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New Release: NOT FOR AMNESIA by Lo Galluccio (Chapbook)
NOT FOR AMNESIA by Lo Galluccio
Červená Barva Press, 2023Lo'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 BooksOnce 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 CreaturesTo 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.
$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-81-9 | 30 Pages
—Michael Todd Steffen, author of On Earth As It Is
New Release: This Side of Utopia poems Thad DeVassie (Chapbook)
This Side of Utopia poems Thad DeVassie
Červená Barva Press, 2023-
Thad DeVassie is a poet and writer who pivots between traditional line breaks of poetry and a linear love of prose poetry, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction. In 2020 he was named a winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize for his manuscript Splendid Irrationalities (SurVision Books). In 2021, his project Year Of Static, containing 11 original paintings with accompanying micro prose, was published by Ghost City Press. It evolved into the art exhibition Love Your Neighbor in 2022. A lifelong Ohioan, Thad writes and paints from the outskirts of Columbus.
This Side of Utopia straddles a fine line between how we think things should go and how they ultimately play out. With equal parts heartfelt longing and comic absurdity, these poems move effortlessly from the mundane to the magical, toggling between lined and prose poems. With a voice all his own, Thad DeVassie taps the haunting playfulness of Charles Simic, the otherworldly surprises of Russell Edson, showing this collection to be one continuous balancing act. Utopia might be an untenable idea, but subtle comforts and a few silver linings still exist in the here and now.
Cover art: "Before the Fall" by Thad DeVassie
$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-67-3 | 31 Pages
New Release: An Alphabet of Last Rites by Marc Vincenz (Chapbook)
An Alphabet of Last Rites by Marc Vincenz
Červená Barva Press, 2023-
Marc Vincenz is a poet, fiction writer, translator, editor, musician and artist. He has published over 30 books of poetry, fiction and translation. His more recent poetry collections, include A Brief Conversation with Consciousness, The Little Book of Earthly Delights, There Might Be a Moon or a Dog, 39 Wonders and Other Management Issues, The Pearl Diver of Irunmani, A Splash of Cave Paint, and The King of Prussia is Drunk on Stars.
Marc's work has been published in The Nation, Ploughshares, Raritan, Colorado Review, Washington Square Review, Plume, Fourteen Hills, Willow Springs, Solstice, World Literature Today, The Notre Dame Review, The Golden Handcuffs Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books and many other journals and periodicals.
He is publisher and editor of MadHat Press and publisher of New American Writing, and lives on a farm in Western Massachusetts where there are more spiny-nosed voles, tufted grey-buckle hares and Amoeba scintilla than humans.
"Marc Vincenz knows how to ‘strain the essence...’ of life. His cinematic lures are full of vim and drama. This is is an heroic epic distilled into short passages- where wit and experience thrust and parry in a perpetual hazing rite-an utterly innovative work of discovery. It bores into the soul drop where we find what we’re made of. In An Alphabet of Last Rites, a mutable feast of prose poems, Marc Vincenz grapples with those reckonings. As the title implies, he ponders our destination while reveling in the journey, mixing the quotidian and the quixotic with his trademark quicksilver facility. Wondrous. Wry. Incredibly novel. An affirmation of what it means to be alive."
-Jeffrey Cyphers Wright"‘Emboldened, empathetic, empowered, emphatic’: Marc Vincenz's An Alphabet of Last Rites has a cast of characters ranging from Catherine the Great and Eva Peron to minotaurs to "thieves, pirates, dastardly characters you've only seen on the silver screen." As you sip your fourth martini, enjoy this cornucopia of unceasing poetic imagery and relentless conceits, and be captured by the seemingly limitless fecundity of language, which these last rites offer."
-Larissa Shmailo"This book concerns a character, a linguistically nationless and particular internationalist poet’s language. It’s also a prose-poetry sequence in the form of a primer. Marc Vincenz’s An Alphabet of Last Rites is spoken by the personification of language, while the person consistently addressed, a reader, a listener, is actually the poet himself. Gradually, this personification goes completely out of his head with embraced eccentricity, and you are thinking maybe this is a job for Robert Browning. The reader wins with this alphabet of short prose poems that are beautiful and funny and weird, all style, yet generous and tolerant of our faults."
$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-94-9 | 42 Pages
-David Blair
New Release: Heavenly Bodies at the MET by Ellen Devlin (chapbook)
Heavenly Bodies at the MET by Ellen Devlin
Červená Barva Press, 2023Ellen Devlin is the author of two chapbooks, Rita, (2019) and Heavenly Bodies at the MET (2023). Her poems can be found in The Cortland Review, Ekphrasis, Lime Hawk Review, PANK, The New Ohio Review, The Sow's Ear and Women's Studies Quarterly Review. and other journals, most recently Beyond Words, 2023, Muleskinner 2023, and The Westchester Review, 2023. She lives in Irvington, New York with her husband, Charles.
"Heavenly Bodies at the Met explores the ecclesiastical garments created by well known designers inspired by Catholic liturgy. In this collection, Ellen Devlin describes the various gowns and garments with the descriptive eye reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop. Many of the garments become reflective journeys through the poet's own life. Each supplies an emotional awareness that is rendered in vivid, concise language. This a deeply human collection, a personal confrontation and examination of the poet's life and as you read perhaps your own."
-Kevin Pilkington, author of Playing Poker With Tennessee Williams"This is my body / my silken birthright. / sieve me for sin / and fragrant apples fall from / bee-studded trees," writes Ellen Devlin in Heavenly Bodies at the MET, her gorgeous, glowing testament to the costume exhibit of that name. Speaking to how the exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art exalted the female form in haute couture gowns inspired by Church history, Devlin embraces the divine and the quotidian, the elegant sweep and the stunning detail, reminding us, as "silver roses abundant bloom / from her shoulders /cross breasts and hips / with botanical precision-" that each dress, each poem, in its innermost essence, holds the true grace of the numinous feminine: "the casing of her holiness / the beating heart of a living woman." Reader, come and let your senses be clothed in such beauty.
