experience. In just twenty-two elegant pages it contains an epic journey across an imagined city. The happenings in this city are surreal, ominous, funny and vivid. The circumstances may be dreamlike, but the longing and the wisdom are entirely real.
-John Dalton, author of Heaven Lake

1.
When the carrousel maker died, he dreamed of horses, wild horses, giraffes, zebras, deer, all running riderless but in bright carnival colors, as if every animal he'd sculpted and painted in garish and gilt colors were running wild again as they had for him very early when he was young and hardly knew the difference between wild animals and those that circled the carrousel.

You dreamed that night of escaping on a carrousel. The guards fire at you every time you come around again. You crouch down low to streamline your body for speed, then ride upright around the back side to slow it down, to delay the inevitable encounter with the guards. You are having one of his dreams, or he is having one of his dreams for you.

2.
Dreams of confinement and escape follow each other uninterrupted, night after night until the one looks like the other. You walk a beach sided by high cliffs and turn to climb stone steps leading up. They're covered with sand; they enter the rock cliff tunneling in, so you're climbing in darkness. But there's sunlight ahead. Finally, stepped into full light, you push open the gate of a picket fence. The spring creaks. On the gate, a sign, dusted over. You must brush off the lettering with your thumb. It says: This is not the way to the world. You must return to the beach down the steps. You look around. In the large fenced fields, grass has grown tall or the deep green of vegetable leaves spread in the sun. A woman has hiked her skirt up over her knees and she is bent over tending to a plant. A dog nearby begins to growl deep in his throat. You know you must leave and take the long, steep stairs, covered with sand, carrying the large bag of birdseed you've had with you all this time, searching for sure footing in the dark, back to the deserted beach where you find an endless line of stairwells leading up. You must try each one. Confinement. Escape. They need each other.

$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9831041-3-1 | 33 Pages | In Stock

A Palace of Strangers Is No City by Stephen Frech Broadside: $20.00 | In Stock

May 15, 2011:
MUD SEASON by Pamela Annas

MUD SEASON by Pamela Annas Červená Barva Press, 2011

Pamela Annas grew up in the Navy, constantly moving from country to country. She singlehandedly raised a child who's now in college and is herself a professor and associate dean at University of Massachusetts Boston, member of the editorial collective of The Radical Teacher, author of a Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath and co-author of two textbook/anthologies, Literature and Society and Against the Current. She looks forward to taking up blues harp in her retirement and in the meantime is quite pleased to see this first chapbook appear beautifully in print from Červená Barva Press.

"What resonates most clearly and powerfully in Pam Annas's Mud Season is her ability to assume a variety of distinctive voices, and in so doing, speak from a variety of experiences. This is made possible because of the poet's good ear for a diction that is not present simply to announce or decorate or please, but instead to carefully lure the reader into the lives she inhabits in order to tell a fresh and illuminating story of who we are."
-Bruce Weigl

Clotheslines

Back of the Navy housing project
the women hang the laundry.
Under a thin morning sun, braced
against a keening wind, my mother lifts
wet towels out of the wicker basket
heaves them to the curving clothesline
higher than the top of her head
and a late setting sickle moon.
I hand up the wooden pegs one by one
adrift in a cotton trance.

The back yards are a harbor of sails
rippling in the icy breeze.
Freezing stiff, cotton diapers
are lined up in ranks on review.
My brother and I play hide and seek
among the swaying sheets, or crouch
between two lines as in a bivouacked
tent, telling stories of heroes and feasts.
Rows of back doors, scuffed dirt,
a red tricycle.

Family uniforms come off the line
in a fading yellow afternoon. We
slide the pegs back into their cloth bag,
stack frozen diapers in the basket.
Red chapped hands wrapped
around mugs of hot chocolate thaw
in the cramped steamy apartment.
Clean clothes relax into tenderness
throwing off a fresh cold scent,
silver notes from a Celtic harp.

My mother's life, the story of a day:
gathering, washing, hanging, drying,
sorting and folding, putting away.

$7.00 | 40 Pages | In Stock

February 10, 2011:
A Story and Poetry Chapbook Collection Edited by Susan Tepper

Valentine Day Massacre Edited by Susan Tepper Červená Barva Press, 2011

Fictionaut Authors' Valentine Day Massacre Challenge

Because I am a fool for love, I couldn't resist starting a Valentine Day Massacre challenge at Fictionaut. The result, as you see, is a complex assortment of printed goodies (white, milk, and dark chocolate) dedicated to valentines everywhere.
-Susan Tepper

Stories & Poems by:
Doug Bond, Angela Brett, Estelle Bruno, Sheldon Lee Compton, Sara T. Einhorn, David Erlewine, Susan Gibb, Frank Hinton, Matt Kang, Dorothee Lang, Ryan McDermott, John Minichillo, Kevin Paul Myrick, Nora Nadjarian, Ajay Nair, Gabriel Orgrease, Derek Osborne, Meg Pokrass, Sam Rasnake, Beate Sigriddaughter, Marcus Speh, Paul Steven Stone, Miles Tepper, Susan Tepper, xTx

February 11, 2011, Fictionaut blog:
http://blog.fictionaut.com/2011/02/11/valentines-day-massacres/

$7.00 | 49 Pages | In Stock

January 15, 2011: A new fiction chapbook from Zvi A. Sesling

Across Stones Of Bad Dreams Poems by Zvi A. Sesling Červená Barva Press, 2010

Zvi A. Sesling has published poems in Midstream, Saranac Review, New Delta Review, Voices Israel Anthology, Cyclamens & Swords, Ship of Fools, The Chaffin Journal, Poetica, Ibbetson Street, Istanbul Literary Review, Illya's Honey, Wavelength, Asphodel, Main Channel Voices and Hazmat Review, and many others. In 2004 he was awarded Third Place in the Reuben Rose International Poetry Competition and in 2007 he received First Prize in the Reuben Rose International Poetry Competition. He was selected to read his poetry at New England/Pen "Discovery" in 2008 by Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish. He is editor of the Muddy River Poetry Review.

January 17, 2010
Review: Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/

This great chapbook is about the giant dumpster of memory in the realm of past loves gone dead. The image of death carries right into the end, where Sesling imagines heaven as a welcoming place with a beautiful aquamarine sky like his mother's ring"¦and yet there are his mother and father and relatives still instilling guilt and criticism and where "Piles of ancestors like old newspapers in the basement/will present themselves as headlines for me to acknowledge,"¦the sun yellow as the stars my aunts, uncles, cousins wore." Only "Dogs from my past will bound forward through green fields,/tails wagging a quick metronome to their happy bark"¦" Continued...

$7.00 | 38 Pages | In Stock

November 6th: A new fiction chapbook from Joan Gelfand

Here and Abroad by Joan Gelfand Červená Barva Press, 2010

Winner of the 2010 Červená Barva Press Fiction Contest, Judged by Dorothy Freudenthal

Joan's poetry, fiction, reviews and essays have appeared in national and international magazines, anthologies and literary journals including Rattle, Kalliope, The Toronto Quarterly, The Huffington Post and The MacGuffin. Past President of the Women's National Book Association, Joan is the Fiction Editor for Zeek Magazine and teaches in the California Poets in the Schools program. "A Dreamer's Guide to Cities and Streams" was published by SF Bay Press in 2009 and "Seeking Center," by Two Bridges Press in 2006. You can listen to her CD, "Transported," on reverbnation.com http://joangelfand.com

"Joan Gelfand is at her best in her new collection of short stories. They're quirky, original, and highly entertaining with surprising dark moments that will take your breath away."
-Mary Mackey Author of The Widow's War

"EAT WRITE LOVE. Joan Gelfand whisks us, briefly, to Paris, where the present meets the past in both its ugliness and its grace, to Florence, where art meets its cruelest friend, "art criticism," to a more anonymous if earthier place in our own land where families and lovers pass and balance, for a moment, on the pinnacle of Thanksgiving. Her stories, like her poetry, celebrate life and love, family, friendship, art - a scrumptious meal, and an intoxicating bottle of wine! (Warning: Do NOT read these stories on an empty stomach.)"
-Christopher Bernard, author of A Spy in the Ruins, cofounder of Caveat Lector

$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9831041-0-0 | 52 Pages | In Stock

October 16th: A new chapbook from Elaine Terranova

Elegiac: Footnotes to Rilke's Duino Elegies by Elaine Terranova Červená Barva Press, 2010

Elaine Terranova is the author of four collections of poems, Not To, New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 2006) which was a runner-up for the Poetry Society's William Carlos Williams Award, The Dog's Heart (Orchises Press, 2002), Damages (Copper Canyon Press, 1996), and The Cult of the Right Hand, winner of the 1990 Walt Whitman Award (Doubleday, 1991) and an earlier chapbook, Toward Morning/Swimmers (Hollow Spring Press, 1980), Her poems have appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares, Boulevard, and Pleiades, and in these and other anthologies, A Gift of Tongues, Blood to Remember: American Poets write about the Holocaust, A Cadence of Hooves, and Riffing on Strings. Her work has been part of The Poetry Society's Poetry in Motion project. Her translation of Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis appeared in the Penn Greek Drama Series (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). She has received a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a National Endowment in the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants. She won the Anna Davidson Rosenberg competition in 1992 and has been Banister Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College and a Fellow at Bread Loaf. She is a writing specialist at the Community College of Philadelphia and a faculty member of the Rutgers, Camden, MFA Program in Creative Writing.

"I've long admired Elaine Terranova's poetry and Elegiac is another first-rate collection. Taking Rilke's Duino Elegies as a starting point, these "footnotes" to the older poet's work are technically sophisticated and sonically lovely. They're also deeply moving, meditating on mortality, God, and the constantly vanishing past, retrievable only through the vagaries of memory or the creative imagination. These are beautiful, impressionistic poems distinguished especially for their shifting, subtle intelligence and their emotional force."
-Kevin Prufer, author of National Anthem

November 6, 2010
Review by Irene Koronas: http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2010/11/elegiac-footnotes-to-rilkes-duino.html

$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock

October 16th: A new chapbook from Jendi Reiter
Winner of the 2010 Červená Barva Press Poetry Contest

Barbie at 50 by Jendi Reiter Červená Barva Press, 2010

Winner of the 2010 Červená Barva Press Poetry Contest: Judged by Afaa Michael Weaver

Jendi Reiter's first book, A Talent for Sadness, was published in 2003 by Turning Point Books. Her poetry chapbook Swallow won the 2008 Flip Kelly Poetry Prize and was published in 2009 by Amsterdam Press. In 2010 she received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist's Grant for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The New Criterion, Mudfish, American Fiction, The Adirondack Review, The Broome Review, FULCRUM, Juked, The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Alligator Juniper, MARGIE: The American Journal of Poetry, Phoebe, Best American Poetry 1990 and many other publications. She is the editor of Poetry Contest Insider, an online guide to over 750 literary contests, published by www.winningwriters.com.
Visit her blog at www.jendireiter.com.

Jendi Reiter's Barbie at 50 contains an inventive re-imagining of the fairytale woman as well as iconic images of women, including Barbie. The poems are replete with surprise and peppered with humor. In her poem, "The Fallen Angel Writes a Letter Home" she writes, "I never run out of language. I'm easy listening. /Background music for the long drive away /from that sunset field where they fell under / the sweep of a great and lively silence." Her poems resound with lyrical language, and are not bound for silence, but for reading.In "The Happiness Myth" she jests, "Inside me is a thin person,/ two policemen, a rhododendron, and a sheepdog /trying to get out." Inside Barbie at 50 there is much more; a collection of well-crafted and delightful, well-imagined poems.
-Lori Desrosiers

Barbie at 50 is a lush collection of poems with lines embroidered with the craft of a studied life. It's Barbie outdoing herself, leaving off the accursed weight of a 1950's perfectionism to discover the truth of genuine joy. These are poems of a life more real than any doll's, as they point up the grace of having confronted the problematic entanglements that attempt to derail a woman making her way through the puzzles of maturing in the last fifty years, a time studded with all ridiculous matter. These poems show us a difficult tenderness harvested from what makes us weep and what makes us shout out in celebration, what makes us laugh.
-Afaa Michael Weaver, Simmons College

Throughout this collection, various poems include reference to the following brands: Barbie and Ken, trademarks of Mattel Corp.; Maybelline, a trademark of L'OrÃ©al USA Creative Inc.; and Project Runway, a trademark of Fashion Cents, LLC. No rights in these marks are claimed nor commercial affiliation intended.

