The Lost Bookshelf Author's by last name F

E <<< Author: F >>> G

Gary Fincke

THEM! by Gary Fincke Červená Barva Press, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Fleckenstein

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

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

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

Cover Artist: Mark Fleckenstein

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

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

Michael Foldes

Original Sin Selected Poems by Michael Foldes Červená Barva Press, 2022

Michael Foldes (b 1946) is an American poet, publisher, author and businessman. Born in Baltimore, MD, he grew up in Endwell, New York, later graduating from The Ohio State University in anthropology. In 2004, Foldes founded Ragazine.cc, a free, global, online magazine of art, information and entertainment. The bimonthly zine ceased publication in December 2019. Partial archives remain online at www.ragazine.cc.

Foldes's publications and projects include the anthologies "Stopped Dead: The End of Poetry," "In an Early Hour," and "Sand and Snow"; Sleeping Dogs: A true story of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping" (Split Oak Press, Ithaca, NY, 2012), and Sandy: Chronicles of a Superstorm in collaboration with artist Christie Devereaux. In 2017, he completed "Fashions & Passions" a series of ekphrastic poems in collaboration with artist Christopher Panzner. Panzner and Foldes recently completed a second collection titled "End Game," 75 poems with images created by Panzner in response to the poems. His poetry collection Some Stuff is available as a Kindle edition on Amazon.

Foldes's articles, editorials, poems, reviews, interviews and stories have appeared in publications worldwide, some in translation in Romanian, Hungarian, Japanese, French and Spanish. Publishing credits include l'Oeil de la Photographie, Where is the Jazz Festival, Mobius, Southern Literary Review, the Village Voice, High Times, The Seventh Quarry, Paterson Literary Review, CLH/Romania, We Are You Poetry anthology, From the Finger Lakes, Folazil (France), and Rosebud, among others. An interview with Foldes by Carol Smallwood appeared in the Scarlet Leaf Review, and in Wilderness House Literary Review.

His jobs have included lifeguard, grocery store bagger, potato peeler, construction worker, magazine editor, newspaper editor, social worker, electronic component sales rep, and medical video products sales engineer. One of his favorite gigs was bartending at the National Poetry Society in Earl’s Court Square, London, where the Guinness was warm and the patrons amazing.

He and his wife have three children and two grandchildren. They live in New York's Southern Tier a few hundred yards from the Susquehanna River.

Don't expect to find a bouquet of poems neatly tied together by a common theme or style; if anything brings these highly divergent poems together, it is probably the date of their creation as the fruits of the same harvest season, a recent one. Mike Foldes always tends to be very eclectic, open to any style, any theme, but in each of his poems, no matter how unique, his voice sounds authentic whether he speaks of personal experiences or editorializes on current political events. None of the poems are made to order; they all just seem to have burst out from the creative nook of the poet's mind and dictated their own style. Some readers-whether they be critics or just lovers of poetry-may find themselves at a loss faced with such wide range of eclecticism, but I applaud it and the poet's unhesitating answer to an inner call; however, my favorites are the short spiffy ones that say more by telling less, such as the footballer and gravity: "...when gravity / takes me where / all things go, / pray / what's there / will make me / the believer / you said / i would become."
-Paul Sohar, a fellow poet and occasional critic; author of "In Sun's Shadow"

Mike Foldes's chapbook, "Original Sin," weaves a fine-spun and well-designed American "poetic" carpet knit together with vibrant words, which are not mild incantations, but rather words that allow readers to confront their greatest fears (i.e., aging, illness, impotence, war, loveless love, betrayal, darkness, or the current global rise of right-wing totalitarian fascism). For instance, in precise "clear-cut" language, in the poem "The Sedition Edition," Foldes captures the full anti-American treasonous horror of January 6, 2021's U.S. Capitol insurrection.
-Jose Rodeiro, recipient of an NEA, Fulbright Fellowship, and an Oscar B. Cintas Fellowship in painting

"where do we go/ from here?/ where is the ladder?/ where are the stars?" asks the final poem in this thoughtful, outrageous chapbook. Original Sin deftly encapsulates the pandemic, a year like no other, filled with love lost, insurrection, aging, drugs, death, and, yes, love found again. Foldes asks the hard questions. His answers might surprise you.
-Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of Explicit: New & Selected, poetry editor, Cultural Daily

