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Last Update: September 2, 2010
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New Release: September, 2010


Where Sanity Begins by Hugh Fox (Poetry)

New Releases: August, 2010

Paul Celan and the Messiah's Broken Levered Tongue: An Exponential Dyad
by Daniel Y. Harris and Adam Shechter
(Poetry)

What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock and Dori G
by Gary Percesepe and Susan Tepper
(Fiction)

Shipping Date: September 15, 2010

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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

Full-length Books

What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock and Dori G by Gary Percesepe and Susan Tepper 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.

Gary Percesepe and Susan Tepper 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

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

Shipping Date: September 15, 2010

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 Café 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 Café 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 Café, 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

This book is unavailable/out of stock

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 | Temporarily Out of Stock

Just released June 12th, 2009

Anezka Ceska by Jaromir Horec Translated into English by Jana Morávková 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, Jaromír 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

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 Mörling

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

$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 | In 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

$13.00 | ISBN: 9780979531361 | 72 Pages

Chapbooks

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.

$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.

$7.00 | 58 Pages | In Stock

July 1: A new chapbook by Thom Brucie

Moments Around The Campfire With A Vietnam Vet by Thom Brucie Červená Barva Press, 2010

Thom Brucie earned his MA in English at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, and his PhD at Binghamton University. His short story collection, Still Waters: Five Stories was nominated for a Georgia Author of the Year award in the short fiction category. His poems and stories have appeared in a variety of journals, including DEROS, Southwestern Review, San Joaquin Review, Cappers, and others. He teaches American Literature and Creative Writing at Brewton-Parker College. He and his wife, Carol, have six children.

The poems in Moments Around The Campfire With A Vietnam Vet flow with an incredible narrative voice spoken from the recollected perspective of a ghost poet with a precise eye for detail, a poet who carries you along the beautiful waterfall of misery with your eyes wide open and your heart in your throat. Each poem commands the page, daring the reader to deny its verity and weight, forbidding the reader to dismiss the small totals of Vietnam we still don't speak about. Wow. These poems took my breath away.
~Lana Maht Wiggins, University of Louisiana; author of Notes From Refuge, Felix Voorhies Award winner

Moments Around The Campfire With A Vietnam Vet is full of poignant poems about various characters who fought in the Vietnam War. Thom Brucie's style is direct, his images clear and specific, and the poems often end on a sardonic or ironic note. He makes us feel as though we were actually invited into the camp circle to hear the stories of these people, to know their longings and aspirations and disappointments. This is one of the best books of war poems I've ever read. I promise, you won't be able to put it down.
~Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Binghamton University; American Book Award winner for All That Lies Between Us

Cover Photo: Members of the 3rd Bn, 12th Inf, 4th Inf Div, "take five" during bunker construction on Hill 530, Vietnam War, 1967.

$7.00 | 42 Pages | In 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 Féile 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 Cervená 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

$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 Wróblewski

A Rarity by Grzegorz Wróblewski Translated from the Polish by Agnieszka Pokojska Červená Barva Press, 2009

Grzegorz Wróblewski, 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 Wróblewski'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 café, 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 | In 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

$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: 20

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.
$7.00 | 33 Pages | In Stock: 20

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

$7.00 | 20 Pages | In Stock: 25

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

$7.00 | 47 Pages | In Stock: 20

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: 25

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: 25

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?

$7.00 | 30 Pages | In Stock: 25

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 Doré 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: 25

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: 25

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: 25

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.
$7.00 | 39 Pages | In Stock: 20

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: 20

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: 20

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: 20

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: 20

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: 15

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: 15

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: 20

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: 5

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: 10

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 Sfârlea, 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: 10

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: 9

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: 6

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: 10

Oh Angel by Gloria Mindock U ŠOKU ŠTAMPA-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.

$7.00 | 48 Pages | In Stock: 30

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

$6.00 | 29 Pages | In Stock: 20

Plays

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 Féile 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 fiancé 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)

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

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September 2: A new chapbook by Hugh Fox

August 26: A new chapbook by Daniel Y. Harris and Adam Shechter

July 1: A new chapbook by Thom Brucie

May 27th: My Soul Still A Virgin by Gulnar Ali Balata

May 16, 2010: I'd Rather be Mexican by Charles P. Ries

April 15, 2010: Passions (monodrama) by Denis Emorine

March 16, 2010: The Lines Are Not My friends Poems by Stacia M. Fleegal

February 27, 2010: Snakes and Angels Adaptations of Indonesian Folk Tales by James Penha

February 27, 2010: Commodity Fetishism by Susan Lewis

December 2, 2009: Only A Mirage by Alexander G. Dryer

November 14, 2009: Catching The Light 12 Haiku Sequences by John Elsberg and Eric Greinke

November 14, 2009: Celebrity Slumbers by Judson Hamilton

November 7, 2009: The Possibility of Recovery by William Delman

October 18, 2009: A Rarity by Grzegorz Wróblewski

September 16, 2009: Unrestrained by Jennifer LeBlanc

September 4, 2009: Beowulf by Martin Burke

Beowulf

September 4, 2009: Waiting By Godot by Alexander Motyl