$7.00 | 28 Pages | In Stock

September 2: A new chapbook by Hugh Fox

Where Sanity Begins by Hugh Fox Červená Barva Press, 2010

Hugh Fox is a 78 year old poet originally from Chicago, has spent most of his life teaching writing, American literature and film in Champaign-Urbana, Los Angeles, Caracas, Santa Catarina (Brazil), Buenos Aires, etc. He has 110 books published, his most recent being, The Collected Poetry of Hugh Fox, published last year by World Audience in New York.

CONJURING

My mind and clothes are caught
in March winds as
buildings and cars go flat,
whirled into remembrances
of worlds antedating ecological
suicide, when the last farmhouse
spoke and sick meant soft warm
milk, "supported," not "supporting,"
when all I had to do, after class
and homework, was to whirl and be
a paisano of yo-yo's and kites, bikes,
popsicles, chocolate bars, ice cream
and second-day doughnuts and smoke
whirled off bonfires where I was baking
potatoes underground, snow whirled
off buildings and I flew into the wind like
a comet, there were no walls between
me and my world and it all flowed through
and with me.

$7.00 | 57 Pages | In Stock

August 26: A new chapbook by Daniel Y. Harris and Adam Shechter

Paul Celan and the Messiah's Broken Levered Tongue: An Exponential Dyad by Daniel Y. Harris and Adam Shechter Červená Barva Press, 2010

As Ron Sukenick so aptly put it in his last book "Mosaic Man," Jews are both proto and posthuman. Adam Shechter and Daniel Y. Harris are possessed of that molten globe of fiery perdition that draws the brighter children of the tribe to the flame. Add poetry and oy! What can I say? Shechter and Harris have made another journey to the hellchamber of Jewish mystery/creation/death and came out in company, a big company that includes a lot of fried geniuses, but most of all they came out, and it's good to see them.
-Andrei Codrescu (www.codrescu.com), is the author of The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess (Princeton University Press) and edits Exquisite Corpse at (www. corpse.org).

I can't begin to comprehend/surround all that is transpiring here in this Harris/Shechter collaboration/fusion-I'll need other readings toward adequate bearings-but as Seine suicide Paul Celan hovers among these pages of prayerful heresies-"no Shabbos-always Shabbos"-I experience a language that wields "pen as scalpel," and I feel flayed but grateful for this awakening into wild inquiry/attack. By way of thousands of years of Jewish history & of their own lives slashed out in poems & prose pieces of mesmerizing power, even as they wonder if they've gone too far, these two visionaries/revisionists have made something powerful & new here, something of charismatic complication. Oi Vey, & mazel tov.
-William Heyen, author of Shoah Train: Poems, finalist for the National Book Award

Adam Shechter is from Un-Brooklyn, the imperceptible imperialist brownstone aesthetic of 1989 Prospect Park West benches by Garfield Street. Adam has never been published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review and this fact is likely to never change. For this reason, he started the online journal, The Blue Jew Yorker. Sadly, this quaintly anarchistic periodical has not found its reputation competitive with the above named titans of publishing. Still, Mr. Shechter receives great emotional satisfaction in publishing authors and artists in the journal. A tragic and ironic fact of Adam's life is that his neighborhood of birth and raising, Park Slope, now houses some of the most successful authors of the writing world. Roger Cohen moved in next to his parents, a house where the fabled Christiansen family once lived. In line with Freud, listening to the same song over and over is one of Adam's favorite hobbies.

Daniel Y. Harris, M.Div, holds a Master of Arts in Divinity from The University of Chicago, where he specialized in Jewish theology and comparative religion and wrote his dissertation on The Zohar. He is the author of Unio Mystica (Cross-Cultural Communications Press, 2009) and Hyperlinks of Anxiety (forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press, 2012). He is the associate editor of The Blue Jew Yorker. He is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Among his credits are: The Pedestal Magazine, Exquisite Corpse, In Posse Review, European Judaism, SoMa Literary Review, Mad Hatters' Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Wheelhouse Magazine, Moria, Ygdrasil, Wilderness House Literary Review, Poetry Magazine.com, Denver Quarterly, Convergence, Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture and The Other Voices International Among his art exhibitions credits are: The Jewish Community Library of San Francisco, Market Street Gallery, The Euphrat Museum and The Center for Visual Arts. His website is www.danielyharris.com.

Big Bridge, Jake Marmer's review:
http://www.bigbridge.org/BB15/toc.html
Click here for PDF Version

Review in The Pedestal:
http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/gallery.php?item=16628

Review in The Jewish Forward by Jake Marmer: http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/132899/

Paul Celan and the Messiah's Broken Levered Tongue was picked as one of the 5 most important poetry books of 2010 by The Jewish Daily Forward. http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/134268/

$7.00 | 58 Pages

Out of Stock

May 27th: My Soul Still A Virgin by Gulnar Ali Balata

My Soul Still A Virgin by Gulnar Ali Balata Červená Barva Press, 2010

Cover painting by Ghada Habib

Gulnar Ali Balata was born in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1974. She is the author of two books of poems, Luna and Twelve Months (Hawar Press, 2006) and Song of the Sad Ruins (Hawar Press, 2008) published in Duhok, Iraq. Gulnar has had work appear in a number of literary journals, websites and anthologies in Kurdish and Arabic languages which are her first and second languages. She is now busy with her first story, a novel, and a third book of poetry.
She received an associates degree in English from Duhok, Iraq. She taught English for three years before she left home in 1996. Gulnar received an associates degree from Bunker Hill Community College in 2009. She currently is working on her bachelors degree in art. Her work has been published in newspapers and magazines in Kurdish and extensively on the Internet.
She has been listed as one of the top Kurdish women's voices in modern Kurdish poetry. Her poems have a romantic power. She uses a clean and pure vocabulary.

These are poems of exile, torn from the soil of the author's native Kurdistan. They are poems of the human spirit orphaned. They demand of the reader the care and compassion any orphan requires to retain hope and nurture the promise of return.
-T. Michael Sullivan, Director William Joiner Center's Writers' Workshop

Gulnar's poetry speaks in English the language of her native Kurdistan. The mountains, streams, and valleys are both harsh and sensitive barriers in the mist. The ever present partridge reminds us of the country's beauty and beyond them and before them lies its sadness. Gulnar Ali Balata is a wonderful poet whom it has been my great pleasure to work with for the past several years watching her adapt her Kurdish and Arabic poetry to English.
-Tom Hooper, Bunker Hill, Community College

My soul still a virgin

The night holds its wings
Over the side of my expecting heart,
leaving wilted roses dew
on the morning star's face
smiling for the coming morning
that follows gulls' cheers.

Tears of the sky
Flow for the grief of the night
And the vanquished body
hiding in the corner of the wilderness
Picks up his broken pieces
And what's left of his tears
To seek new.

Preoccupied in abhorrent life
the maiden spirit with
its portable undying thirst,
its mystery of existence
and sense of its freedom of dreams and hope
remain after the confiscation of
waking up in the dewy morning,
Overlooking from the longing window
The chirping of birds.

Three-colored autumn leaves
Squeezed with tears of grief last night
Despite struggling with the wind
Despite the rain
Adhering with tears on my car window
Smile on my face
Penetrate my skin
Dancing with Nightingale's music

Sorrows of the body's reeling roar;
and the Spirit is still a virgin
which Lies on the lips of glamour
Calling the Moon
Waiting for the morning star.

$7.00 | 38 Pages | In Stock

May 16, 2010: I'd Rather be Mexican by Charles P. Ries

I'd Rather be Mexican by Charles P. Ries Červená Barva Press, 2010

Charles P. Ries lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His narrative poems, short stories, interviews, and poetry reviews have appeared in over two hundred print and electronic publications. He has received four Pushcart Prize nominations for his writing. He is the author of THE FATHERS WE FIND, a novel based on memory and five books of poetry. Most recently he was awarded the Wisconsin Regional Writers Association "Jade Ring" Award for humorous poetry. He is the former poetry editor for Word Riot (www.wordriot.org) and a former member of the board at the Woodland Pattern Book Center. Charles is Co-Chairman of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. He will have a book of poetry published in early 2010: Girl Friend & Other Mysteries of Love that will be published by Alternating Current Pre, Leah Angstman, Editor. He is a founding member of the Lake Shore Surf Club, the oldest fresh water surfing club on the Great Lakes (http://www.visitsheboygan.com/dairyland/). You may find additional samples of his work by going to: http://www.literati.net/Ries/

El Latino Blanco
(The White Latin)

I woke up throughout the night
as the fleas kept biting my toes.
Just my toes "“ the rest of me
didn t seem to interest them.

"El Latino Blanco" the bartender called me as
I ordered double shots of tequila throughout the night,
one for me and one for my friend the large white rabbit
called El Conjito Blanco Grande who sat invisibly next to me,
as he has next to the other drunks who have used him as an
excuse to order doubles.

My dreams that night were ones of desolation and consolation.
Always in that order. I remember because the fleas kept me
on the edge of real time. Maybe they weren't fleas at all,
but insect sized psychic miners, biting me to lucidity and
injecting me with some sort of drunken-poet-dream-sex-venom.
I'm sure I'm not the first drunken poet to be visited in this way.
I'm sure I will not be the last.

As the morning came, the fleas went to sleep and I too drifted away
into a deep cold river, waking to a pure blue sky, a massive Mexican
hangover and the smell of black coffee served to me by a mescal worm named Little Rico.

$7.00 | 28 Pages | In Stock

April 15, 2010: Passions (monodrama) by Denis Emorine

Passions (monodrama) by Denis Emorine Translated from the French by Brian Cole Červená Barva Press, 2010

Denis Emorine is the author of short stories, essays, poetry, and theater. He was born in 1956 in Paris and studied literature at the Sorbonne (University of Paris). His theatrical output has been staged in France and Russia. He has a great interest for Eastern Europe. In 2004, he won first prize (French) for his poetry at the FÃ©ile Filiochta International competition. His poetry has been published in Pphoo (India), Blue Beat Jacket (Japan), Snow Monkey, Cokefishing, Be Which Magazine, Poesia, (USA). His texts have been published in numerous e-zines including Cipher Journal, Mad Hatter's Review, Milk, The Salt River Review, Istanbul Literary Review, and WHL Review. His last publication was a play called, "On The Platform," (Červená Barva Press).

Salt for the Dead: 'Passions' by Denis Emorine
article by Michael T. Steffen

Sometimes while watching or reading drama we're struck by an insight, however subjective, that the theatre the author is presenting to us is the theatre of our own mind. The notion was impressed convincingly upon me once as I read 'Othello' and realized that Iago was not an actor of acts, but a protagonist, in the true sense of the word, of the tragic hero's passions. That is, Iago is the powerful agent of Doubt within Othello's own psyche.

It's interesting that Denis Emorine's one-act monodrama 'Passions' (released earlier this year by CervenÃ¡ Barva Press) so deftly evokes this sense of isolated inner psychology, though unusually the drama of 'Passions' takes place in the wake of a personal crisis or tragedy, and the tables are turned. The protagonist, Frank, now has nothing to say. He lies on a bed motionless and speechless throughout the short play. Frederick, we gather from his bitter and plaintive monologue, has been the victim of a conspiracy (just what we are not told specifically) which Frank and another referred to as George have played out on him.

This whole displacement of focus from the acts that build to a climax, to the worded invective after, makes a good point in its demonstration of the destructive senseless gestures of regret and spite. We sense throughout the first half of the act that Frederick's wounded pride is fruitless. He can't even evoke the events of Frank and George's treachery, and we suspect moreover, because of this lack of details, that Frederick in fact has no case whatsoever, that he is suffering from delusions.

A further and more poignant point made by 'Passions' comes to our awareness when the insularity of the drama is disrupted toward the end of the play by the sound of footsteps rushing to the door outside the room. Here Frederick must realize that he has only deepened his own dilemma by elaborating his grief against his companion. Threatened by the arrival of a soldier, Frederick's roaring indignation is deflated. He is again frightened and pleading for Frank to help him. At this moment Frank's unresponsiveness grows haunted and meaningful.