Cover Art: Christopher Panzner

$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-73-4 | 45 Pages

Linda Nemec Foster

The Elusive Heroine: My Daughter Lost in Magritte by Linda Nemec Foster Červená Barva Press, 2018: Linda Nemec Foster has published ten other collections of poetry including Amber Necklace from Gdansk (finalist for the Ohio Book Award in Poetry), Talking Diamonds (finalist for ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year), and The Lake Michigan Mermaid (co-authored with Anne-Marie Oomen). Foster's work has appeared in such journals as The Georgia Review, Nimrod, Connecticut Review, New American Writing, The North American Review, Paterson Literary Review, and Quarterly West. Her poetry has also been published in anthologies in the United States and Great Britain, translated in Europe, and produced for the stage. She has been honored with Pushcart Prize nominations and has received awards from the Arts Foundation of Michigan, ArtServe Michigan, National Writer's Voice, the Polish-American Historical Association, and the Academy of American Poets. Foster was selected to serve as Grand Rapids, Michigan's first Poet Laureate from 2003-05. Her chapbook, Contemplating the Heavens, was the inspiration for jazz pianist Steve Talaga's original composition which was nominated for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Foster's project, Cry of Freedom, is a collaboration with Hungarian musician Laszlo Slomovits and was released on CD in 2013. Foster is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College and in 2015 received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Dyer-Ives Foundation for her work as a poet and advocate for the literary arts.
$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9984253-9-9 | 40 Pages

Ten Songs From Bulgaria by Linda Nemec Foster Červená Barva Press, 2008

The first lines in Linda Nemec Foster’s Ten Songs from Bulgaria, sing 'Small lives, small lives/ we are trapped inside/ small lives.' The paradox here is that Foster’s poems reveal how large and rich the worlds are in which these small lives are lived. In line after line, we encounter the depths and reach of those who live outside the zones of everyday safety. Foster makes herself vulnerable to a world 'as tangible as fog' with her own penetrating observations. She walks 'the long journey' and her poems reflect the haunting music of ode and elegy.
-Jack Ridl

These poems evoke--in their concision and clarity--intense, disturbing images of lives shredded into pieces so small all that’s left is the memory of having endured. They are caged inside the empty space of the page, which seems to want to suffocate their spare, fragile, incredible beauty. Each image speaks a world that is window and mirror of what we hide from in the fabricated assemblages we make against the truth these poems speak.
-Faye Kicknosway

Reviews

Linda Nemec Foster Interview: Michigan Public Radio (an affiliate of NPR) for their Stateside program, hosted by Cynthia Canty. http://www.michiganradio.org/post/bulgarian-photography-and-michigan-poetry-inspire-album

Mark Lamoureux on four Červená Barva Press Chapbooks,
Gently Read Literature Review:
http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/mark-lamoureux-on-four-cervena-barva-press-chapbooks/

$7.00 | 20 Pages | In Stock

Hugh Fox

Where Sanity Begins by Hugh Fox Červená Barva Press, 2010

Hugh Fox is a 78 year old poet originally from Chicago, has spent most of his life teaching writing, American literature and film in Champaign-Urbana, Los Angeles, Caracas, Santa Catarina (Brazil), Buenos Aires, etc. He has 110 books published, his most recent being, The Collected Poetry of Hugh Fox, published last year by World Audience in New York.

CONJURING

My mind and clothes are caught
in March winds as
buildings and cars go flat,
whirled into remembrances
of worlds antedating ecological
suicide, when the last farmhouse
spoke and sick meant soft warm
milk, "supported," not "supporting,"
when all I had to do, after class
and homework, was to whirl and be
a paisano of yo-yo's and kites, bikes,
popsicles, chocolate bars, ice cream
and second-day doughnuts and smoke
whirled off bonfires where I was baking
potatoes underground, snow whirled
off buildings and I flew into the wind like
a comet, there were no walls between
me and my world and it all flowed through
and with me.

$7.00 | 57 Pages | In Stock

Stephen Frech

A Palace of Strangers Is No City by Stephen Frech Červená Barva Press, 2011

Cover Art: Stanislav Lahoda

Stephen Frech has earned degrees from Northwestern University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Cincinnati. He has published three volumes of poetry: Toward Evening and the Day Far Spent (Kent State University Press) won the 1995 Wick Poetry Chapbook Contest, If Not For These Wrinkles of Darkness won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize, published in 2001, and The Dark Villages of Childhood won the 2008 Mississippi Valley Poetry Chapbook Prize. He has been the recipient of the Elliston Poetry Writing Fellowship, the Milton Center Post-Graduate Writing Fellowship, and grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and the Illinois Arts Council.

He is founder and editor of Oneiros Press, publisher of limited edition, letterpress poetry broadsides. Oneiros broadsides have been purchased by special collections libraries around the world, among them the Newberry Library (Chicago), the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the University of Amsterdam Print Collection.

Stephen Frech is Associate Professor of English at Millikin University.

