The Lost Bookshelf Author's by last name P

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Chad Parenteau

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

Mark Pawlak

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

ALL THE NEWS by Mark Pawlak (signed copies) Hanging Loose Press, 1985

Out of Print, First Edition
Signed copies
Collages by Louis Unea

$10.00 | ISBN: 0-914610-37-6 | 31 Pages | In Stock: 5

The Buffalo Sequence by Mark Pawlak (signed copy) Copper Canyon Press, 1977

Rare and out of print, First Edition, 1977
One of the first books by Copper Canyon Press

"earnest and urgent pieces about growing up American"
--Celia Hagan, Northwest Review

Introduction by Denise Levertov

$10.00 | ISBN: 0-914742-19-1 | 64 Pages | In Stock: 5

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

No Bones To Carry Poems by James Penha New Sins Press, 2007

James Penha's imagination will whet your own. This book is a feast.
--Louis Crew

James Penha is able to mold exotic topics into poignant universal truths. Should I be called upon to speak at a funeral. I would choose to quote the first four lines of the evocative title poem, 'No Bones To Carry.'"
--Virginia Howard, editor of Thema

The poems in No Bones To Carry are nuanced and expansive, defining the individual's place in the larger world. Here, Penha reminds us of the limitations of our perception and the poet's struggle to see beyond them.
--Blas Falconer

$13.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9796956-0-5 | 71 Pages | In Stock: 4

Gary Percesepe

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

Dean Perchik

Symzonia Review by Dean Perchik Better Late Than Never Press, September 2007

"Writing with style and grace Dean Perchik offers us historical memorabilia akin those lost treasures archaeologists long to find. Though the textbooks have not made room for them, Dean has found a way to enlighten and please us."
--Simon Perchik