Emorine's vision operates in terms of shadows and impulses, at the vanities of the essential soul, revealing his subjects unflinchingly at precisely their weakest, at the waste of their own worst powers. In its modest format of a chapbook, 'Passions' lurks with dark energy under the surface and filter of our all too frail human confidence.

$7.00 | 16 Pages | In Stock

March 16, 2010:
The Lines Are Not My friends Poems by Stacia M. Fleegal

The Lines Are Not My Friends Poems by Stacia M. Fleegal Červená Barva Press, 2010

Stacia M. Fleegal is the author of Anatomy of a Shape-Shifter (WordTech, forthcoming 2010) and the chapbook A Fling with the Ground (Finishing Line Press, 2007). In 2009, individual poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appeared or are forthcoming in Fourth River, The Louisville Review, Skidrow Penthouse, Pemmican, Blue Collar Review, The Kerf, Prick of the Spindle, New Verse News, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, The Heartland Review, and Babel Fruit. She received her MFA in writing from Spalding University, is co-founder and managing editor of Blood Lotus (www.bloodlotus.org), and recently co-founded Imaginary Friend Press (named after Thomas McGrath's Letter to an Imaginary Friend) with her partner, the poet Dan Nowak.

An Unknown Poet's Grandiose Call to Action

If all the living world is your canvas and

   you can         see where there is red earth and
   you can         hear where there is white noise and
   you can         taste orange and yellow fruits and
   you can         smell purple in a hard-earned spring and
   you can         feel blackness or rainbows and

   you can         hug your children and
   you can         joke about incompetent leaders and
   you can         relate to suffering and
   you can         feel remorse and
   you can         stockpile food in your basement and
   you can         worship your television and
   you can         answer your phone when it rings and
   you can         buy things with promises and
   you can         never run out of promises and
   you can         promise that and
   you can         promise nothing else of substance and

   you can         hear about Darfur and Burma and
                           Lebanon and Detroit and
                           St. Louis and Miami and
                           rape-as-a-weapon and hate crimes and
                           drowned polar bears and extinct butterflies and
                           dead uninsured babies and jobs outsourced and
                           everyone everywhere casting stones and

you can sleep at night and

   you can         hold the tool you were given at birth on this soil and
   you can         appreciate art when being cultured is "in" and
   you can         testify that pictures on menus deepen hunger and
   you can         see the merit of having the whole picture

how then does your brush still hang lamely at your side?

$7.00 | 28 Pages | In Stock

February 27, 2010:
Snakes and Angels Adaptations of Indonesian Folk Tales by James Penha

Snakes and Angels Adaptations of Indonesian Folk Tales by James Penha Červená Barva Press, 2010

Winner of the 2009 Cervena Barva Press Fiction Contest

A native New Yorker, James Penha has lived for the past eighteen years in Indonesia. He teaches at STB-ACS (International) School in Jakarta. No Bones to Carry, the latest volume of Penha's poetry, is available from New Sins Press at www.newsinspress.com. His award-winning 1992 chapbook On the Back of the Dragon is downloadable from Frugal Fiction at www.frugalfiction.com.
Among the most recent of his many other published works are articles in NCTE's Classroom Notes Plus; fiction at East of the Web, Big Pulp, and Ignavia; and poems in THEMA, Storie, Naugatuck River Review, Waterways, and in Only the Sea Keeps: Poetry of the Tsunami (Bayeux Press), and the two Silver Boomers anthologies. Penha edits The New Verse News, a website for current-events poetry at www.newversenews.com.

Since childhood when my father told me Jewish and/or Russian folk tales and my mother would conjure old German stories, I have been fascinated by tales based on the mists of past times. Now along comes James Penha, a native New Yorker living in Indonesia, who has written down three Indonesian folk tales. Usually one thinks of a page turner as a mystery or suspense novel, but Penha's three tidy little stories wrapped up in 34 pages keep me reading until the end. And what endings! I won't tell you, but I will say that the first story "Dust and Stone" will be familiar to many readers from other cultures because it has universal themes found in English and Greek literature, the Old Testament, among many others. The first tale tells about a magician who is turned into a dog during day and a man at night, the woman who loves and their son who....well, that's enough for now. Just say you will enjoy this story as much as I did.

The second story, "The Farmer and His Angel" is another well known theme of love found and lost, deceit and redemption in which a young man finds the woman of his dreams and desire in a most unusual, and deceitful way and learns that in the long run the truth will be revealed.

The final tale in this trilogy is "The Snake Boy" which incorporates the themes of the first two stories, but with a different twist and a unique route by which it gets there and Penha's interpretation of this "“ as with all three tales "“ is well and cleanly rendered.

Snakes and Angels will hold any reader's interest and give parents new stories to tell their children at bedtime rather than the age old Mother Goose or Aesop fables that schools tell and parents repeat. These fresh takes are wonderful stories that teach and entertain at the same time and will last a long time in your memory.
-Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Like Baroque pearls on a string the narratives possess the beauty, wisdom and universality of folktales. The wonderful poetic adaptations speak to us today...
-Rochelle Owens

"Snakes And Angels" is a remarkable feat of preservation of folklore through ingenious retelling by a masterful hand. The mythic lives on through the creative effort to erase the division between past and present by giving it a new voice that tells us not what was but what is and always will be.
-George Economou

$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock

February 27, 2010: Commodity Fetishism by Susan Lewis

Commodity Fetishism by Susan Lewis Červená Barva Press, 2010

Winner of the 2009 Cervena Barva Press Poetry Contest

Susan Lewis is the author of "Animal Husbandry" (Finishing Line Press, 2008). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Atlanta Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, The New Orleans Review, Phoebe, Raritan, Seneca Review, So To Speak, Verse, and Verse Daily. Her collaborations with composer Jonathan Golove have been performed at such venues as the Kennedy Center and Carnegie's Weill Hall.

Cold ontology and normative longing have met their antidote in these derivations of bright oughts from the imperfect is "“ progressions as hopeful as they are rigorous. Welcome to the unknowable nursery of tomorrow's big payoff, the source of all tantalizing hypotheticals. Here even the schism between practitioners and their actions is not mere disconnect, it's the animating principle that gives us room to evolve. Welcome to Susan Lewis' genesis in the retort, lush with secret memes of closed door intimacy.
"“Brendan Lorber, Editor/Publisher, Lungfull! Magazine

Commodity Fetishism is at once a verbal collage of the mental rigamarole of daily living and a compendium of irony and sentiment. These poems are terse yet opaque, jokey yet unapologetically consequential. This chapbook is off-beat, perfectly tuned, and compulsively readable.
"“Wayne Thomas, Editor, The Tusculum Review

COMMODITY FETISHISM

Because he abhorred the notion of work, the young man turned his home into a museum, offering his life as the sole exhibit. Although at first there were few visitors, the curious were given to repetitive, even compulsive, attendance. Soon their devotion became contagious, and the museum's patrons grew in number, especially as the exhibits explored themes such as Restless Yearning, Acceptance, and Doubt. By the time Reexamination was put up, scores of disappointed viewers had to be turned away. When Resignation made way for Peaceful Detachment, the public rioted, insisting that the museum never close. Tearful strangers mobbed the old man with their grief and unreasonable need, forcing him to retreat the only way he could.

$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-692-00642-9 | 34 Pages | In Stock

December 2, 2009: Only A Mirage by Alexander G. Dryer

Only A Mirage by Alexander G. Dryer Červená Barva Press, 2009

Červená Barva Press starts a children's poetry chapbook series. This is by solicitation only. Any manuscript received will be returned unread. Červená Barva Press is proud to publish our first in this series by Alexander G. Dryer. He is an excellent writer way beyond his age. We are very proud to publish this chapbook but will not publish where Alexander lives or any personal information about him since he is a child.

Alexander Gregory Dryer composed the poems in this book during the eighth, ninth, and tenth years of his life. He loves writing poems, but does not force the ideas onto paper or give himself deadlines. He really loves when the ideas just flow. Alexander says that his Auntie Woo-Woo is a source of inspiration for his poems. When asked to describe the room he writes in, he said, "It is a quiet room with lots of books, organized writing supplies, and my Lego creations."

Alexander lives with his mom, dad, two cats, and dog. He enjoys school, reading, learning to play the violin and piano, and building with Legos. When he grows up, he wants to be a paleontologist and a professional violinist.

Three Desert Haiku

I.    Prickly cactus grows
       Very high above the ground
       And resists the wind.

II.    Lake in the desert
        Glistens brightly in the sun
        Only a mirage.

III.    Snake slithers quickly
          To catch a spotted lizard
          That darts in the sand.

$5.00 | 18 Pages | In Stock

November 14, 2009: Catching The Light 12 Haiku Sequences by John Elsberg and Eric Greinke

Catching The Light 12 Haiku Sequences by John Elsberg and Eric Greinke Červená Barva Press, 2009

Eric Greinke has been active on the literary scene since the late sixties. He has studied and published with many of the major poets of the post-modern period, including Robert Bly, Ted Berrigan, Charles Reznikoff, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley and Donald Hall. He has taught creative writing in Grand Rapids City School and for the Michigan Poets In The Schools program and spent 25 years as a social worker for special needs children. He has a long history of collaborations with other poets, including Ronnie Lane, Brian Adam, Harry Smith, Mark Sonnenfeld, Richard Kostelanetz and Hugh Fox. He has published poetry, fiction, translations, creative non-fiction and essays in hundreds of books and magazines internationally, including recent American appearances in The New York Quarterly, The California Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, The Mad Poets Review, and the Home Planet News. His work has been nominated six times for a Pushcart Prize. His long poem For The Living Dead won the 2008 Muses Review Award for Best Poem of the Year. His most recent poetry collection is Wild Strawberries. He lives with wife Roseanne on a Michigan lake where they publish under the Presa Press imprint.
www.ericgreinke.com.

John Elsberg is a poet, reviewer, editor, and historian. He is the author of over a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, and his work has been in a number of anthologies. He also was the host of open poetry readings at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland, for almost twenty-five years. He has conducted various writing workshops (to include experimental poetry on the high school level) and judged numerous poetry contests. He was the fiction editor of Gargoyle in the late 1970's, and he has been the editor of Bogg: A Journal of Contemporary Writing since 1980. He also sits on the editorial board of The Delmarva Review on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where he and his wife Connie now spend a good part of their time. In terms of a "daytime job," as a young man he taught for the University of Maryland, and then he spent many years as an editor/publisher of history books. His poems have appeared in a wide range of journals, such as Hanging Loose, Blue Unicorn, the New Orleans Review, Lost & Found Times, RAW NerVZ (Canada), Modern Haiku, and the Lilliput Review.
boggmag@aol.com

England's 2010 Purple Patch Awards have been announced. Catching The Light is on their list (#14 of 20) of Best Individual Collections of the Year.
Check it yourselves at www.purplepatchpoetry.co.uk

$7.00 | 32 Pages | In Stock

November 14, 2009: Celebrity Slumbers by Judson Hamilton

Celebrity Slumbers by Judson Hamilton Červená Barva Press, 2009

Judson Hamilton lives in Wroclaw, Poland. He has a chapbook entitled "˜No Rainbow' (Greying Ghost Press) forthcoming this year. More of his work can be found by plugging his name into the search engine of your choice.

He can be reached at: be_mightee@hotmail.com

Celebrity Slumber [17]

We all stood in the greeting line after the wedding, waiting to congratulate Dustin Hoffman on his upcoming role as Nolan Ryan. When it came my turn I edged forward and gave him the requisite three kisses, ducking under the bill of his Astros cap and commented briefly on his sunset-striped uniform. He seemed taller in cleats as he transfixed me with a warm gaze, holding my hand in both of his mitts.

$7.00 | 35 Pages | In Stock

November 7, 2009: The Possibility of Recovery by William Delman

The Possibility of Recovery by William Delman Červená Barva Press, 2009

William Delman received the Academy of American Poets Prize at Boston University in 2006. His poetry has appeared in The Literary Review, The Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, Salamander, CT Review, Rhino, and other fine publications. He is the director of The Bay State Underground reading series at Boston University, and an editor at Agni Magazine.