Stephen Frech Website: www.stephenfrech.com

Stephen Frech in his sequence of prose poems called A Palace of Strangers Is No City gives us a Kafkaesque world, signaled by the very first poem that ends with the frightening uncertainty of whether an unknown “you” is having a carrousel maker’s dream, or whether the carrousel maker is having a dream of the “you.” […] There are of course many fine works that have dealt with imaginary and oppressive landscapes, but what makes Frech’s book wonderfully creepy is that the oppression is so deeply existential. […] Another prose sequence, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities comes to mind, and with Frech’s mastery of the prose poem, it’s not an exaggeration to say A Palace of Strangers Is No City ranks with that masterpiece.
—Peter Johnson, from the Introduction

A Palace of Strangers Is No City is a one-of-a-kind experience. In just twenty-two elegant pages it contains an epic journey across an imagined city. The happenings in this city are surreal, ominous, funny and vivid. The circumstances may be dreamlike, but the longing and the wisdom are entirely real.
—John Dalton, author of Heaven Lake

1.
When the carrousel maker died, he dreamed of horses, wild horses, giraffes, zebras, deer, all running riderless but in bright carnival colors, as if every animal he'd sculpted and painted in garish and gilt colors were running wild again as they had for him very early when he was young and hardly knew the difference between wild animals and those that circled the carrousel.

You dreamed that night of escaping on a carrousel. The guards fire at you every time you come around again. You crouch down low to streamline your body for speed, then ride upright around the back side to slow it down, to delay the inevitable encounter with the guards. You are having one of his dreams, or he is having one of his dreams for you.

2.
Dreams of confinement and escape follow each other uninterrupted, night after night until the one looks like the other. You walk a beach sided by high cliffs and turn to climb stone steps leading up. They're covered with sand; they enter the rock cliff tunneling in, so you're climbing in darkness. But there's sunlight ahead. Finally, stepped into full light, you push open the gate of a picket fence. The spring creaks. On the gate, a sign, dusted over. You must brush off the lettering with your thumb. It says: This is not the way to the world. You must return to the beach down the steps. You look around. In the large fenced fields, grass has grown tall or the deep green of vegetable leaves spread in the sun. A woman has hiked her skirt up over her knees and she is bent over tending to a plant. A dog nearby begins to growl deep in his throat. You know you must leave and take the long, steep stairs, covered with sand, carrying the large bag of birdseed you've had with you all this time, searching for sure footing in the dark, back to the deserted beach where you find an endless line of stairwells leading up. You must try each one. Confinement. Escape. They need each other.

$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9831041-3-1 | 33 Pages | In Stock

A Palace of Strangers Is No City by Stephen Frech Broadside: $20.00 | In Stock

Karen Friedland

Tales from the Teacup Palace by Karen Friedland Červená Barva Press, 2020

A nonprofit grant writer by day, Karen's poems have been published in Writing in a Women's Voice, Nixes Mate Review, Vox Populi, The Lily Poetry Review, Constellations, and others. Her previous book, Places That Are Gone, was published in 2019 by Nixes Mate Books. She lives in Boston with her husband, two dogs, two cats, and a few too many plants.

An ordinary neighborhood on the edge of the city comes to life in Karen Friedland's Tales from the Teacup Palace-its dogs, trees, houses, spouses, and people, living and gone. With humor and insight, Friedland mines the nuances of her particular terroir as well as her own memories, all while striving to follow Forster's dictum, "only connect." This is a collection of vivid, contemplative poems that were expressly written to be enjoyed.

Karen Friedland's poems invite us into her West Roxbury neighborhood where the teacup sized yards mark the spaces between houses and we witness the "frail human connection" between neighbors. For Friedland "words on a screen, on a page are the lightest of filaments, that connect us, that make us, that save us." And that is what these quotidian poems achieve - they bring the reader into a Zen state and entrap us in the amber light of 1970s photographs where we hear the poet's confession that "Eros and the arts are my main forms of transportation." We are transported through the neighborhood, through the seasons, through memory and loss where we are reminded that poetry is a testament to the living, stronger than disease, and poetry is what we need to appreciate the fragile beauty of daily life where "nothing is in fact preordained - it's all just happenstance magic."
-Annie Pluto, author of The Deepest Part of Dark

Philosophical, cautiously optimistic, Tales from the Teacup Palace reveals Friedland's native intelligence, deep attachment to home, and other places on and off her map. Heart drives this stunning new poems collection.
-Susan Tepper, author of Confess and What Drives Men

In Tales from the Teacup Palace, Karen Friedland returns to the wistful imagery that serves as the foundation of her poetic work. Within these pages Friedland shares her formative years growing up in the 1970s, the quiet comforts of her humble home, and the small wonders of nature's beauty. We see it all. Whether conveying the blessing of springtime or ruminating on the correlation between "Eros and the Arts," Friedland's observations give readers a heightened awareness of life's small but critical moments. These poems serve as a precious chronicle of landscapes, both organic and contemporary. With subtle humor, robust femininity, and acute kindness, Tales from the Teacup Palace explores the finest nuances of our human experience.
-Renuka Raghavan, author of Out of the Blue and The Face I Desire

$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-42-0 | 27 Pages

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