$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-57-4 | 28 Pages
-Gillian Cummings, author of The Owl was a Baker's Daughter
New Release: THEM! by Gary Fincke
THEM! by Gary Fincke
Červená Barva Press, 2023Gary Fincke's books have won The Flannery O'Connor Prize for Short Fiction, the Robert C. Jones Prize for Nonfiction Prose, and what is now the Wheeler Prize for Poetry. His latest collections are Nothing Falls from Nowhere: Stories (Steven F. Austin, 2021) and The Mussolini Diaries (Serving House, 2020). His new collection of essays The Mayan Syndrome will be published later this year by Madhat Press. Its lead essay, "After the Three-Moon Era," was selected to be reprinted in Best American Essays 2020.
Cover artist Shannon Rae Fincke is also an Art Educator and Art Administrator living and working in Los Angeles, CA. Her work has been exhibited at museums and galleries internationally, and has been featured in print, film, and television. She is the Founder/ Director of Institute for Visual Arts, mother of three children, and daughter of Gary Fincke.
Gary Fincke's chapbook Them! is packed with poems prompted by films that range from the lowest of the B-Movies of the 50s to A-list horror to Biblical epics. In tones varied from satirical to serious, he finds significance in the absurdities of rubber-suited monstera and cavorting snake women as well as man-made catastrophes that foreshadow the horror of ecological disasters. Them! will make readers laugh and cringe and think, often in the same cleverly constructed poem.
$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-52-9 | 36 Pages
New Release: Original Sin Selected Poems by Michael Foldes
Original Sin Selected Poems by Michael Foldes
Červená Barva Press, 2022-
Michael Foldes (b 1946) is an American poet, publisher, author and businessman. Born in Baltimore, MD, he grew up in Endwell, New York, later graduating from The Ohio State University in anthropology. In 2004, Foldes founded Ragazine.cc, a free, global, online magazine of art, information and entertainment. The bimonthly zine ceased publication in December 2019. Partial archives remain online at www.ragazine.cc.
Foldes's publications and projects include the anthologies "Stopped Dead: The End of Poetry," "In an Early Hour," and "Sand and Snow"; Sleeping Dogs: A true story of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping" (Split Oak Press, Ithaca, NY, 2012), and Sandy: Chronicles of a Superstorm in collaboration with artist Christie Devereaux. In 2017, he completed "Fashions & Passions" a series of ekphrastic poems in collaboration with artist Christopher Panzner. Panzner and Foldes recently completed a second collection titled "End Game," 75 poems with images created by Panzner in response to the poems. His poetry collection Some Stuff is available as a Kindle edition on Amazon.
Foldes's articles, editorials, poems, reviews, interviews and stories have appeared in publications worldwide, some in translation in Romanian, Hungarian, Japanese, French and Spanish. Publishing credits include l'Oeil de la Photographie, Where is the Jazz Festival, Mobius, Southern Literary Review, the Village Voice, High Times, The Seventh Quarry, Paterson Literary Review, CLH/Romania, We Are You Poetry anthology, From the Finger Lakes, Folazil (France), and Rosebud, among others. An interview with Foldes by Carol Smallwood appeared in the Scarlet Leaf Review, and in Wilderness House Literary Review.
His jobs have included lifeguard, grocery store bagger, potato peeler, construction worker, magazine editor, newspaper editor, social worker, electronic component sales rep, and medical video products sales engineer. One of his favorite gigs was bartending at the National Poetry Society in Earl’s Court Square, London, where the Guinness was warm and the patrons amazing.
He and his wife have three children and two grandchildren. They live in New York's Southern Tier a few hundred yards from the Susquehanna River.
Don't expect to find a bouquet of poems neatly tied together by a common theme or style; if anything brings these highly divergent poems together, it is probably the date of their creation as the fruits of the same harvest season, a recent one. Mike Foldes always tends to be very eclectic, open to any style, any theme, but in each of his poems, no matter how unique, his voice sounds authentic whether he speaks of personal experiences or editorializes on current political events. None of the poems are made to order; they all just seem to have burst out from the creative nook of the poet's mind and dictated their own style. Some readers-whether they be critics or just lovers of poetry-may find themselves at a loss faced with such wide range of eclecticism, but I applaud it and the poet's unhesitating answer to an inner call; however, my favorites are the short spiffy ones that say more by telling less, such as the footballer and gravity: "...when gravity / takes me where / all things go, / pray / what's there / will make me / the believer / you said / i would become."
-Paul Sohar, a fellow poet and occasional critic; author of "In Sun's Shadow"Mike Foldes's chapbook, "Original Sin," weaves a fine-spun and well-designed American "poetic" carpet knit together with vibrant words, which are not mild incantations, but rather words that allow readers to confront their greatest fears (i.e., aging, illness, impotence, war, loveless love, betrayal, darkness, or the current global rise of right-wing totalitarian fascism). For instance, in precise "clear-cut" language, in the poem "The Sedition Edition," Foldes captures the full anti-American treasonous horror of January 6, 2021's U.S. Capitol insurrection.
-Jose Rodeiro, recipient of an NEA, Fulbright Fellowship, and an Oscar B. Cintas Fellowship in painting"where do we go/ from here?/ where is the ladder?/ where are the stars?" asks the final poem in this thoughtful, outrageous chapbook. Original Sin deftly encapsulates the pandemic, a year like no other, filled with love lost, insurrection, aging, drugs, death, and, yes, love found again. Foldes asks the hard questions. His answers might surprise you.
-Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of Explicit: New & Selected, poetry editor, Cultural DailyCover Art: Christopher Panzner
$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-73-4 | 45 Pages
New Release: Juchitan Medusa by Alan Catlin
Juchitan Medusa by Alan Catlin
Červená Barva Press, 2022Alan Catlin is retired from a long career in his unchosen profession in the "hospitality industry." He has published well over sixty chapbooks and full-length books of poetry and prose. Most recently his fictional memoir/ novel Chaos Management was published by Alien Buddha and is available on Amazon, as are many of his recent publications on a wide variety of subjects from art, to bar wars, to self-portraits that aren't self-portraits, to a series of book length memories which aren't "memories" per se, among many others. He won the 2017 Slipstream Chapbook Award for Blue Velvet, the first of eleven chapbooks channeling noir movies. Two of his books were named Most Neglected Books of the Year by the late Marvin Malone, editor of the legendary Wormwood Review.
Cover Photography: Susanna Lewis
$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-72-7 | 29 Pages
New Release: Nomad Moon Stories by Doug Mathewson
Nomad Moon Stories by Doug Mathewson
Edited by Sally Reno
Červená Barva Press, 2022-
Doug Mathewson writes short, and even shorter fiction. His work has appeared here and there, now and then due to the kindness and forgiving nature of numerous editors to whom he is most sincerely grateful. He is the editor of Blink-Ink www.blink-ink.org Also he sweeps up and does odd chores for The Mambo Academy of Kitty Wang. More of his work can be found at Little 2 Say www.little2say.org
Nomad Moon is a collection of twenty four short stories by Doug Mathewson. They have been described as "True stories from imaginary lives." Every one is true except for the pretend and made up parts. Some stories are sad, and some humorous, but all showing the authors love of life and human kind.
$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-56-7 | 27 Pages
RIOT WAKE by Nina Rubinstein Alonso
RIOT WAKE by Nina Rubinstein Alonso
Červená Barva Press, 2022-
Nina Rubinstein Alonso's poetry and stories have appeared in Ploughshares, The New Yorker, U. Mass. Review, Writing in a Woman's Voice, Nixes Mate, Ibbetson Street, Broadkill Review, Southern Women's Review, Peacock Journal, Sumac, Wilderness House, The New Boston Review, Pensive Journal, Taj Mahal Review, etc. Her book This Body was published by David Godine Press, her story collection A Dancer's Notebook and a novel Balancing on One Leg are in the works. She's the editor of Constellations: a Journal of Poetry and Fiction and has published the 11th issue. She taught at Boston Ballet for eleven years and continues as director and teacher of Fresh Pond Ballet.
"Do you ever feel a "wow moment" when reading a poet's work? It might be an idea, poetic lines or a usage of words that say this poet is unique. Nina R. Alonso's Riot Wake is full with such lines as: "seeing women in black veils/ wrapped like moths at night." Alonso's observations of people and places is like walking the Earth with a magnifying glass. Her poetry is intriguing, inspired and insightful. It is a book not soon forgotten."
-Zvi A. SeslingRiot Wake is outstanding. The poems are intelligent, lyrical and so precisely observed. The collection as a whole is carefully organized to give us the arc of the story: beauty and repression. Nina Alonso speaks to us personally and frankly out of each one of these perfect poems. These poems will echo in your heart forever. The collection is timely and will be a classic for years to come.
-Kathleen Spivack, author of Unspeakable Things"The word "unique" may be used till the devil take it, but here it applies appropriately to Nina Alonso's "Riot Wake" which portrays an inner journey through sites as disparate as El Camino in Spain and a Harvard Square reduced to rubble by rioters. There's psychic pain and suffering as these poems ride their course, while in greater measure there's delight in how they honor the eye and ear, line by line, with masterly performance. This is a goddam good chapbook."
-Tomas O'Leary"Nina Alonso is a dancer. And in the case of her poetry there seems to be a slow motion, wandering sensibility to her work. And indeed as she traveled through Morocco and Spain with her late husband her wanderlust brings the reader to the face of intriguing and beautiful imagery. In Tangiers, she sees "women in black veils/ wrapped like moths at night." She resurrects an acid trip in a fluorescent diner that dances with light and distortion. There is a sense of mystery throughout this collection...of seeing the unseen...the past with all its pain and allure."
$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-34-5 | 50 Pages
-Doug Holder
How to Jump from a Moving Train by Oriana Ivy (chapbook)
How to Jump from a Moving Train by Oriana Ivy
Červená Barva Press, 2022-
Oriana Ivy was born and raised in Poland. She came to the United States when she was 17. Her poems, essays, book reviews, and translations have been published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Best American Poetry, Nimrod, Spoon River Review, The Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, Los Angeles Review of Books and many others. She’s the prize winning author of the chapbooks April Snow (Finishing Line Press) and From a New World (Paper Nautilus). A former journalist and community college instructor, she leads an online Poetry Salon. Her poetry-and-culture blog, oriana-poetry.blogspot.com, has gained an international audience. She lives in Southern California.
How to Jump from a Moving Train offers an interweave of immigrant experience with a complex mother-daughter relationship, with a secondary interweave of history and myth. The speaker was born and raised in Poland, and came to this country when she was seventeen. Her poems often address the "doubleness" of being an immigrant, the deep cultural divide that the experience tends to produce.
I love these poems. Each one is astounding, a whole treasured world unto itself, rendered in language that's been honed and polished until it shines. There's an intimacy in this work that keeps opening out - from the deeply personal into something enormous, not grandiose but so human that it hurts, it blesses, it heals.
-Cecilia Woloch, author of Tzigan, Sacrifice, Carpathia, Earth and LateAmongst the tens of thousands of poets at work in the United States in the twenty-first century, there are still a handful who began writing well before the Berlin Wall came down. How long ago that seems! Though Oriana Ivy's poems are embedded in the playing out of European history after World War II, they speak to the crisis that is at the heart of the "ghetto of time." With a poet as reticent as Oriana Ivy to be visible within the horde of contemporary working poets, it's hard to know exactly how many poems she has written that are as fine as the ones in this collection. Several dozen more? Two hundred more? No matter. These poems alone would serve to preserve any poet's name on the reading list of every astute lover of poetry.