Praise for "The Possibility of Recovery"

"William Delman sees with the encompassing range and stringent attention of true poetry: the haunted figures of a particular family are never far from the long reach of human history in these poems. Conversely, myth and epic, with all their imaginative force, are never far from the quirks and tragedies of actual American life."
-Robert Pinsky

"To make it more real' are the first words uttered in this book, and they name the impulse that is at the heart of William Delman's poetry. Here is mortal illness, the violence of war, the long-lingering effects of trauma, the way soul-wounds pass from parent to child, such things that one might naturally flinch from. But here too is finely-textured language, haunted and haunting imagery, and a sharply incised poetic line, all of which teaches us 'the art of seeing things' and with that, the possibility of recovery."
-Fred Marchant

"'Home, what is not here, and what is' Willian Delman's poems are intensely focused, mostly about domestic and familial history, but these seen, as in his wonderful poem, at once pitying and unrelenting, 'My Wedding Day in Brugge,' also in the context of our wars. The austere spareness of these poems is eloquent and moving."
-David ferry

$7.00 | 43 Pages | In Stock

October 18, 2009: A Rarity by Grzegorz WrÃ³blewski

A Rarity by Grzegorz Wroblewski Translated from the Polish by Agnieszka Pokojska Červená Barva Press, 2009

Grzegorz Wroblewski, born in 1962 in Gdansk and raised in Warsaw, has been living in Copenhagen since 1985. He has published eight volumes of poetry and two collections of short prose pieces in Poland; three books of poetry, a book of poetic prose and an experimental novel (translations) in Denmark; and a book of selected poems in Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as a selection of plays. His work has been translated into five languages. The English translations of his poems and/or plays have appeared in London Magazine, Poetry London, Magma Poetry, Parameter Magazine, Poetry Wales, The Delinquent, Chicago Review, 3rd bed, Eclectica, Mississippi Review, Absinthe: New European Writing, Common Knowledge, Word Riot, Practice: New Writing + Art, The Mercurian - A Theatrical Translation Review, Lyric, Exquisite Corpse, Jacket Magazine, West Wind Review and in the following anthologies: Altered State: The New Polish Poetry (Arc Publications, Todmorden, UK 2003), Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird (Zephyr Press, Brookline, USA 2004), A Generation Defining Itself "“ In Our Own Words (MW Enterprises, USA 2007). A volume of his selected poems Our Flying Objects (Equipage Press, Cambridge, UK) was published in 2007. His chapbooks to date are: These Extraordinary People (erbacce-press, Liverpool, UK 2008) and Mercury Project (Toad Press, Claremont, USA 2008).

Agnieszka Pokojska is a freelance translator and editor, tutor in literary translation at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and author of a number of articles on translation. Her translations into Polish include poems by Seamus Heaney, Robert Pinsky and Derek Walcott. Her translations of Grzegorz Wroblewski's poetry appeared in the anthology Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird, in Lyric Poetry Review, West Wind Review, Eclectica Magazine, The Delinquent and Poetry Wales.

$7.00 | 32 Pages | In Stock

September 16, 2009: Unrestrained by Jennifer LeBlanc

Unrestrained by Jennifer LeBlanc Červená Barva Press, 2009: Jennifer LeBlanc is currently pursuing a B.A. in English from Regis College in Weston, Massachusetts. Her book Coloring the Shadows (2009) won the Mary C. Bryan Women's Studies Award for 2009, and she represented Regis College at the 2009 Greater Boston Intercollegiate Poetry Festival. She is an editor of Regis College's literary journal, Hemetera, and her poetry has been published in Bolts of Silk, Oak Bend Review, and Up the Staircase, among others.
$7.00 | 28 Pages | In Stock

September 4, 2009: Beowulf by Martin Burke

Beowulf by Martin Burke Červená Barva Press, 2009

"Burke is the eloquent essayist of the sublime"
Projected Letters

"His style is far ahead in terms of imaginative inventiveness
This is startling, original work"
Kiosque Review

Beowulf

TO BEGIN with the hero is inaccurate

Begin with his opposite
The one he must meet
The one he will forever be named by

Begin with time ripening to a specific purpose
With events entering history at a critical moment
Begin with Grendel

Grendel: beast/man/beast
Grendel: purpose-driven like no other
Grendel: a law unto himself

This is the one who names the hero for all time
The one doomed from the beginning
And yet this is not a minor role

O no
Not Grendel
Not the man-beast as he broods in his lair
Not as he plots the destruction he will bring
Not as he delights in the prospect

And he will bring destruction
O yes
Destruction and wanton despair
To those who cannot fight him

Martin Burke was born in Ireland but lives now in Brugge, Belgium

$7.00 | 52 Pages | In Stock

September 4, 2009: Waiting By Godot by Alexander Motyl

Waiting By Godot by Alexander Motyl Červená Barva Press, 2009

Alexander Motyl is a writer, painter, and professor. His novels include Whiskey Priest, Who Killed Andrei Warhol, and Flippancy. His art is represented by The Tori Collection. Motyl teaches at Rutgers University-Newark and lives in New York City.

His web site is: www.AlexanderMotyl.webs.com.

$1.00 | 5 Pages | In Stock

Opuscula Small thoughts, hardly worthy of note by Steve Glines Červená Barva Press, 2009: Steve Glines, in addition to being the editor of Wilderness House Literary Review, is an essayist, journalist, storyteller, occasional poet and bon vivant. His motto is, "The best is barely good enough." Steve has published six books, only one of which might be considered even remotely "literary," a travelogue about Fiji. He has been published in Ibbetson Review, The Belmont Citizen, The Littleton Independent, Unix Review, Technology Review, The Boston Globe, The New York Times and The Hartford Current among others. He has never been published in The Paris Review, The Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, The Atlantic Monthly or The Kenyon Review. To these awesome credentials it should be added that he has never received a McArthur Award nor been nominated for a Pulitzer or Pushcart Prize. Still, for some reason, people like what he writes and, on occasion, even pay him for it.
$7.00 | 37 Pages | In Stock

Balancing on Unstable Ground by Francis Alix Červená Barva Press, 2009

Francis Alix's Balancing on Unstable Ground employs all the reader's senses "“ the poems bleed and chirp and thunder and exude odors both foul and fair. Through unstinting depictions of war and spent love, Alix chronicles what could be the end of things, but, with an alchemist's pen, transmutes them and us into a vivid way forward "on the wings of foraging birds."
-Lisa Beatman, author of Manufacturing America: Poems from the Factory Floor

Francis Alix's Balancing On Unstable Ground echoes Walt Whitman's "The Poetry of the Future," in which Whitman states, "The poetry of the future aims at the free expression of emotion"¦ and to arouse and initiate more than to define or finish"¦" Alix's clear imagery and graceful short lines are concentrated in the emotions of loss, longing, and pity for the planet. They "arouse and initiate" a common feeling of sorrow in the reader as for the starving child in "Kansas" with "her bent legs grasped by her arms, /both thin as cornstalks" or the starlings in "The Journey" who are "exiled/dumped into the modern wild." His subjects are never totally defined or finished; rather they ignite the reader's own irony and melancholy. This affect is impressive in such minimalism. You can hear Alix's voice speaking them to you with a fervor for living that makes the ordinary extraordinary. Bravo on a well crafted first book whose control of language brings the poet and the reader into a tender dynamic.
-Jane Lunin Perel, Professor of Creative Writing and Women's Studies, Providence College

Reading Alix's work, I am reminded of this line from the song, Jungleland, by Bruce Springsteen, in which the lyrics protest, "And the poets down here don't write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be," frustrated that poets have somehow abdicated their responsibility by averting their eyes, but more importantly, their words from the struggles, triumphs and drama of everyday life. Alix has been recording life as only he can see it, our world seen through poetic eyes, unafraid to see the harsh realities and capable of sparkling revelations. He has been busy down here, knee-deep in a poets work, bringing our attention to the glories and cruelties, through poetic stories only he can tell. Whatever the subject, Alix slices to the heart of it, as only a poet can do. Springsteen is wrong. There are real poets down here, refusing to let it all be. Francis Alix is one of them.
-Eileen D'Angelo, Editor Mad Poets Review

$7.00 | 36 Pages | In Stock

A Settlement of Words Poems by Ioan Tepelea Translated from Romanian by Flavia Cosma Červená Barva Press, 2009

Ioan Tepelea was born in Oradea, Romania on June 3, 1949. He graduated with a PhD in History and Philosophy at the University of Cluj, Romania. Since 1989 he distinguished himself as one of the most important animators of literary and scientific activities in Romania. A University Professor, Mr. Tepelea is the president of ASLA (Arts, Literature and Sciences Academy, Oradea, Romania). He is also the Editor en Chief of prestigious literary magazines such as Unu, Aurora and Altheia. Mr. Tepelea authored fourteen poetry collections, both in Romanian and bilingual editions. His work is represented in numerous anthologies in various countries and languages. Ioan Tepelea is a member of The Writers Union of Romania.

From the introduction:
Ioan Tepelea's intimate connection with the surrounding reality is characterized by a fabulous openness toward the universe. In his interior poetic space the entire universe is brought forth in all its wealth, in its most insignificant details, like a miraculous fairy tale Prince Charming.
Tepelea's poetry bears witness to a prolonged practice of cohabitation between the poet and these living creatures that are the words, establishing strong chemical and alchemical ties between the creator and his work...
Ion Popescu-Bradiceni

$7.00 | 24 Pages | In Stock

The Book Of Colors And Painters by Korkut Onaran Červená Barva Press, 2009

The Book of Colors and Painters contains a 15 page poem (titled The Book of Colors) and 6 shorter poems that complete each other. The Book of Colors attempts to create a community of colors, each having its own personality, along with the richness of relationships one can find in a community. By means of parentheses, footnotes, and parentheses in the footnotes, the poem tries to create multiple-voices and depth. The poem is organized like a one-act play with its opening, introduction, development, and closure. The sections - 15 in number - create a rhythm through which new themes are introduced and overlapped on the previous ones.

Korkut Onaran, originally from Turkey, lives in Boulder, Colorado. He practices architecture and urban design and teaches in University of Colorado as an assistant professor adjunct. He has received the second prize in 2006 Baltimore Review Poetry Competition. His poetry has been published in journals such as Penumbra, Rhino, Peralta, Colere, Writer's Journal, Water - Stone Review, Bayou, and White Pelican Review.

Korkut Onaran, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor Adjunct
College Of Architecture And Planning
University Of Colorado At Denver

$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock

Zero Boundaries by Irene Koronas Červená Barva Press, 2008

Irene Koronas has a fine arts degree from Mass College of Art Boston. She is a multi media artist working with paint, collage, mono-printing, artists books and poetry. She is currently the poetry editor for Wilderness House Literary Review and is the submissions editor for Ibbetson Street Press. Her poetry has appeared in lummox journal, free verse journal, posey magazine and on line zines such as arcanam cafÃ©, spearhead, index poetry, unblog, haiku hut and lynx. She has seven chap-books: 'work among friends,' 'where words drip,' 'perception, tongue on everyday,' 'species,' 'flat house' and 'to speak the meaning of being.' Her most recent book 'self portrait drawn from many' is published by ibbettson street press. Her poems also appear in anthologies.

$7.00 | 41 Pages | Out of Stock

Flowering Weeds by Robert K. Johnson Červená Barva Press, 2008

Robert K. Johnson was born in New York City and later lived on Long Island. He obtained a B.A. from Hofstra College (now University); and earned graduate degrees from Cornell University and Denver University. Now retired, he was a university professor of English, mostly at Suffolk University in Boston, for many years. He is currently submissions editor of Ibbetson Street. Many of his poems have appeared individually in a wide variety of magazines and newspapers. Five full-length collections of his poetry, the most recent being From Mist To Shadow, have been published, plus two chapbooks.

$7.00 | 37 Pages | In Stock

From Tehran To Texas by Roger Sedarat Červená Barva Press, 2008

Roger Sedarat's poetry collection, Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic, won Ohio University Press's Hollis Summers Award. His poems have also appeared in such journals as New England Review, Poet Lore, and Iranian.com. He is the recipient of scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference as well as a St. Botolph Society poetry grant. He teaches poetry and translation in the MFA program at Queens College, City University of New York.

$7.00 | 38 Pages | In Stock

Investigations: The Mystery Of The Girl Sleuth by Kathleen Aguero Červená Barva Press, 2008

Kathleen Aguero's books of poetry include, Daughter Of (Cedar Hill Books), The Real Weather (Hanging Loose Press), and Thirsty Day (Alice James Books). She has edited three volumes of multicultural literature published by the University of Georgia Press and has an essay in the anthology, Why I'm Still Married. The recipient of grants from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and the Elgin Cox Foundation, she is a Professor of English at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, MA, teaching in their low-residency MFA and undergraduate programs.

