The Lost Bookshelf Author's by last name G

F <<< Author: G >>> H

Kevin Gallagher

Isolate Flecks by Kevin Gallagher Červená Barva Press, 2008

Kevin Gallagher is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Isolate Flecks (Červená Barva Press, 2008), and Looking for Lake Texcoco (Cy Gist, 2008). His poetry and reviews have appeared in such publications as The Boston Review, Emergency Almanac, Green Mountains Review, Harvard Review, Jacket, Peacework, the Partisan Review and elsewhere. In 2004 he edited a feature on Kenneth Rexroth for Jacket, and a chapbook titled Nevertheless: Some Gloucester Writers and Artists. From 1992 to 2002 he was a publisher and editor of compost magazine. A retrospective anthology of compost, co-edited with Margaret Bezucha, is titled There's No Place on Earth Like the World (Zephyr, 2006). He lives with his wife Kelly, and son Theo, in Newton, Massachusetts.

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

$7.00 | 39 Pages | In Stock: 20

Timothy Gager

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

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
Saturday, March 22, 2009
Review by Doug Holder

Tim Gager’s poems are poems of the regular guy, and in his own way Gager’s work is as American as apple pie. He is a man who is confused by and craves women, retains a childlike enthusiasm for Baseball into his middle age, downs the burger and brews, and pines for something that always seems just out of his reach. There is nothing rarefied about the poet’s work; his poetry speaks as plainly as a stick or bone.

In the poem “2 A.M.” Gager writes evocatively about the concessions of carnality:

“On me
you push down
the weight on each bent leg,
cures my evils…
no more bile
to hold down
no more skeletons
to settle for
when it’s dark…”

And Gager really hits his stride with “ stuck, with my old school ways.” I must admit in this age of the wireless I remain a Luddite , and view the pay phone, and the phone booth with a certain romantic reverence. Gager infuses this one pedestrian booth simmering in the Arizona heat with a plume of sad/sweet nostalgia and longing:

“got green in my pocket
not plastic—nor have I
ever brought a cell
to make his call like this
with poles and wires
endless from where I stand
to you

i’ve driven miles in dust
to find this pay phone
to whisper in your ear
i love you baby
and how are the kids

on the side of the road,
my loneliness
is this booth where
i hear you smile
and I picture
the way your hips thrust
forward, every time you laugh…
this surge of you
bursts, hits me
like the heat in Arizona
at ten
AM.”

This is another fine collection from Cervena Barva. And hats off to the front cover artist Andrea Libertini.

$7.00 | 43 Pages | In Stock: 25

Lo Galluccio

NOT FOR AMNESIA by Lo Galluccio Červená Barva Press, 2023

Lo's first published release is Hot Rain, a poetry collection on Ibbetson Street Press, followed by Sarasota VII a prose poem memoir on Červená Barva Press. In 2010, Alternating Current Press released Terrible Baubles which was also made into spoken word CD with music. She's been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes in poetry. Her other two CDs as a vocalist are Being Visited on the Knitting Factory label and Spell on You, a self-release. They can be heard on Bandcamp, Spotify and Amazon Prime. Lo served as Poet Populist of Cambridge between 2013-2015. She completed her MFA in creative writing from Stonecoast in July 2019. Her work has appeared in Litkicks.com, www.strangeroad.com, The Heat City Literary Review, The Solstice Literary Review, Night magazine, Home Anthology, Eden Waters Press, Lungfull magazine!, Constellations Journal, Wilderness House Literary Review, Ibbetson Street, The Oddball Review, Muddy River Review, among others. She's performed at the Boston Poetry Festival and the New York City New Year's Day Poetry Marathon for the Poetry Project. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA with her cat Lucy, an aloof tabby, but has drawn most of her inspiration from New York City where she lived between 1991 and 2001 on the Lower East Side.

Lo Galluccio is the bad girl tearaway from the furnished souls of Cambridge ladies, and found refuge in the haunted spirits of Sexton and Plath. Now she's knocking on your door with her box of angry candy — fifteen poems leap out and bite before you've had a chance to taste them. Sweet with venom that cures, brutal and bruised into beauty, you'd be wise to flee from her offering — but at what cost? She has been to bedlam and comes all the way back. NOT FOR AMNESIA is not so much a collection of poems but the major arcana of her personal tarot offering guidance; a set of branding irons so you will never forget.
—Richard Cambridge, author of Pulsa: A Book of Books