$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-65-9 | 30 Pages
-William Mohr, author of The Headwaters of Nirvana: Reassembled Poems and Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992
Ifs, Ifs, Ifs musings by David G. Walker
Ifs, Ifs, Ifs musings by David G. Walker
Červená Barva Press, 2021-
David G. Walker's first poems were published in 2014: just after the ink was drying on his MFA from Southern Connecticut State University. Since that time, he has published work sporadically with high points and dry spells abounding. His previous two chapbooks - Pause: A Collection of Moment Poems and Donating Organs in Boxes - were published by Finishing Line Press. In 2016, his poem "California" won the Steel Pen Conference Creative Writing Contest and his poem "Cathedral" was nominated for Best New Poets in 2018. Currently, he lives in Massachusetts with his wonderful wife, Caitlin; his two children, Mikey and Ellie; and his cat, Eva.
Those throw-away nuggets of thought you have at 3am were the seeds of the poems found within Ifs, Ifs, Ifs by David G. Walker. The manuscript is a mad dash through fairy tales, car accidents, and form rejection letters - with a pit stop at a cult-leading leaf. Imagination pulses through the poetry in this collection as Walker attempts to explore the elusive ifs we all shove in the dark corners of our brains. What emerges is anyone's guess.
David Walker tells us at the start, "I reach higher and lower states," and thankfully, that reflexivity applies to his comedy, as well as to his states of consciousness. From a highbrow conversation with Emerson to a lowbrow satirical rejection letter, or a poem about a suicidal Santa, Walker tears through decorum and expectations to make us cringe, and laugh. The pathos exorcised in this short collection get right up close to the pain. A carpenter puts a nail through his thumb and keeps hammering, and the taxidermist whistles while he works. In between we're treated to beautiful rhymes and imagery like "I mark me up in a soft pink highlighter, barely noticeable, my time in running cars. / I flip me and draw a dash through flower-shop doorbells, / Through Crunch bars, fun-size." And fun it is, indeed!
-Michael FilasImagine you're eating a bowl of cereal and skimming the morning headlines when you feel a sudden urge to slip outside of yourself and ask, "What if?" In David Walker's most recent poetry collection we're invited to navigate mundane life as Emerson's transparent eyeball--absorbing what surrounds us as well as what sits quietly (and not so quietly) below the surface. Our questions have the potential to be life-altering (what if we passed the deer on the roadside minutes before the accident?) and wildly speculative (maybe we'd have all the answers if we'd finished reading Paradise Lost in college). And in our brief time as ultra-meta-floating-eyeball, we become increasingly self-aware and foresightful ("I feel the water in my body tugging towards the faucets") as Walker takes on the guise of an all-knowing editor who insists that we "stop trying to romanticize the 'moonlight'" and record what we see, as we see it. Dear Writer, you "soulless thing," you, "it's either/or, there is no middle ground."
-Meg CowenIfs, Ifs, Ifs takes wing into the hypothetical realms of the Out-of-the-Ordinary, the Double-Take-Head-Spin, and Irreverence-R-Us. The poems in this collection float and sink at the same time. They bob and weave and come straight at you slantwise. Even as they take on some of life's thornier existential concerns, they are a pleasure, joyously serious and seriously joyful.
$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-49-9 | 32 Pages
-Jeff Mock
SHALOM, MY TEARDROP! by Mimoza Erebara (Chapbook)
Translated from the Albanian by Arben P. Latifi
SHALOM, MY TEARDROP! by Mimoza Erebara (Chapbook)
Translated from the Albanian by Arben P. Latifi
Červená Barva Press, 2021Mimoza Erebara, Jewish / Albanian, was born in Tirana, Albania. She is the author of the following books: "To accompany a hope" (poetry), "Cry of love" (poetry), "Adventures of 10x10 and the Upside Down Munuriro" (Fairy Tale), "Wrongly in Love" (Stories), "Torn Reason" (poetry)), "Symbrapshti" (fairy tale), "Dry rent" (stories), "Peace without a Prophet" (poetry), "He and She: Love Messages" (poetry), "Shalom, my tears” (poetry), “Spirit in the Desert” (poetry), “Philosophy in Metaphor" (literary studies and criticism) and Anthology of Hebrew Poetry. Mimoza has been published in numerous literary magazines in Albania and abroad. He has received "Gold Medals" for poetry from the European Academy of Arts, Paris, France, and many awards in the country. Holds the title "Ambassador of Peace." Mimoza works as a journalist in the daily press in Tirana and editor of many volumes.
Arben P. Latifi graduated in English Studies from the State University of Tirana, Albania [1985]. As an Albanian and US citizen, he is passionate about traveling, world culture, and literature. He has taught English in Albania, USA, Oman, and China. Currently Arben settled back in his native Albania. His Albanian-English, English-Albanian translations, mostly poetry and history, reflects accuracy and faithfulness to the original text, while enhancing its merits through elements such as cohesion, imagery, vocabulary, and musicality. Arben is fluent in English, Albanian, Italian, Greek, and Russian.
Shalom, my tears!
The essence of this poetic volume is the universal human love of the individuals who venerate themselves, their past, jealously preserving their identity even in the extreme conditions, is the daughter's love for the father, nation and the Holy Land.
It is the search for a deeper understanding of this inalienable spiritual connection. It is the foremost belief that only this way you can profess eternal love, attaining peace even though you are at war. It is the desire to feel free, where freedom itself morphs its dimensions taking you along for the journey.
This volume accentuates the unconditional love, the sacrifice to keep it inviolable. After all, it is the soul and life of the poetic oneself, the author.
It is the discovery of the soul that transcends us to this. The chance to have all the images in different realms of everyday life that beautifully merge with the divine through elegant details.
A poem that dwells into the mind and sensations of the reader. The visualizations of Israel, country of origin of the author, replace one another, war and peace also shapeshift through significant details.
Prophecies are extant, unforgotten like the Holocaust that transpires through the verses. The historical essence of the holy land itself is vividly ubiquitous.