Review:
Investigations: The Mystery of the Girl Sleuth

Investigations is a celebration of Nancy Drew novels (50 years) during the late 1950's. she led a way for young women who wanted more than what they, may of perceived, as domestic boredom. Nancy did not have the proverbial mother to relate too. she also had an absentee father, a lawyer. this left the young investigator on her won to rife out her suspicions. unlike superman who needed superpowers to accomplish his task of riding the world of evil doers, Nancy worked closely with her friends for what seemed a more human story.

"I understand, the mysteries of the scoured pot,
clogged toilet, tolling dinner bell,
hold no appeal. but chances are you're not
going to marry Carson Drew,
conveniently absent when the action starts,
never demanding you halt mid-case to listen
to his tale of triumph at the office"¦"

Nancy Drew's tale has been placed into the capable hands or words of Kathleen Aguero. Aguero translates, reinvents and looks for clues that relate to her present situations as in, "˜the case of the suicidal friend,' "you didn't leave a note, just your own body on the stairs." and again in "˜jewel box,' which I had the privilege of hearing the poet read Aguero shows us her mother's delusional clarity, her mother's love, the perception of honesty in leaving, of placing value in memory, connecting, collecting personal items, identifying their significance, "we have to do this now"¦" her poems are full of references, clues; the password:

"she was clever.
she found the wooden gate where they put the garbage out.
she pulled, but it was locked.
she waited, but no one came
so she joined the walkers, round and round the halls
out one door, in the other"¦

this is a clear case. this chapbook will leave you wanting more of Kathleen Aguero's writing.

Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor
Ibbetson Street Press
www.ibbetsonpress.com

Fiddler Crab reviews chapbook "Investigations" by poet Kathleen Aguero: www.fiddlercrabreview.com

$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock

Brothers by Eric Wasserman Červená Barva Press, 2008

Advance Praise for Brothers:
Take Faulkner's dicturn that "the past is never dead, it's not even past" and transpose it to late Forties L.A. In the grand tradition of John Gregory Dunne's True Confessions, Wasserman's taut little tale finds a mismatched pair of brothers clashing. explosively, at the dawn of the Blacklist era.
-Wesley Strick, screenwriter and author of Out There in the Dark

Eric Wasserman is the author of a collection of short fiction, The Temporary Life. His short story, "He's No Sandy Koufax," won first prize in the 13th Annual David Dornstein Creative Writing Contest. Brothers is the first chapter from his recently completed first novel, Celluloid Strangers. Eric is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Akron, wher he also teaches in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program (NEOMFA).

Visit him at www.ericwasserman.com

$7.00 | 19 Pages | In Stock

The Conquest of Somalia by Gary Beck Červená Barva Press, 2008: Gary Beck has spent most of his adult life as a theater director and worked as an art dealer when he couldn't earn a living in the theater. He has also been a tennis pro, a ditch digger and a salvage diver. His original plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes and Sophocles have been produced Off Broadway and toured colleges and outdoor performance venues. He currently lives in New York City, where he's busy writing fiction and his short stories have recently appeared in numerous literary magazines.
$7.00 | 36 Pages | In Stock

Stunted Inner-child Shot the TV by Mike Amado Červená Barva Press, 2008

"Crossing the intersections between media, militarization, and post-9/11 consciousness, Amado's Stunted Inner-child Shot the TV, gives us a view of the complicated relationship between society and self, consumerism and identity."
-Edward J. Carvalho (Doctoral Candidate, Indiana University of Pennsylvania and author of solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short)

"Take Mike Amado's red Morpheus pill and follow him down the rabbit hole of America's mad matrix of warped dreams, tabloid icons, chrome-eyed military men and infopreachers....His writing is elastic, vivid and wise. With a heart for an undetermined and undetermining God, Amado's revolution cannot be downloaded. It's amazing any of us make it out alive."
-Lo Galluccio

Mike Amado is a performance poet, percussionst and drummer painfully in touch with the real-everyday and his work is filled with the real-time force of tough, hard-core lyrics and life that drags you into the midst of contemporary real reality: "There is a dealer/that sells lives/like pre-owed cars./I'm gonna trade in Angelina Jolie./Like a rusted up Chevy Sloper/she needs her soul rebuilt...//born to a fifteen year old,/a doomed kid/on the block/dodging bullets and rocks/and a life of Government checks." ("Angelina Jolie Reincarnated," p.20). Amado is especially relevant today because of his total immersion in the working-class/middle-class sense of downturning lifestyles and ways of coping. He's like radical news-reports stripping off the overlays and lies and getting to the hard-cores: "Blessed be the bartenders and poker table dealers,/They are the certifiable psychos./They attach themselves to people who have/Knuckle-dragging tantrums and sing/the same, old song.../ "My money's all gone, free-drink me!"No sprites or sun-gods, romantic landscapes, gods in the underbrush. Welcome to the whole of contemporary reality, as far as you can get out of the suburbs into the everydayness that most Americans are soaked in.
-Hugh Fox

$7.00 | 41 Pages | In Stock

The News Today by George Held Červená Barva Press, 2008

The News Today is George Held's second chapbook from Červená Barva Press, the first being W Is for War (2006). His other poetry books include Beyond Renewal (2001) and the chapbooks Winged (1995), Salamander Love and Others (1998), Open & Shut (1999), Grounded (2005), The Art of Writing and Others (2007), and Phased (2008). Other books include the e-book American Poetry (2004), the art book Absolut Death & Others (2000) (with paintings by Roz Dimon), Martial Artist (2005) (translations of Martial's epigrams), and the anthology Touched by Eros (2002), which he edited. Held's poetry has appeared in more than a dozen anthologies, received five Pushcart Prize nominations, and been read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac (NPR). He has co-edited The Ledge Poetry and Fiction Magazine since 1991. In addition, he served as a Fulbright lecturer in Czechoslovakia, 1973-76, and has been on the executive board of The South Fork Natural History Society and Museum (Bridgehampton, NY) since 1991.

Mark Lamoureux on four Červená Barva Press Chapbooks,
Gently Read Literature Review:
http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/mark-lamoureux-on-four-cervena-barva-press-chapbooks/

$7.00 | 33 Pages | In Stock

Ten Songs From Bulgaria by Linda Nemec Foster Červená Barva Press, 2008

The first lines in Linda Nemec Foster's Ten Songs from Bulgaria, sing 'Small lives, small lives/ we are trapped inside/ small lives.' The paradox here is that Foster's poems reveal how large and rich the worlds are in which these small lives are lived. In line after line, we encounter the depths and reach of those who live outside the zones of everyday safety. Foster makes herself vulnerable to a world 'as tangible as fog' with her own penetrating observations. She walks 'the long journey' and her poems reflect the haunting music of ode and elegy.
-Jack Ridl

These poems evoke--in their concision and clarity--intense, disturbing images of lives shredded into pieces so small all that's left is the memory of having endured. They are caged inside the empty space of the page, which seems to want to suffocate their spare, fragile, incredible beauty. Each image speaks a world that is window and mirror of what we hide from in the fabricated assemblages we make against the truth these poems speak.
-Faye Kicknosway

Reviews

Linda Nemec Foster Interview: Michigan Public Radio (an affiliate of NPR) for their Stateside program, hosted by Cynthia Canty. http://www.michiganradio.org/post/bulgarian-photography-and-michigan-poetry-inspire-album

Mark Lamoureux on four Červená Barva Press Chapbooks,
Gently Read Literature Review:
http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/mark-lamoureux-on-four-cervena-barva-press-chapbooks/

$7.00 | 20 Pages | In Stock

A Cure For Suicide by Larissa Shmailo Červená Barva Press, 2008

In "A Cure for Suicide" by Larissa Shmailo, Shmailo writes (as the founder of Fulcrum Magazine Philip Nikolayev points out in his introduction) as if she is "¦" constitutionally predestined to sing out her lines"¦her eyes filled with life and love, pain and death, freedom and coercion, the real of the mind and the imagined of the heart." In the poem "Dancing with the Devil," the poet sings about the need to throw caution to the wind and trip the light fantastic with the Devil:

"They say if you flirt with death,
you're going to get a date;
But I don't mind-the music's fine,
And I love dancing with someone who can really lead."

Shmailo put herself in the deceptive calmness of the eye of a hurricane, asks us to tell her what makes us tic, and takes us on the Harlem River Line, like the "Duke" took us on the "A" train. In a sea of mimics this poet is an original voice.
~Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ May 2008

Mark Lamoureux on four Červená Barva Press Chapbooks,
Gently Read Literature Review:
http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/mark-lamoureux-on-four-cervena-barva-press-chapbooks/

$7.00 | 47 Pages | In Stock

Discarded: Poems for My Apartments by Chad Parenteau Červená Barva Press, 2008: In this new collection by Chad Parenteau, the peculiar intimacies of the shared apartment experience emerge in imaginative and startling shapes. In Parenteau's stunning tropes, the apartment, now war zone, now toxic wasteland, now party palace, at once magical and mundane, finds its excited denizens "burning their hands on bulbs to stay awake, / afraid to miss a summoning." Parenteau musters poignancy, pathos, and the pathetic from the crowded sink and the discarded vodka bottles, breeding them into his lines with an acute and ironic sensuality. If, as the author contends, "The bed now leaves its own notches/on the backs of everyone/who's slept in it alone," these poems will leave their mark on the mind of any reader who has ever stammered through a roommate interview or suffocated from the incense sneaking under the crack at the bottom of a roommate's door.
-Tom Daley, Instructor for the Online School of Poetry
$7.00 | 25 Pages | In Stock

faustinetta, gegenschein, trapunto by Diane Wald Červená Barva Press, 2008: These three poems somehow asked to be together. They are full of alive and dead people, full of genuine and created personalities, full of composite desires and fears and mockeries. They popped up out of the love of words, and the word-secrets we all hold dear. The title words brought me buckets of pleasure, and I wanted to celebrate and embellish them. One of them I made up, one of them I learned, one of them I'd forgotten I knew. I think all three are united in mystery, begging for me to believe them.
-Diane Wald
$7.00 | 20 Pages | In Stock

Tara by Catherine Sasanov Červená Barva Press, 2008

In 2005, poet Catherine Sasanov made an unsettling discovery: slaveholding had been an unspoken part of her family's history. Sasanov's painstaking search to find out what happened to the men, women, and children held by her ancestors is at the heart of her new chapbook, Tara. In its pages, Sasanov conjures Missouri's Antebellum landscape out of the ravages of urban sprawl. She pieces together a portrait of slaves and freedmen in poems haunted by the question: How does one write a coherent life of a people if only bits and scraps of their existence can be found?

Reviews: http://www.jendireiter.com/2015/06/09/chapbook-spotlight-poetry-from-catherine-sasanovs-tara/

$7.00 | 30 Pages | In Stock

Up From The Root Cellar by Anne Harding Woodworth Červená Barva Press, 2008

If the root cellar connotes dark and damp, it also promises nourishment-and this book serves up a startling buffet. Whether imagining herself into a grave, a slaughterhouse, or a rose that holds a family memory, Anne Harding Woodworth is attentive to how "secrets rise to the surface." Her range of subject matter is startling-from famine to termites to dowsing for bodies-and she deftly works a root vegetable into nearly every poem, including one about the invention of the potato chip and another that turns the peeling of an Idaho into a sexy striptease. Up from the Root Cellar is rich with music, and brings a satisfying harvest of buried and strewn things to light.
Ellen DorÃ© Watson, author of This Sharpening

In Up from the Root Cellar, Anne Harding Woodworth delights us with a quick and unblinking look to the cold, soupy, death-in-life world that roots our body's generation, and our ladders of art. Her poems feel through near-frozen "rhizomes / tightly wadded leaves," and wan cyclopean russet potatoes, "wide-eyed, looking for a way out," in order redefine the human form, the ways that the body seeks its "light-time" even as it must bow to physical limits, "dry-weighted, wet-weighted, scoped on dials, squeezed into ratio." Woodworth's instincts for the contrarian, and messy-microbial sources for human stories put her alongside the garden-shed bio-poetries of Roethke and Marianne Moore. Yet her sudden turns and wacky humor find their own force and presence.
David Gewanter, author of The Sleep of Reason

One of the many pleasures of poetry is that of coming into the company of an interesting mind. In Up from the Root Cellar, Anne Harding Woodworth uses her central metaphor to plumb the mysteries of preservation and renewal in ways that are fresh and surprising. Her tender, gently subversive poems, with their rich wordplay and mischievous imagery, succeed in bringing up from the darkness of the root cellar insights that delight and enlighten.
Jean Nordhaus, author of Innocence

Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene review:
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/search?q=anne+harding+woodworth

$7.00 | 45 Pages | In Stock

this is where you go when you are gone by Timothy Gager Červená Barva press, 2008

This chapbook represents Timothy's best poems from 2007, a year that he had 32 accepted submissions. These poems are rich with emotion, humor, double meanings, happiness and regret. "this is where you go when you are gone" ranges of experiences, responses to social events and a poetic e-mails written to someone who felt his poems were too sad. Timothy Gager tells stories through his poetry and this collection represents a new and more mature and seasoned writer.

Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene Review

$7.00 | 43 Pages | In Stock

The Lengthening Radius For Hate by Gary Fincke Červená Barva press, 2008

The Lengthening Radius for Hate is a poem sequence that has, at its foundation, the shooting of Kent State students on May 4, 1970, by the National Guard. Gary Fincke was a student at Kent State in 1970, and he chronicles both the shooting and its residual effects over decades in a series of strongly observed narrative poems that explore disillusionment, anger, and the difficulties of reconciliation.

Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene Review:
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/search?q=gary+Fincke

$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock

Isolate Flecks by Kevin Gallagher Červená Barva Press, 2008

Kevin Gallagher is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Isolate Flecks (Červená Barva Press, 2008), and Looking for Lake Texcoco (Cy Gist, 2008). His poetry and reviews have appeared in such publications as The Boston Review, Emergency Almanac, Green Mountains Review, Harvard Review, Jacket, Peacework, the Partisan Review and elsewhere. In 2004 he edited a feature on Kenneth Rexroth for Jacket, and a chapbook titled Nevertheless: Some Gloucester Writers and Artists. From 1992 to 2002 he was a publisher and editor of compost magazine. A retrospective anthology of compost, co-edited with Margaret Bezucha, is titled There's No Place on Earth Like the World (Zephyr, 2006). He lives with his wife Kelly, and son Theo, in Newton, Massachusetts.

Mark Lamoureux on four Červená Barva Press Chapbooks,
Gently Read Literature Review:
http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/mark-lamoureux-on-four-cervena-barva-press-chapbooks/

$7.00 | 39 Pages | In Stock

Survival Notes by Adrian S. Potter Červená Barva Press, 2008

Winner of the 2006 Cervena Barva Press Fiction Chapbook Prize
Judge: Dorothy Freudenthal

Adrian S. Potter is the winner the 2003 Langston Hughes Poetry Contest and the 2005 Saturday Writers Short Story Contest. He has been published in more than 60 different literary journals, magazines, and websites including Colere, City Works, Reed, Out of Line, The Binnacle, Main Channel Voices, Blue Earth Review and Poesia.

Additional propaganda about Adrian and his writing can be found at http://adrianspotter.squarespace.com/.

Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
Survival Notes by Adrian S. Potter
Somerville's Cervena Barva Press has published a collection of very short stories or flash fiction by Adrian Potter: "Survival Notes." Potter is the winner of the 2003 Langston Hughes Poetry Contest and has numerous publication credits. Potter's pieces have a raw edge to them. They take place for the most part in urban settings with angry male characters in the midst of existential crises. One story that peaked my interest in this collection was "Domestic Silence." In this story, an unfortunate neighbor to a loud and argumentative couple, tracks the jazz music the abusive male in this unfortunate coupling plays to mute the loud protests of his many domestic brawls.

"I've lived here for two years, long enough that I can determine the topic of their disputes by what record is playing. Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue," means that that the husband is releasing the frustration of financial woes onto her fragile ribcage. The swinging melodies of Duke Ellington are reserved for senseless shouting matches, the type of overreaction brought on by male jealousy. Electronic jazz-funk, like Herbie Hancock and the "Head Hunters," is synonymous with the profanities and backhanded slaps that come from drinking binges. I don't even have to explain the subtle irony when songs from Coltrane's " A Love Supreme" filter from underneath their doorway."

I would like to see Potter develop more stories like this. He may be on to something.
Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ Jan. 2008/ Somerville, Mass.

$7.00 | 42 Pages | In Stock

Illegal Border Crosser by Michael Graves Červená Barva Press, 2008: Michael Graves was a student of James Wright. He is the author of a chapbook Outside St. Jude's (REM Press, 1990), which was re-issued as an ebook by Rattapallax, and is the recipient of a grant of $4,500 from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation for two thousand four. His first full-length collection of poems is Adam and Cain (Black Buzzard, 2006). He has published thirteen (13) poems in the James Joyce Quarterly and read a selection of his poems to a meeting of the James Joyce Society at the Gotham Book Mart in New York City. Professor A. Nicholas Fargnoli, President of the James Joyce Society has adopted some of his poems as required reading for his survey course in Modern American Literature. His poem "Apollo to Daphne" appears in Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths (Oxford University Press 2001). He has published widely in journals and magazines, some of which include The Classical Outlook, European Judaism, The Journal of Irish Literature, Cumberland Poetry Review, nycBigCityLit-New York Edition, Writer's Forum, Rattapallax, The Hurricane Review, The Hollins Critic, Archipelago, and Salonika.
$7.00 | 36 Pages | In Stock

Among Us by Harris Gardner Červená Barva Press, 2007

It is said the angels walk among us, the invisible. Gardner drapes the invisible with language in the hopes that we can see ourselves.
"“Afaa M. Weaver

Gardner's vision here mainly focuses on angels. He's right out of scripture, brings biblical (and elsewhere) visions of angels into our contemporary world so that everything surrounding us becomes supernaturalized and uplifted., And always in a language that reads the way Monet paints. "The breeze stretches pliant forms/ kinetic art, brush-stroked clouds"¦/ Senses soar toward the sun/ when rays sear through languid clouds/ revealing noble haloed heads"¦" ("Among Us"). He is Mr. Visionary, taking the Torah and all other angel-sources like Milton, Raphael, "Dictionary of Angels", etc., and filling our world with uplifting such as you've never been uplifted into before. It's a vision sorely needed today, and technically the most masterful word-working on the contemporary or any other scene.
"“Hugh Fox

Excerpt from a review
Angels have held a fascination for many writers: Milton, Hass, Hopkins, Billy Collins, to name a few. But how does one manage to address the imperceptible, let alone the holy? Gardner's answer is to bring angels down to earth, to imbue them with human characteristics and foibles...This collection's central strength is its admonition to the reader to look beyond the mundane. "Seeing angels may challenge your vision. / No cost to believe in noble winged creatures." In our bitter post-post-modern age, this is a welcome thought.
Eleanor Goodman/ Ibbetson Update/ Jan 2008
Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

$7.00 | 45 Pages | In Stock

Living Proof by Mary Bonina Cervena Barva Press, 2007

Review excerpt from: Prick of the spindle,
"Mary Bonina's Living Proof is a hefty 45 pages and worth every drop of ink Červená Barva Press shelled out to bring it into the world. Each poem reads like a miniature story, stabbing at the heart of memory and nostalgia, capturing lifetimes in a single moment or turn of phrase..."
--Jen Garfield, editor
Prick of the Spindle

To read the whole review:
http://www.prickofthespindle.com/reviews/

These are poems concerned with the primary relationships of our lives -- family, friends, lovers, nature -- and in them, there is always the larger world rattling around. This volume of narratives, lyrics, dialogues, and found poems demonstrates Bonina's accomplishment and range. Here is an assured voice imbued with musicality, surprising us in the simple way it offers up deeper meaning, often using imagery drawn from the everyday.

"...the voice of these poems knows death, luck, the mall, the hard edges of place, New England places, the violence of the world. It runs very concretely and in many poems, past what its bearer sees as if standing still in deep attention. It is written so that "he who runs may read" but turns entirely inside out the terms and assumptions of that old insult. What a place this human world would be if we all ran at Mary Bonina's speed, what Flannery O'Connor once called the terrible speed of mercy."
--Mary Baine Campbell
author of TROUBLE (poems), Carnegie Mellon U Press and The World, The Flesh, and Angels (poems), Beacon Press

$7.00 | 46 Pages | In Stock

Ferrovie by Anthony Russell White Červená Barva Press, 2007

The 2006 Červená Barva Press Chapbook Poetry Prize Winner

Ferrovie is Italian for trains, and seemed appropriate for a series of poems about strange encounters on Italian trains. I was introduced to the prose poem in 1993 by Robert Bly at a workshop afloat in Alaska, and have been writing them ever since. Some poems just seem to want to be in that form. Some of these ten came from my dreams, a few from actual events, the remainder from pure unleashed imagination.
Anthony Russell White

$5.00 | 20 Pages | In Stock

Sister Mary Butkus by Ed McManis Červená Barva Press, 2007

Ed McManis is a teacher, writer, poet, editor, songwriter, husband and dad-not always in that order. His work has appeared in more than 40 publications.

Cover art by Joe McManis

$7.00 | 37 Pages | In Stock

God of the Jellyfish by Lucille Lang Day Červená Barva Press, 2007

At once sacrilegious and reverential, the poems in God of the Jellyfish seek the divine in a natural world governed by the laws of science. In these poems, you'll find a god in the shape of a jellyfish, a prayer celebrating the color red, a man for whom music becomes the source of salvation, a vision of an earthly paradise populated by moon bears and moon rats, and a pilgrimage through 14 stations where Sisyphus, Shaker women, and howling wolves appear. Lucille Lang Day deftly couples scientific observations to the engine of imagination to take us on a magical and inspiring journey.

God of the Jellyfish shimmers in a space where "moon cacti bloom at night" and magpies can "fly over a field/of small glass bottles." The world Lucille Lang Day creates in her poetry is vivid and surreal yet always deftly anchored in the beauty and truth of the natural world. This is a small handbook of magic. When you read it, you'll find yourself transported to places you've never even dared to imagine.
-Susan Terris

There are few contemporary poets who use science in their poetry at all, let alone use it as Lucille Lang Day does here, as an element, both dreamlike and hyperreal, in her gorgeous, moving global lyric.
-Richard Silberg

$7.00 | 39 Pages | In Stock

Land of the Morning Calm by Susanne Morning Červená Barva Press, 2007: South Korea, referred to as the hermit kingdom of Asia, has been the home of New Zealand author/painter Susanne Morning for the last 7 years. Fascinating and humorous, Land of the Morning Calm unearths the bizarre and unexpected elements of this ancient/modern Confucian culture. An archeological dig that will put dirt under your nails and priceless relics in your hands!
$7.00 | 29 Pages | In Stock

Of All The Meals I Had Before: Poems About Food and Eating by Doug Holder Červená Barva Press, 2007

These food poems are served up spicy like Italian cousine. Read them before dinner or after dessert, either way like Chinese food, you'll return hungry for more.
A.D. Winans

In his collection, "Of All The Meals I Had Before: Poems About Food and Eating" Doug Holder serves up a hearty fare. He fills our plate with "unapologetically greasy Egg Foo Young," "tamed tenderloin," "a chorus line" of "rotisserie chickens," and "some fraction of gelatinous liver quivering." He not only takes us out to dine with him, but he also looks around for us, makes sure we notice the "ancient waitresses"¦[who] bark the orders\through the swing of doors" and "old man Cardullo spit from\his cigar-studded mouth" and the undertaker beside us who "delicately wipes his mouth\"¦ runs his well-veined hand\through the shoe polish\in his hair." Holder offers a truly eclectic cuisine and company to match"“ savory, and unsavory, occasionally bitter, more often sweet. Even as we polish off dessert, he leaves us wondering, "What If We Froze with a Fork in Our Hand" and "just\took a\minute\to simply\pause."
Mary Buchinger Bodwell, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences

A delightful and delicious collection of poems, whetting the appetite for more. These are the kinds of witty, Jewishy poems I envision Woody Allen would write, should he ever take to writing poetry.
Helen Bar-Lev, Artist, Poet
Editor-in-Chief Voices Israel Anthology
Author: Animals are Nature's Poetry
Co-author: Cyclamens and Swords and other poems about Israel

Doug Holder's All the Meals I Had Before delivers again and again. Each poem is a savory dish worthy of five stars at Loch Ober's. Holder's poetry feeds our high expectations and does not disappoint. His wit and erudite observations constantly shine with sterling results. A lot of the poetry has a certain edginess mixed with wit and humor that equally provokes to thought while it entertains. Everyone should indulge themselves in this gourmet buffet.This collection, as well as Holder's other published works, belong in every serious collectors library.
Harris Gardner
Executive Director
Tapestry of Voices

Aside from being the founder, publisher, and co-editor of the prestigious and influential Ibbetson Street Press, Doug Holder writes poetry with a passion and insight that deserves prestige and influence all its own.