Once again Ms. Galluccio with her heady images and songlike poems, marches into your psyche Her latest offering of poems, small sacrifices on the altar of memories and forgetting, does not disappoint. Her poems blend into a crooning song about lust, love, remorse, and sometimes anguish – "My desire/comes before /the world wars." Reading Galluccio is like discovering a modern-day Goth poetess and wondering why it took you so long to find her.
—Julia Carlson, author of Little Creatures

To crave blankness, to paint desire orange, pain yellow or to find grounding in going "home a waiter/from a bad shift, grotesque,/no good tips," Galluccio's language attests to spontaneity and unusual responsiveness to the unexpected. She heeds an essential call to poets: Take language, which makes and keeps us familiar, and deliver it rather strangely, singingly ("Because she may break he waits,/and the and the trees stiffen in all directions"), to open the eye asleep in its everyday gaze. To waken the eye.
—Michael Todd Steffen, author of On Earth As It Is

$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-81-9 | 30 Pages

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 | No Longer Available

Roberto Carlos Garcia

Melancolía Poems by Roberto Carlos Garcia Červená Barva Press, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

amores gitano (gypsy loves) by Roberto Carlos Garcia Červená Barva Press, 2013

Roberto Carlos Garcia's work has appeared in Connotation Press- An Online Artifact, Wilderness House Literary Review, Poets & Artists Magazine, Metazen, Atticus Review, and others. His fiction is included in the anthology "The Lost Children," a book of 30 short stories to benefit children's charities PROTECT and Children 1st U.K.

"Amores Gitano (gypsy loves)" is his first chapbook.

A native New Yorker, he now lives and works in New Jersey where he is pursuing an MFA in Poetry and Poetry Translation at Drew University's Low Residency MFA Program.

You can follow Roberto Carlos Garcia on Twitter at @thespokenmind. His website is www.robertocarlosgarcia.tumblr.com

"In his chapbook, amores gitano, Roberto Carlos Garcia breathes adult passion into the craft of desire, these poems strip themselves, naked. They flirt and they want and each section a near erotic frame of determined risk ready to widen the realm of the reader's senses. Here is a poet who can dress and undress the lyric with his mind, hands and tongue."
—Thomas Sayers Ellis, Author of Skin Inc. Identity Repair Poems and The Maverick Room

"Roberto Carlos Garcia gives us twenty stunning gypsy loves in amores gitano that together construct a language so wrought with desire it swaggers. This is a luminous book that marks the emergence of a new and important voice that is sure to stir up all kinds of bad."
—Sean Nevin, Author of Oblivio Gate

18.

There's a cruelty
about her
that's always hungry.

When she finally takes,
finally tastes flesh
& is full,
what's left of me
is loved again,
her cruelty abates.

In many ways
I'm a keeper
in a zoo.

Once the lions are fed
I can enter the cage
but still,
I'm leaving my life
to chance.

$7.00 | 30 Pages | Out of Print

Harris Gardner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joan Gelfand

Here and Abroad by Joan Gelfand Červená Barva Press, 2010

Winner of the 2010 Červená Barva Press Fiction Contest, Judged by Dorothy Freudenthal

Joan's poetry, fiction, reviews and essays have appeared in national and international magazines, anthologies and literary journals including Rattle, Kalliope, The Toronto Quarterly, The Huffington Post and The MacGuffin. Past President of the Women's National Book Association, Joan is the Fiction Editor for Zeek Magazine and teaches in the California Poets in the Schools program. "A Dreamer's Guide to Cities and Streams" was published by SF Bay Press in 2009 and "Seeking Center," by Two Bridges Press in 2006. You can listen to her CD, "Transported," on reverbnation.com http://joangelfand.com

"Joan Gelfand is at her best in her new collection of short stories. They're quirky, original, and highly entertaining with surprising dark moments that will take your breath away."
—Mary Mackey Author of The Widow's War

"EAT WRITE LOVE. Joan Gelfand whisks us, briefly, to Paris, where the present meets the past in both its ugliness and its grace, to Florence, where art meets its cruelest friend, "art criticism," to a more anonymous if earthier place in our own land where families and lovers pass and balance, for a moment, on the pinnacle of Thanksgiving. Her stories, like her poetry, celebrate life and love, family, friendship, art - a scrumptious meal, and an intoxicating bottle of wine! (Warning: Do NOT read these stories on an empty stomach.)"
—Christopher Bernard, author of A Spy in the Ruins, cofounder of Caveat Lector

$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9831041-0-0 | 52 Pages | In Stock

David Giannini

Span of Thread by David Giannini Červená Barva Press, 2015

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

On OTHERS' LINES

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

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

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

On RIM/WAVE

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

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

Steve Glines

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

Gail Goepfert

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cover Art: Rob Vaughn @followrobv

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

Martin Golan

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.
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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.
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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

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Rachel Goldstein

Except for That Poems by Rachel Goldstein Červená Barva Press, 2013

Cover Artist: Rachel Goldstein

Rachel Goldstein is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She was born in Germany in 1946 in a displaced person’s hospital. At the age of two, she moved to La Paz, Bolivia with her parents. Five years later, her family emigrated to Montreal, Canada, where she completed her education with a degree in English Literature from McGill University. Her poems have been widely published. In 2005, she won Second Prize in the Robert Penn Warren Award.