$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-27-7 | 28 Pages
How The Twins Grew Up A collection of short stories for children by Milutin Durickovic (chapbook)
How The Twins Grew Up A collection of short stories for children
by Milutin Durickovic
Červená Barva Press, 2021-
Milutin Djurickovic was born on 1967 in Decan. He earned his doctorate at the Faculty of Philosophy in East Sarajevo. He works as a professor at the College of Professional Studies for Educators in Aleksinac. Member of the Serbian Royal Academy, World Union of Poets, Association of Writers of Serbia and the Association of Journalists of Serbia. He published 60 books for children and adults (poems, novel, story, critic, monography, anthology...). He lives in Belgrade.
$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-47-5 | 32 Pages
Everyday Divine by Noel Sloboda
Everyday Divine by Noel Sloboda
Červená Barva Press, 2021-
Noel Sloboda earned his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis. His dissertation about Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein became a book. He sat on the board of directors for the Gamut Theatre Group for a decade, while serving as dramaturg for its nationally recognized Shakespeare company. Sloboda has published two poetry collections, six chapbooks, and hundreds of poems in journals and magazines. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at Penn State York.
In Everyday Divine, Noel Sloboda presents a sequence of poems about saints. These figures stand with one foot in the realm of the secular, the other in the realm of the sacred. At the same time, Sloboda pushes hagiography outside of familiar contexts, revealing myriad new saints out there just waiting to be discovered. Readers of Everyday Divine will catch "The Patron Saint of Shoplifters" filching a candy bar, listen to rumors spread by “The Patron Saint of Gossip,” and find themselves stuck in traffic behind "The Patron Saint of Rubberneckers." In some of Sloboda's saints, readers will also identify parts of themselves, thereby glimpsing connections to others.
I've been a fan of Noel Sloboda's work for about ten years. Everyday Divine is a series of "patron saints," portraits of everyday people told with insight and gentle humor. Sloboda serves up fresh text with lively, palpable metaphors. The result is enjoyable, very readable poetry.
-John Philip Johnson, Pushcart Prize-winning poet, author of The Book of FlyThrough everyday characters, Noel Sloboda's Everyday Divine makes the reader reconsider what he or she takes for granted. Whether it be a character reevaluating his anxieties, a shoplifter stealing out of need and transforming the act into performance art, or because of line breaks like "Always says never imagine // this will not happen / again," the reader's expectations are upended. Like all good art, these poems challenge the reader’s everyday habits of perception for the better.
$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-06-2 | 30 Pages
-Tom Holmes, editor of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics
Leaning West by Michael C. Keith
Červená Barva Press, 2020Michael C. Keith is the author of 15 story collections and an acclaimed memoir (The Next Better Place). He retired emeritus professor in the Communication Department at Boston College. Prior to his four decades in academe, Keith was a radio broadcaster. He has been nominated for several awards for his fiction and is the recipient of numerous accolades for his books on media subjects.
"Stories set in the West inspired by landscape that has long intrigued and beguiled the author."
"The short imaginative bursts in Leaning West capture the feel and mystique of the west. The book filters the western experience through Michael Keith's unique and somewhat twisted view. His stories are humorous, thought provoking, weird, and always entertaining. I grew up in the west. The stories ring true and I can relate to the places he takes us. For anyone interested in the west, or simply a unique perspective on life, this is a great read."
-Michael Brown, Emeritus Professor, University of WyomingCover Art: Susanne Riette
$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-28-4 | 29 Pages
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 DarkPhilosophical, 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 MenIn 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.
$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-42-0 | 27 Pages
-Renuka Raghavan, author of Out of the Blue and The Face I Desire
The Snow Dead by Marc Zegans
Červená Barva Press, 2020-
Marc Zegans is a poet and creative development advisor. He is the author of five previous collections of poems, The Underwater Typewriter, Boys in the Woods, Pillow Talk, The Book of Clouds, and La Commedia Sotterranea: Swizzle Felt's First Folio form the Typewriter Underground; two spoken word albums Night Work, and Marker and Parker, and immersive theatrical productions Mum and Shaw, and The Typewriter Underground. The Snow Dead debuted theatrically in Erotic Eclectic's "Sin-aesthetic" at the Lost Church during San Francisco's 2019 Lit Crawl. Marc lives by the coast in Northern California. His poetry can be found at marczegans.com, and he can be reached for creative advisory services at mycreativedevelopment.com.
The Snow Dead is a quiet meditation on life and death imagined as a series of marks in the cold snow-where all color is heightened, and in which even the most subtle register of heat leaves an impression. This gathering of connected poems elegantly incarnates the gravitas of aging - shorn of artifice and romance - in its barest essence.
"The delicate chill of loss and longing described in bone white visions of isolation and ember red recollections of intimacy.”
-Janice Blaze Rocke, artistic director Erotic EclecticZegans' spare and revelatory collection embraces the paradox and beauty of winter's morbid hold. It's a magical fascination that plays out with foxes and angels and starlets - startling little stories that shine and entrance. The Snow Dead is a pure and inspiring joy to read.
-Lo Galluccio, author of Hot Rain and Sarasota VIIReviews:
$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-39-0 | 30 Pages
Review: Subterranean Blue Poetry: Current Issue
notanotherbookreview: Anne Waldman's SANCTUARY, Marc Zegans' THE SNOW DEAD
Confess by Susan Tepper
Červená Barva Press, 2020-
Susan Tepper grew up amidst the dairy farms and wild strawberry fields of Long Island, when it was still a mystical finger in the water. A multitude of careers that include actress, singer, flight attendant, airline marketing manager, Cable TV producer, overseas tour guide, interior decorator, rescue worker and more have informed her poetry and fiction. An award-winning author, Tepper lives with her husband in the New York area. For more information please visit www.susantepper.com
"In the poems comprising her newest collection, Susan Tepper is elegiac and lyrical (...a lake I carry on my back/one of stillness), often contemplating winter and its darkness with the necessary intervention of birds, foods and the mysteries of human relationships—your arms hold secrets. And now and then a tough humor shines a light as well (Bury me in a giant keg—I'm lonely.) One feels her physical and inner landscape acutely, and one has to confess that here's a poet who really knows, to the bone, how breathing in the stories is done to the benefit of us all."