Take, for instance, "Of All The Meals I Had Before: Poems About Food and Eating," a work with an organic feel surprising for a chapbook. Among some odes to nostalgic eateries like "Last Night at the Wursthaus" and "At Benson's Deli," Holder ponders the silly-"Milk Duds"-and the sublime-"Portrait of My Mother During Her Solitary Meal." His eye for the rattling image drives many of the poems, like "Eating Out" where he observes: "As the Latino/scrapes the masticated/bone and marrow/into a bloody bin/ and flashes a gold-toothed smile,/at the chef/ whose cleaver/tears through a prime cut--/then holds some/fraction of a gelatinous liver/quivering in his hands"¦" What makes his work so enjoyable is not only his well-described world but also the fun he has with it, as when he ends the same poem with the line," "Meanwhile I order desert." The book flirts with food and sex, comparing breastfeeding and sucking on a straw or rotisserie chickens and pornographic images, until it climaxes in the final poem "Cannibalism," that begins:
"And what could be more intimate?/ To deflesh a skull/ crack a femur/ to get down/ to the very marrow/ Is there a greater/ act of love?"
--S. Craig Renfroe, Jr., Main Street Rag
Winter 2007-8 Edition

$7.00 | 23 Pages | In Stock

Gothic Calligraphy Poems by Flavia Cosma Červená Barva Press, 2007

Flavia Cosma is an acclaimed Romanian-born, Canadian poet, author and translator. She is also an award winning independent television documentary producer, director and writer. To date she has published nine books of poetry, a novel, a traveling memoir and a book of Fairy Tales. Her work is represented in numerous anthologies in various countries and languages.

Gothic Calligraphy, translated from the original Romanian by Flavia Cosma with Charles Siedlecki, is Flavia Cosma's tenth poetry collection published in Somerville, Massachusetts by Červená Barva Press (2007). These poems are candid, romantic and metaphisical. What is particularly striking about the poems is their originality and the daring force of their imagery and metaphors, wonderfully rendered into English by this tantalizing, entrancing translation. The language is straightforward, spare, yet so bold in image as to seem extravagant.

Ioan Tepelea, poet and publisher, Oradea, Romania:
"The inner equilibrium and the uniqueness of voice, but most of all the interior fervor to be oneself when faced with life's adversity, turn these poems into an existential suffrage, revealing an authentic and personal vision."

George Elliott Clarke, Department of English, University of Toronto:
"Flavia Cosma's vision is dark and Gothic, but also saturated with Mediterranean sun, romance and vine. Her style "“ imagistic, cryptic "“ reminds one of other powerful women writers such as America's Emily Dickinson, Russia's Anna Akhmatova and Canada's Marie Uguay. Their poems are miniature fairy tales that enjoy being both sprightly and grim."

David Mills, poet and literary critic, Toronto:
"Flavia Cosma's poetry has been designed to waken sleeping consciousness. These poems lead the reader through the pain, suffering and loneliness of life while searching for truth's hidden mysteries which serve to make life meaningful and beautiful, yet remain to be discovered in that continual renewal and rebirth of life."

Irene Harasimowicz-Zarzecka, foreword to Gothic Calligraphy:
"A poet of extraordinary depth and sensitivity, combining in a permanent osmosis her state of mind and consciousness with the wealth of nature, always searching for the eternal, timeless values of our earthly sojourn. The baroque opulence of Flavia Cosma's diction is worthy of a genuine master of the word.

Alexander SfÃ¢rlea, poet and literary critic, Oradea, Romania:
a review of Gothic Calligraphy:
"What strikes the reader in Gothic Calligraphy is an anxious and intense perception of the existential struggle, which melts irreversibly into extinction and forgetfulness, an intangible and tragic descent into the inevitable nothingness, combined with the ultimate deliverance of coming to terms with oneself."

Fragments from Gothic Calligraphy appeared in their Romanian version-In Bratele Tatalui, Cogito Press, Oradea, Romania, 2006.

$8.00 | 41 Pages | In Stock

Bilingual Poems by Richard Kostelanetz Červená Barva Press, 2007

Preface From the book:
If the principal theme of my poetry has been invention, one motive of the poems written since Wordworks (1993), my first elaborate collection, has been the clashing of languages. This reflects initially my interest in writing poems in languages I barely know--for instance, the French and German Strings reprinted there. As always, I make a move and then look for surprising results. Here one move is interweaving the letters of words in two languages; another comes from jamming two words together to form not only a larger word but an evocative intersection. Many other poetic developments should follow from these initial moves. Some depend upon understanding two languages; others, not. "“Richard Kostelanetz, New York, NY

Review from Doug Holder's Authors Den:
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?AuthorID=3792

$7.00 | 17 Pages | In Stock: Out of stock-Restocking soon

Out Of The Arcadian Ghetto A Fiction Chapbook by Ian Randall Wilson Červená Barva Press, 2007

Ian Randall Wilson is the author of Hunger and Other Stories (Hollyridge Press, 2000), and the poetry chapbook Theme of the Parabola (Hollyridge Press, 2005). His work has appeared in many journals including the North American Review, the Mid-American Review and The Gettysburg Review. He is an executive at Columbia-TriStar Marketing Group, and on the fiction faculty at the UCLA Extension.

Out of the Arcadian Ghetto is a work of great imagination. It features two previously published stories. In "He Was Known For His Nose," a specialist employed by a reclusive millionaire selects female companionship for his master by the women's smell. When his nose fails, disaster ensues. In "The Three Bears: A Retelling," this classic fairytale is reconceived as a contemporary commentary on race relations between homo sapiens and Ursus arctos.

Small Press Review/ Mar-Apr Picks, 2007

$7.00 | 33 Pages | In Stock

Blue Edge by Susan Tepper Červená Barva Press-2006

Susan Tepper's poetry is honest, filled with original insights that enrich the reader. Her lyrics are taut and moving, a joy to read. She is to be welcomed among the most accomplished poets writing today.
Simon Perchik

The collection has an elegant focus and hush around it...
Timothy Donnelly, Boston Review

Susan Tepper is a poet of quiet grace yet insistent power, who steals your mind's focus in odd moments long after you've laid down her book.
Don Williams, Editor, New Millennium Writings & Syndicated Columnist

Susan Tepper...on the page, shimmers through everyday thoughts, bringing life to streams and smoke and snow. Her gentle vision beautifully informs her well-crafted poems in "Blue Edge."
Suzi Winson, Fish Drum

Readers of Grasslimb will be familiar with Susan Tepper's fine poetry... We can enthusiastically recommend this fine further exploration of her work.
Valerie Polichar, Grasslimb

Susan's poetry is in touch with the human race... reaps with the knowledge of a poet well versed.
Shirley Gerald Ware, Fresh! Literary Magazine

$6.00 | 30 Pages | In Stock

Fishing in Green Waters by Judy Ray Červená Barva Press-2006; Second Printing-2007

"Sometimes, fishing in green waters, we draw up words in a fine net," says poet Judy Ray in her poem, "Sometimes." This "fine net" could easily describe her chapbook, Fishing in Green Waters, recently published by Červená Barva Press. In poems that take the reader from Tiananmen Square, to the Midwest flatlands, to the emotional landscape of Frida Kahlo, Fishing in Green Waters makes for a remarkable read. Ranging in tone from whispered quiet ("Let us lullaby to sleep the weary unseeing eyes") to breathless, imagistic cross-cuts ("[The poem] looks for the flash of the pileated woodpecker, finds the splash of blood in a schoolyard"), Ray reels in the political, the personal, and the historical in her tightly woven poems.
Gloria Mindock, Editor, Červená Barva Press

(Excerpt of Review)
The beauty of this poetry chapbook was the surprises I witnessed each time I turned the page. The author was quite adept in addressing different themes and different places. This rendered a kaleidoscope of writing and filled me with anticipation. --Francis Alix
Small Press Review, July-August, 2006

$6.00 | 35 Pages | In Stock

Oh Angel by Gloria Mindock U Å OKU Å TAMPA-2005

If you don't believe in angels, this compelling collection of poems about them might give you pause for thought. Among the kinds of angels Gloria Mindock addresses are male and female, guardian, loyal, and fallen angels, even a vacationing angel. As in the title poem, which opens the book, she often exclaims, "Oh angel," in conjecture, disappointment, pique, passion, or some other emotion. Angels dominate her consciousness, her moods, her actions. For instance, "Wild" begins, "Oh angel, at dawn, / I get up and sit in the nicest room," and in "Guardian Angel Sits on Left" she says, "The angel is curled against / me . . . / She protects me." But by the end of the poem, "The angel went on to / guard another." Though desirable, angels can sometimes be disloyal, like people. In "Wings" the speaker chides a traitor angel and then reproaches a lover who has deserted her: "Oh Herman-stupid man / Prodigies won't help / Poetry is necessary / just like me." This passage recalls Wallace Stevens' "necessary angel," his name for the imagination, whose necessary product is poetry. Stupid Herman "jumped out too soon," leaving the speaker at first bereft but then with a new subject for a poem, a new sense of worth. Oh Gloria, what else are lovers and angels for?
--George Held

To read a review of Oh Angel visit: http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2006_02_12_dougholder_archive.html

$5.50 | 16 Pages | In Stock: Sold Out

The Whole Enchilada by Ed Miller Červená Barva Press-2006

Think of The Whole Enchilada as an absurdist playground, and you're invited. There you'll find an abundance of whooping, hollering, cussing and adolescent ridicule. There you'll find a lot of sand being flung around, kicked around. It's a ruckus of mockeries, a splenetic free-for-all.

The poems: more than a few are found-text pieces, derived from the ephemera and detritus of life, which are combined or manipulated or both; some are casual narratives; some began as correspondence and later stood trembling on their own.

$6.00 | 48 Pages | In Stock

W Is for War by George Held Červená Barva Press-2006

In one way or another, ranging from inconvenience to death, we all become victims of war. In these fine, even-toned poems, Mr. Held outlines the price in folly and flesh paid by all sides. Ultimately, war is the last of last resorts--and not to be undertaken but for the direst circumstances.
THE ICONOCLAST #94

W Is for War, a new poetry chapbook by political activist George Held. In this collection of poems, his ninth, George expresses his protest against the war in Iraq. "Because he supports our men and women in arms, he resists sending them into battle without compelling, legitimate reasons."

The whole collection hangs together very well. I admire your guts in publishing the volume, and I'm glad I own a copy as it's a little piece of history. --Gretchen Fletcher

WIFW gives precise and true voice to what many patriots think. It's courageous and passionate. --Michael Graves

Some of your best work is in this book. They say no one in love ever wrote a good love poem, the point being that passion gets in the way of craftsmanship. But it hasn't in your case. --James McGowan

This chapbook is wonderfully cohesive, and I admire the way you move through the war by moving through all the players: President, populations on both sides, a Vietnam vet, poets writing on the war, a mother and child, a single Everyman speaker, and by invoking the government of ancient Rome. This endows the collection with variety, a quality I prize highly in any collection. --Margot Farrington

Small Press Review /September-October Picks, 2006

$7.00 | 29 Pages | In Stock

Plays

SAM, SARA, ETC. A play in two acts by Brian Arundel Červená Barva Press, 2021

A native of Washington, D.C., Brian Arundel received an MA in English from Virginia Tech and an MFA in creative writing from Louisiana State University. His short stories and essays have appeared in publications that include Salon, Mid-American Review, Bryant Literary Review, Under the Sun, The Satirist and Buddhadharma, as well as the anthologies The Practice of Creative Writing, Best of Brevity and Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, among other publications. An avid trail runner, Brian works in the nonprofit sector in southern Maine, where he lives with his wife, Manuela.