"The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Rachel Goldstein writes with a searing authenticity haunting in its evocative power. Her spare, elegant poems provide intimate and poignant insights into a harrowing time and lives lived bravely afterward."
—Barbara Wallace Grossman, Professor of Drama, Tufts University; Presidential Appointee to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2000-2005)

"In this biographical collection, the author chronicles her parents' experiences before, during and after World War II. She helps the reader understand, "you were not there [when] eyes tilted toward the impossible." Each and every one of them was a "skin-thin weight [with] miles of wind in their bones." Their story will not die as long as "the willows still stand faithful in leafy gowns" and daughter-poet "sing what will not be redeemed.""
—Michal Mahgerefteh, Publisher Poetica Magazine

Reviews

Feb. 2, 2013 Doug Holder Blogspot Review:
Review of Except For That by Rachel Goldstein

$8.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9883713-1-6 | 33 Pages | In stock

Myles Gordon

Until It Does Us In by Myles Gordon Červená Barva Press, 2015

Myles Gordon’s book-length book of poetry, Inside the Splintered Wood, was recently published by Tebot Bach (Huntington Beach, CA), as winner of the press's "Patricia Bibby First Book Competition." His chapbook, Recite Every Day, was published by Evening Street Press (Dublin, Ohio) in 2009, as winner of the press's "Helen Kay Chapbook Competition." He is a past winner of the Grolier Poetry Prize, and honorable mention for an AWP Intro Award – Poetry. He currently teaches English in a Massachusetts high school.

Praise for Until It Does Us In

Myles Gordon's ambitious and affecting sonnet sequence not only conveys – sometimes with beautiful formal understatement, other times with bitter directness – the horrors of Jewish history, but also, heartbreakingly, how those horrors infiltrate the present. In Until It Does Us In, moving sonnets about the suicide of a hip, pot-smoking, peace-sign wielding older cousin function as continuations and repercussions of what is captured in this exquisite final couplet: "the Jews of Brest Litovsk; the German gun./The shadows dwindled, thinned. Then there were none."
—Jacqueline Osherow, Author of Whitehorn

The humanity and sense of loss in Gordon’s poems is so forceful and fresh, we feel like rising up and saving each other.
—Yehoshua November, Author of God's Optimism

This little book of sonnets startles and reaches the reader in ways that no other medium can. It is the naked truth, the full story, condensed in a few lines. It weaves the horror of the Holocaust through the fabric of generations, linking past atrocity to present day tragedy, laying bare all pretenses and deceptions that are attempt to disguise it.
—Dr. Dori Laub, Founder – Fortunoff Video Archive For Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University

How is it we evolve from violence? Myles Gordon asks then answers in 25 tightly controlled sonnets. Compassionate and unflinching, Until It Does Us In seeks to answer one of the most heart-wrenching of questions: How is it that someone whose family was nearly murdered out of existence ends up taking his own life?
—Catherine Sasanov, Author of Had Slaves

Myles Gordon directly confronts the afterlives of the Holocaust through this deftly woven family saga, crossing continents and centuries. Gordon maps the "DNA of tragedy," determining the difference between what we inherit and what we control, forever searching for the legacy of the Holocaust to end.
—Alyssa Pacy, Archivist – Cambridge Public Library

$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9861111-0-5 | 35 Pages | In Stock

Michael Graves

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

Gila Green

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eric Greinke

All This Dark 24 Tanka Sequences by John Elsberg & Eric Greinke Červená Barva Press, 2012

This chapbook is a companion piece to Catching The Light: 12 Haiku Sequences by John Elsberg and Eric Greinke, which Červená Barva Press published in 2009.