—Tim Suermondt, author of Josephine Baker Swimming Pool"There is an extreme sense of intimacy in the poems of Susan Tepper. You can literally feel on the scrim of your skin her engagement with her senses—the natural order of things. She is no ham-fisted poet, but brings a subtle, dark beauty, like a trail of deep, deep blue. She is in constant conversation with the world, and only a poet who is deeply in tune to herself, and the signs the universe sends us, can bring this accomplished work to the plate."
—Doug Holder/Ibbetson Street Press/ Lecturer in Creative Writing, Endicott College"Susan Tepper's book of poetry, CONFESS, is a handful of pearls in a hand extended as a gift bearing opalescent light, specks of muted colors, sometimes questioning who we are in shaping our destiny, and what escapes from our dark corners, as in her poem "Course": ...the heart meets itself, blankly, hears its name in the crumpled page... In "Egg," a beam creaks, mindful in the quiet of the passage of time. There still exists in "Part & Parcel" Two suitcases, side by side / Have yet to be unpacked, and in "Each Sky" Tepper plucks from the ever changing sky her keen perception of what is a visual poem."
$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-38-3 | 21 Pages
—Judith Lawrence, Lilly Press, editor/publisher
Dancing in Santa Fe and other poems by Beate Sigriddaughter
Červená Barva Press, 2019-
Beate Sigriddaughter, www.sigriddaughter.net, was poet laureate of Silver City, NM (Land of Enchantment) from 2017-2019. She grew up in Nürnberg, Germany, where she began her trajectory of enchantment a five-minute walk from the castle. Alternate playgrounds, even closer to home, were World War II bomb ruins. Contrasts in her life became the norm. Her writing has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations and a handful of poetry prizes. Keenly interested in women and their situation in the world, she created the blog Writing In A Woman's Voice where she publishes other women's work.
This life a sacred loan./ I vow to celebrate" the poet proclaims in this exquisite chapbook. These are powerful poems of loss and transcendence. Sigriddaughter's singular brilliance lies in making the cosmic fiercely personal; she shines a light.
-Alexis Rhone Fancher, poetry editor, Cultural Weekly, author of Junkie WifeSkillfully balanced between facing the ominous facts in world news and her enthusiasm for the spirit and beauty in her surroundings, Beate Sigriddaughter’s short collection is filled with clear-sightedness. The title poem brilliantly juxtaposes an inherited German history with her current New Mexico situation filled with affection and natural wonders. These pages are for all who seek something both uplifting and realistic; a lyrical wisdom that acknowledges a debt to fairy tales spanning light and darkness.
-David Chorlton, author of Reading T. S. Eliot to a BirdRadiant writing! Beate Sigriddaughter is unafraid of the dark, and so is able to illuminate with rapturous language the hidden perplexities of the heart. Her vision is clear, her observations cut to the core with insights into nature and human nature seen through a focused lens of hard-earned joy. I found these poems astoundingly moving!
-Eve West Bessier, Poet Laureate of Silver City, NMBeate Sigriddaughter's Dancing in Santa Fe and other poems will make you remember what it is to be alive in this world. Insightful, rewarding poetry. These poems moved me. They are filled with heart and care and apology and exquisite writing. They explore the darkness as well as the awesome beauty of life, and how, as human beings with a soul and memory, we must learn to live with both. These poems question and consider, looking inward as well as to the physical world, and to the mystical and spiritual. Ultimately, they lift a dark curtain, and are laced with love.
-Kari Nguyen, Contributing author, The Best of Boston Literary Magazine (Volume One) and New Hampshire's Emerging Writers Anthology (2018)Were I forced at the point of King Arthur's sword to sum up Beate Sigriddaughter's poetic voice in three words-not counting the audible gulp at such a daunting demand-my response would be a strong, defiant, "Redolent of Life!" (The exclamation point my proud, subversive fourth.)
$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-23-9 | 34 Pages
-Mathew Paust, author of Executive Pink, whose blog Crime Time is at https://mdpaust.blogspot.com
Rita by Ellen Devlin
Červená Barva Press, 2019-
Ellen Devlin's poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The Cortland Review, Ekphrasis, Lime Hawk Review, PANK, The New Ohio Review, The Sow's Ear and Women's Studies Quarterly Review. One chapbook is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press, "Heavenly Bodies at the MET." She lives in Irvington, New York, with her husband, Charles.
Ellen Devlin's Rita is as subversive as it is wise. Rita's sassy "talk backs" to heroines from the canon may be feminist retellings but Devlin's project is more complex. Each insightful warning, discussion, or interrogation (with female characters of carefully chosen seminal texts) explores necessary questions of identity, agency, free will, power, and complicity. These poems are instruments of power-asserting, imagining, describing what it's like to be a woman today. I wish I read this book when I was a young woman. This is no ordinary debut collection; Devlin's attention to craft is masterful and her language fresh and fierce. "The windows and doors are locked and I can feel/ my mother's life barreling towards me."
—Jennifer Franklin, author of No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018)It isn't often that a book of poems introduces us to a character we get to know as deeply as we know our closest intimates, or ourselves. Ellen Devlin achieves this with Rita, wielding an unfailing eye for detail and ear for voice. Rita is a middle-aged woman, uncelebrated in her world and ours, living with "a pile of ideas about being seen/not seen." As a reader, she talks back to a series of heroines who, tempted by "luminous sin," seem poised to stumble (as we know they will) into the perils that can befall the desirous female body. She shops at the supermarket, goes to her book club, nurses her memories. She accepts both horror and pleasure with her unique intensity and detachment. In the end, this unique sensibility is what saves Rita and burnishes these poems. She compels our interest, our awe and our love.