Emotionally devastated after his wife leaves him, Sam returns home, where his fisherman father has entered the family in a reality television contest. As filming ensues, the lines blur between authentic and constructed realities. Sam seeks healing while his family, and in particular his relationship with his father, descends into chaos, confrontation, and unexpected product endorsements. At turns hilarious, emotional, and philosophical, Sam, Sara, Etc. questions the meaning of identity, our roles in life, and what we might hear when everything is silent.

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-43-7 | 138 Pages

Passions (monodrama) by Denis Emorine Translated from the French by Brian Cole Červená Barva Press, 2010: Denis Emorine is the author of short stories, essays, poetry, and theater. He was born in 1956 in Paris and studied literature at the Sorbonne (University of Paris). His theatrical output has been staged in France and Russia. He has a great interest for Eastern Europe. In 2004, he won first prize (French) for his poetry at the FÃ©ile Filiochta International competition. His poetry has been published in Pphoo (India), Blue Beat Jacket (Japan), Snow Monkey, Cokefishing, Be Which Magazine, Poesia, (USA). His texts have been published in numerous e-zines including Cipher Journal, Mad Hatter's Review, Milk, The Salt River Review, Istanbul Literary Review, and WHL Review. His last publication was a play called, "On The Platform," (Červená Barva Press).
$7.00 | 16 Pages | In Stock

On The Platform A play by Denis Emorine Translated by Brian Cole, Červená Barva Press, 2008

Cover Art: L' Echo oculaire by Farah Willem Dahri

On the Platform, by Denis Emorine, takes us to a crowded platform where impatient travelers wait for a train from Paris. We are introduced to a character named Laure. She is waiting for her fiancÃ© Julien to arrive. Is it chance or fate that Laure meets a man named Marek? What transpires is an encounter we may all one day face. How extraordinary that in this crowded landscape, Laure realizes her destiny and his are intertwined.

Denis Emorine perfectly captures the torment of Marek and the innocence of Laure, imparting to us a vivid picture of his tortured soul and her radiant spirit. But, as the whims of Fate are unavoidable, Laure's life takes a profound turn"¦
-Gloria Mindock, Červená Barva Press

$14.00 | ISBN: 978-0-615-25983-3 | 42 Pages

E-books

No One is Safe by Susan Tepper Červená Barva Press, 2007

Susan Tepper, a three-time Pushcart Nominee, writes poetry, fiction and essays. Her work has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Green Mountains Review, Boston Review, Salt Hill, New Millennium Writings, Snake Nation Press, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Wilderness House Literary Review, Grasslimb, Pavement Saw and Poesia.

In 2006, Červená Barva Press published her poetry collection "Blue Edge." Two of her novels are currently making the publishing rounds.

Sassy, sensitive, and suspenseful, Susan Tepper's No One Is Safe is something you must read.
-Laurie Graff author, You Have To Kiss A Lot Of Frogs and Looking For Mr. Goodfrog

"No One is Safe" is a haunting story that taps into the core of our fears. Susan Tepper has masterfully shown us what happens when one's security and freedom are taken away."
Ellen Litman, author "The Last Chicken in America"

Read it online now!

The Life and Death of a Literary Legend by Martin Golan Červená Barva Press, 2007

In this hilarious life and death tale of a famous literary magazine, Martin Golan pulls no punches. Anyone who has traversed the often treacherous waters of publishing will appreciate this candid story, presented with humor and a twist of lemon.
--Susan Tepper

For anyone in the literary scene, whether you are an editor or writer, or a lover of words, you will find this story hysterically funny. Take a journey with Martin and the New York Literary Review and watch the fate one magazine can bring!
--Gloria Mindock, Editor, Červená Barva Press

"Being an editor of a literary magazine, I found this story of the life and death of a New York Lit mag. profoundly funny, and profoundly embarrassing. If you ever been in the world of literary magazines, poets and writers you will recognize the ruses, the players and yourself. At the end you will feel like your fly is down."
--Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update

Read it online now!

STREETS OF FLOWERS by Martin Golan Červená Barva Press, 2007: In "Streets of Flowers," a college student who yearns to be a writer finds inspiration in the flowery names of the streets where he walks and in the beauty of a woman in his writing class. Spurred on by the breathless reviews he imagines in his head, he presents a poem about the woman to the class, in a scene that will be familiar to anyone who has presented work they cared deeply about in a writers' workshop. His experience in the class, coupled with an evening alone with the woman, teaches him a great deal: though he does not yet fully understand it, he has found not only his path but also himself.
Read it online now!

WHEN ANNIE FELL OFF THE MOUNTAIN by Martin Golan Červená Barva Press, 2007: "When Annie Fell Off The Mountain" is a love story set in the world before Roe v. Wade, a world where a foolish moment of impetuosity leads to sneaking around back alleys and clandestine meetings in filthy motels. A man "“ now happily married and with children of his own "“ looks back on his and onetime girlfriend Annie's harrowing pursuit of an illegal abortion. He sees for the first time that it was harder for her in ways he would never understand. It comes to him that just being a man, or being the kind of man he was, shielded him from the worst of it, how "“ as when Annie slipped on a mountain at the story's start, and in the search to terminate her pregnancy, even now in his life "“ he has always been standing on safe, solid ground.
Read it online now!

Gilgamesh by Martin Burke

A free e-book to read online or download

I have always had a special spot in my heart for the story of Gilgamesh because of writing music and singing the 72 sections of the text based on sin-leqi-unninni's version written around 1300 B.C. I find it extremely amazing that most of the columns have survived. In the epic, Gilgamesh ruled in one of the first historical cities which would now be Iraq.

The following is a description of Gilgamesh taken from the Theatre S. program in 1989.

In the epic, Gilgamesh is a powerful King in need of a companion. So Enkidu is created for him out of the wilderness. After they travel together and defeat a monster in the forest, Enkidu dies. Stricken with grief, Gilgamesh journeys alone to the end of the earth to seek the answer to humanity's mortality.

I love Martin Burke's version of Gilgamesh and think it is beautifully written. It is no easy task to take on such an epic. He has definitely made it his own.

Gloria Mindock, Editor
Červená Barva Press

Click here to download Gilgamesh
(Microsoft Word version)

I Ching by Martin Burke

A free e-book to read online or download

Martin Burke -poet and playwright
Founder of the bilingual Theatre group 'Zonder Thuis'

"Burke is the eloquent essayist of the sublime"
Projected Letters

"His style is far ahead in terms of imaginative inventiveness:
This is startling, original work"
Kiosque Review

Biography is always of two kinds. There is the external biography of places lived in, books published and plays preformed. This is legitimated and this is included -but it is not the full story. True biography occurs in the mind that confronts certain issues and then gives them form in books and poems.
So it is that when I say I live in Flanders I am not just referring to the northern Flemish speaking area of Belgium. When I say Flanders I am touching an imaginative source that covers place and history, archetype and existential fact that roots into all the work I do. It was the Welsh poet Vernon Watkins who wrote "I have been luck in this one thing alone" -and this luck in living at a centre which proves to be a Temenos of the imagination both forwards in time and backwards in memory is something for which I am grateful. To live here was not a conscious choice. At least not initially so. I came on a holiday to visit a friend intending to stay for ten days or so. That was twenty seven years ago and still the holidays has not ended.
Not that the rooting into the roots of this place was instant. It wasn't. initially all poetry ceased when I moved here and for more than twenty years there was no poetry to be written. No thought which I could express. No word to which I could give expression. And then, four years ago, the mystery returned. All that had lain dormant sought utterance and brought with it the means of utterance. Since then I have applied myself to following this word down to its roots and into its future. And it is here that all that is implied by Flanders seems to me to be the perfect figure of time and timelessness of this borderline expression. The books have flowed and the word has not ceased and twenty years of wonderment are finding their long suppressed expression.
This then is the biography behind the biography -a biography locked into and bound up with the word Flanders.
More will follow and surprises await and yet I think I will always be able to centre it on this imaginative centre and that no matter how far I move I will not move far from it. The bio that follows should then be seen in this light

Born in Ireland but living now in Brugge, Belgium

Near Love Stories by J. B. Hogan

A free e-book to read online or download

J. B. Hogan is a writer and poet living in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He has a Ph.D. in English (Literature) from Arizona State University (1979) and worked for many years as a technical writer. His short stories, poems, and non-fiction have appeared in: Istanbul Literary Review, Smokebox, The Scruffy Dog Review, Aphelion, Rumble, The Swallow's Tail, Poesia, Bewildering Stories, Avatar Review, Copperfield Review, Ascent Aspirations, Megaera, The Pedestal Magazine, Dogwood Journal, Mastodon Dentist, The Square Table, Raving Dove, Mobius, Viet Nam Generation, The Mark Twain Journal, and San Francisco Review of Books.

Postcard Series

Postcard Series: One Designed by Gloria Mindock Červená Barva Press-2005: (Excerpt of Review)
...the most striking quality of these twenty "postcards" is the radical exploration of both size and color, not only in the background but typography... Though black-on-white on their backsides, most of these glossy cards are simply beautiful enough to stand by themselves, individually mounted to one's walls.
--Richard Kostelanetz Small Press Review/November-December, 2005
$15.00 | 21 Postcards | Out of Stock

To order by mail...

Červená Barva Press Books, Chapbooks and Postcards

New Release: Becoming Mirsky by Paul Beckman (Fiction)

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

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

SAYING GOODBYE by Andrew Stancek (Flash-Fiction)

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

Quiet Geography by Michael C. Keith (Fiction)

New Release: WITH NO SWEAT AT ALL by Alisa Velaj Translated from the Albanian by Ukë Zenel Buçpapaj

New Release: LAVINIA & HER DAUGHTERS A Carpathian Elegy by Ioana Ieronim Translated from Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Ioana Ieronim

New Release: WINTER JOURNEY EL VIAJE DEL INVIERNO by Alicia Aza Translated by J. Kates and Stephen A. Sadow

January 5, 2018: The Sun Eaters a novel by Alex M. Pruteanu

Release date November 2, 2015: THE CHINTZ AGE tales of love and loss for a new new york by Ed Hamilton

Release date June 4, 2015: Span of Thread by David Giannini

Release date June 1, 2015: A World Less Perfect for Dying In by Ralph Pennel

December 3, 2013: The Telling by Denise Bergman

My Father's Eyes a memoir by Mary Bonina

New Release: My Life With Blondie by JiřÃ­ Klobouk

New release: On Paths Known to No One Poems by Flavia Cosma

New release: Hyperlinks of Anxiety by Daniel Y. Harris

May 3, 2013: Sweet Snow A novel of the Ukrainian famine of 1933 by Alexander J. Motyl

May 12, 2013: The Bonsai Curator by Pamela L. Laskin

November 7, 2012: Červená Barva Press proudly announces the publication of our 100th book!

Reviews and Interviews

Out of Stock

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October 25, 2010 Review by Zvi A. Sesling http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2010/10/profane-uncertaintiesby-luis-raul-calvo.html

Released May 11, 2010

Released March 30, 2010

Released December 31th, 2009

Released December 16th, 2009

Released December 15th, 2009

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Released June 12th, 2009

Released June 12th, 2009

New Release: NOT FOR AMNESIA by Lo Galluccio (Chapbook)

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

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

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

Červená Barva Press
Books, Chapbooks and Postcards

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

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

New Release: WITH NO SWEAT AT ALL by Alisa Velaj
Translated from the Albanian by Ukë Zenel Buçpapaj

New Release: LAVINIA & HER DAUGHTERS A Carpathian Elegy by Ioana Ieronim
Translated from Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Ioana Ieronim

New Release: WINTER JOURNEY EL VIAJE DEL INVIERNO by Alicia Aza
Translated by J. Kates and Stephen A. Sadow

January 5, 2018:
The Sun Eaters a novel by Alex M. Pruteanu

Release date November 2, 2015:
THE CHINTZ AGE tales of love and loss for a new new york by Ed Hamilton

Release date June 4, 2015:
Span of Thread by David Giannini

Release date June 1, 2015:
A World Less Perfect for Dying In by Ralph Pennel

New Release: My Life With Blondie by JiřÃ Klobouk

October 25, 2010
Review by Zvi A. Sesling http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2010/10/profane-uncertaintiesby-luis-raul-calvo.html