Eric Greinke has been active on the literary scene for nearly fifty years. He has been a bookseller, a publisher, an editor, a creative writing teacher, a book reviewer and a social worker for special needs children. His published work includes poetry, fiction, translation, social criticism and poetics, and has appeared in many books and chapbooks and in journals such as The Hurricane Review, Abraxas, Chiron Review, New York Quarterly, Wilderness House Literary Review, Main St. Rag, The South Carolina Review, California Quarterly, Mad Poets Review, Home Planet News, The University of Tampa Review, and the Paterson Literary Review. He has won several prizes, most recently a 2012 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award from the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. His most recent books are Traveling Music (2011), Beyond Our Control - Two Collaborative Poems (with Hugh Fox, 2012) and Conversation Pieces - Selected Interviews (2012), all from Presa Press. He is known for his collaborations with other poets, including Ronnie Lane, Brian Adam, Mark Sonnenfeld, Harry Smith, Richard Kostelanetz, Marine Robert Warden and Hugh Fox. All This Dark is his second collaboration with John Elsberg. They are working on a third. Website: www.ericgreinke.com.

John Elsberg is a poet, reviewer, editor, and historian. He is the author of over a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, and his work has been in a number of anthologies. He was the host of open poetry readings at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, for almost twenty-five years. He also has led various writing workshops, including explorations of experimental poetry with high school students. In the late 1970’s he was the fiction editor of Gargoyle. He has since been the editor or poetry editor of several other literary magazines, ranging from Bogg to The Delmarva Review on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where he and his wife Connie now spend a good part of their time. As a young man he taught for the University of Maryland, and then he spent many years as an editor/publisher of history books. His poems have appeared in a wide range of journals, such as Hanging Loose, the New Orleans Review, Lost & Found Times, Edgz, RAW NerVZ (Canada), American Tanka, and the Lilliput Review.
boggmag@aol.com

All This Dark

all this dark
stubble in winter sun
but I know
beyond the next turn
the wheat is neon green

cardinals
stay with us through
the winter
an oriental bush
that blooms in fall

late geese
across a rising moon
long trumpets
playing in a royal court
they exit left on cue

Reviews

Verse Wisconsin:
http://versewisconsin.org/Issue111/reviews/elsberg_greinke.html

Review by Dennis Daly:
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2012/07/all-this-dark-24-tanka-sequences-by.html

$7.00 | 32 Pages | In Stock

Catching The Light 12 Haiku Sequences by John Elsberg and Eric Greinke Červená Barva Press, 2009

Eric Greinke has been active on the literary scene since the late sixties. He has studied and published with many of the major poets of the post-modern period, including Robert Bly, Ted Berrigan, Charles Reznikoff, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley and Donald Hall. He has taught creative writing in Grand Rapids City School and for the Michigan Poets In The Schools program and spent 25 years as a social worker for special needs children. He has a long history of collaborations with other poets, including Ronnie Lane, Brian Adam, Harry Smith, Mark Sonnenfeld, Richard Kostelanetz and Hugh Fox. He has published poetry, fiction, translations, creative non-fiction and essays in hundreds of books and magazines internationally, including recent American appearances in The New York Quarterly, The California Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, The Mad Poets Review, and the Home Planet News. His work has been nominated six times for a Pushcart Prize. His long poem For The Living Dead won the 2008 Muses Review Award for Best Poem of the Year. His most recent poetry collection is Wild Strawberries. He lives with wife Roseanne on a Michigan lake where they publish under the Presa Press imprint.
www.ericgreinke.com.

John Elsberg is a poet, reviewer, editor, and historian. He is the author of over a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, and his work has been in a number of anthologies. He also was the host of open poetry readings at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland, for almost twenty-five years. He has conducted various writing workshops (to include experimental poetry on the high school level) and judged numerous poetry contests. He was the fiction editor of Gargoyle in the late 1970's, and he has been the editor of Bogg: A Journal of Contemporary Writing since 1980. He also sits on the editorial board of The Delmarva Review on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where he and his wife Connie now spend a good part of their time. In terms of a "daytime job," as a young man he taught for the University of Maryland, and then he spent many years as an editor/publisher of history books. His poems have appeared in a wide range of journals, such as Hanging Loose, Blue Unicorn, the New Orleans Review, Lost & Found Times, RAW NerVZ (Canada), Modern Haiku, and the Lilliput Review.
boggmag@aol.com

England's 2010 Purple Patch Awards have been announced. Catching The Light is on their list (#14 of 20) of Best Individual Collections of the Year.
Check it yourselves at www.purplepatchpoetry.co.uk

$7.00 | 32 Pages | In Stock

Andrey Gritsman

Family Chronicles Poems by Andrey Gritsman Červená Barva Press, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 | No Longer Available

David Gullette

Questionable Shapes Poems by David Gullette Červená Barva Press, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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