—Kathleen Ossip, author of The Do-Over (Sarabande Books, 2015)Photograph and cover design by Hugh Scully
$8.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-13-0 | 36 Pages
4 new chapbooks: April 13, 2018
The Elusive Heroine: My Daughter Lost in Magritte by Linda Nemec Foster
Červená Barva Press, 2018-
Linda Nemec Foster has published ten other collections of poetry including Amber Necklace from Gdansk (finalist for the Ohio Book Award in Poetry), Talking Diamonds (finalist for ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year), and The Lake Michigan Mermaid (co-authored with Anne-Marie Oomen). Foster's work has appeared in such journals as The Georgia Review, Nimrod, Connecticut Review, New American Writing, The North American Review, Paterson Literary Review, and Quarterly West. Her poetry has also been published in anthologies in the United States and Great Britain, translated in Europe, and produced for the stage. She has been honored with Pushcart Prize nominations and has received awards from the Arts Foundation of Michigan, ArtServe Michigan, National Writer's Voice, the Polish-American Historical Association, and the Academy of American Poets. Foster was selected to serve as Grand Rapids, Michigan's first Poet Laureate from 2003-05. Her chapbook, Contemplating the Heavens, was the inspiration for jazz pianist Steve Talaga's original composition which was nominated for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Foster's project, Cry of Freedom, is a collaboration with Hungarian musician Laszlo Slomovits and was released on CD in 2013. Foster is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College and in 2015 received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Dyer-Ives Foundation for her work as a poet and advocate for the literary arts.
$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9984253-9-9 | 40 Pages
Seen/unseen (a father and son converse)
poems by Benjamin Ostrowski and Steven Ostrowski
Červená Barva Press, 2018-
Steven Ostrowski is a poet, fiction writer, painter and songwriter. His work appears in numerous literary journals and magazines, and he is the author of three previous chapbooks—two of poems and one of stories. New chapbooks from Island Verse and, with Ben Ostrowski, Black Magic Media, are scheduled for 2018. He teaches at Central Connecticut State University.
Benjamin Ostrowski is a current PhD student studying Organizational Behavior at Carnegie Mellon University. He has poems published in The American Journal of Poetry, The Gyroscope Review, Blue Muse, The Dark River Review, and others. He has a forthcoming chapbook co-authored with his father, Steven, from Black Magic Media.
Seen/unseen is an ecstatically authentic conversation, poetry full of unapologetic humanity. This is not just call and response but challenge and answer, parry and thrust. Two voices calling each other higher, reveling in each other's performance. We could not ask for more from such a talented father-son team.
-Will Hicks, author of Stargazer's KitchenSeen/Unseen gives us the visions that occur when each participant closes their eyes, opens themselves to the world and speaks from one soul to another. The commonplace and the miraculous intertwine in this exchange of the gifts the father brings the son, and the son brings the father, when both open their souls to the other and view what they hold in their hearts.
$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-692-08026-9 | 31 Pages
-Gian Lombardo
The Day She Decided to Feed Crows by Hope Jordan
Červená Barva Press, 2018-
Hope Jordan is in the Creative Writing MFA program at UMass Boston. Her poems have recently appeared in such publications as Nine Mile, Comstock Review, Naugatuck River Review, and Red Headed Stepchild. She was the first official poetry slam master in New Hampshire.
Hope Jordan's small book is stripped to the bone precise-yellow jackets and sweet grass, ice fishing holes and old Buicks mark the landscape of people struggling in small towns where "Housewives overdose after Halloween." These are razor sharp poems that tell us only just enough, restrained by love, and terror.
$7.00 | 31 Pages
-Sean Thomas Dougherty
Small as Hope in the Helicopter Rain by Lisa Akus
Červená Barva Press, 2018-
Lisa Akus has published poems in Congeries, Lake Effect, Redactions, and in the anthology Double Kiss: Stories, Poems, Essays on the Art of Billiards (2017 Mammoth Books). Her poem "Killdeer" received an honorable mention for the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Erie, PA with her partner and sometimes collaborator Sean Thomas Dougherty, and their daughters Amara Rumi and Andaluzja Akhmatova who provided much inspiration for these poems.
Small As Hope In the Helicopter Rain
Among the tall grass and clover flowers our youngest sits picking. She squints an eye shut and holds one up to the light twisting at its stem. Slow and careful. She wants to know how the sunlight breaks through its petals and so begins pulling them out one by one. Her sing-song voice counting them until they are all gone. What she takes from this she will tell no one. Then a helicopter seed. And a new question as she continues to pick it up and toss it into the air. Despite it's falling back to the ground, every time. But soon they are falling all around her. A strong wind has brought them almost fluttering in a way she seems somehow familiar with. And suddenly she is spinning with them. She, this girl we worried so much about her walking late. Always tripping over nothing, and even now still unable to come down off her toes. And yet she is spinning, and stretching her arms out as if to welcome something back. Something we at some point lost? Something, small as hope in the helicopter rain.
$7.00 | 29 Pages
New Release: July 11, 2017
The Sound of Angels by Ruth C. Chad
Červená Barva Press, 2017-
Ruth Chad is a psychologist who works in the Boston area. Her poems have appeared in Montreal Poems, Lyrical Somerville, Ibbetson Street, The Bagel Bard Anthology, The Aurorean, Constellations and The Psychoanalytic Couple and Family Institute of New England, Connection, December 2015. Ruth grew up in Montreal, Quebec and now resides in Newton Highlands, MA. with her husband Mark Friedman.
"Ruth Chad is a poet of whispered intimacies, of living and of dying, of laughter and of sorrow, of the natural world and the metaphysical beyond. She writes as both observer and participant in the ordinary and extraordinary dramas of our existence. Her portraits of her family and especially of her dying father are poignant reflections of experience like our own. There is a tenderness in all of her writing as her short stanzas tumble out into our consciousness to demonstrate and to remind us of our human condition and the contexts within which we live. Hers is a sensitivity to the world about her as she answers the question posed to a spider in her poem ‘The Children Have Grown.' She asks the spider to teach her to spin. She has, in fact, spun a web of poems full of insight, fine writing and intimacy."
-Philip E. Burnham, Jr., Winner of the Loft Poetry Prize"There is both deep sadness and sweetness in Ruth Chad's meditative, moving, imagistic poetry. The sadness comes from loss-lost youth, the change of seasons, children moving away, a parent dying-but that loss breeds a deeper appreciation of life's sweetness, often symbolized by affecting natural imagery. I can't imagine anyone reading these poems without feeling more alive."
$7.00 | 39 Pages | In Stock
-Lawrence Kessenich
New Release: April, 2017
The Path of Thunder by Susan Donnelly
Červená Barva Press, 2017-
Susan Donnelly's latest publication is the chapbook Sweet Gooseberries from Every Other Thursday Press. She is the author of three full collections: Eve Names the Animals (Northeastern University Press), Transit and Capture the Flag (Iris Press), and three other chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry and many journals, anthologies and textbooks in the U.S. and abroad, as well as on websites, in academic courses, and on blogs. They have also been featured several times on Garrison Keillor's The Writers Almanac. A frequent reader of her poetry in the Boston area and beyond, Susan lives, writes, and offers poetry classes and consultations in Arlington, Massachusetts.
One writer's experiences finding a path in racially divided America.
"The heart opens/ in such unlikely places" writes Susan Donnelly and her poems give us what she sees and understands in those moments, offering us a way to grasp the world in which the heart might stay open. These are poems to be shared across a table, to knit us together, to face us toward the truth of our common life. This is, as Roque Dalton suggested, "Poetry like bread." Wine, too. What a sublime and nourishing book of poems.
$7.00 | 27 Pages | In Stock
-Richard Hoffman, author of Gold Star Road and Emblem
New Release September 21, 2016:
Benign Protection by Anne Elezabeth Pluto (Anya Vladimirovna Pluta)
Červená Barva Press, 2016-
Anne Elezabeth Pluto is Professor of Literature and Theatre at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA where she is the co-founder and artistic director of the Oxford Street Players. She was a member of the Boston small press scene in the late 1980s and started Commonthought Magazine at Lesley 24 years ago. Her chapbook, The Frog Princess, was published by White Pine Press. She has been a participant at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 2005 and 2006. Her ebook, Lubbok Electric, was published by Argotist ebooks in 2012. Her latest work appears in, The Buffalo Evening News, Unlikely Stories: Episode IV, Mat Hat Lit, nycBigCityLit, and Pirene's Fountain.
Cover Artist:
Bryson Dean-Gauthier has been an artist since childhood, and as an adult has worked in the fields of graphic design, corporate communications, television and education. She has been a graphic design teacher for 15 years, currently with the Art Institute of Pittsburgh Online Division, and is also an instructional design consultant at New England Institute of Technology in Rhode Island. Bryson's current creative work explores photography, digital imaging and mixed media, and takes inspiration from the intersections of fine art, design, mystery, spirit, the natural world and technology.
Benign Protection is a ripe and vivid collection of 32 poems fraught with multi-generational hauntings. "Each breath is a prelude," as Pluto "gnaws through me to my bone." The intricacy of her language is rich on the tongue. Pluto is meant to be read aloud. Resonant and unforgettable.
-Meg Tuite, author of Bare Bulbs Swinging, Artistically Declined Press (2014)Anne Pluto is one of the finest poets I know. I highly recommend Benign Protection.
-Kay Kinghammer, author, The Wenachee River Anthology, Melinda Cochrane International (2014), Inside the Circus, Loyal Stone Press (2013)From the opening poem, "The River Styx", in Anne Elezabeth Pluto's Benign Protection, we are led into a sphere of grief artfully rendered by Pluto's deft hand. There are poems of domesticity that are welcome relief, but the breathing room is small. Grief is Pluto's handmaiden and we are enriched by such an exquisite companionship in this finely-wrought volume.
$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9981027-0-2 | 55 Pages | In Stock
-Clare L. Martin, editor, MockingHeart Review. Author, Seek The Holy Dark, Yellow Flag Press (2017), Eating the Heart First, Press 53, (2012)
New Release September 21, 2016:
Housing for Wrens Poems by Edward Morin
Červená Barva Press, 2016-
Edward Morin was born in Chicago and, while growing up, spent summers in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He has graduate degrees in English from The University of Chicago and Loyola University (Chicago) and has taught at seven Midwestern colleges and universities, including The University of Cincinnati, Wayne State University, and The University of Michigan.
His previous titles include Labor Day at Walden Pond (poems), The Dust of Our City (poems), and Transportation: Hot Tunes and Blues from Motor City (recorded songs). He is editor and co-translator of an anthology, The Red Azalea: Chinese Poetry since the Cultural Revolution (University of Hawaii Press). He has co-edited the anthology, Before There Is Nowhere to Stand: Palestine/Israel: Poets Respond to the Struggle (Lost Horse Press, 2012).
He has won prizes in nine national poetry contests and has had poems in Hudson Review, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, Poetry Northwest and many other magazines. His co-translations of Chinese, Arabic, and Greek poetry have appeared in Iowa Review, New Letters, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arab Literature. His articles and reviews have been published in The Georgia Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Detroit News.
The author has worked as a writer for a few corporations. He has acted and sung in productions of several regional theatre and opera companies. He co-hosts The Crazy Wisdom Poetry Series in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and is editor of Peninsula Poets, the journal of the Poetry Society of Michigan. He lives with his wife in Ann Arbor.
Edward Morin has assembled lyrics and narratives touching on subjects you and I like to read about. The exquisite title poem prepares us for engagements with blue jays, bank swallows, wood thrushes—and also the pleasures of singing, fishing, even of aging. The language is to be savored and the hard-won wisdom taken to heart.
-Laurence Goldstein, author of Poetry Los Angeles: Reading the Essential Poems of the CityThe poet uses eyes, "the most spiritual of the senses," and ears—"this recluse trills its two voice boxes / like Pan's double flute"—to present reflective narratives of the world in and around us, in backyards, at workplaces. Witnessing compulsions and hardships of contemporary life, Morin evinces winged sensibilities and deep-rooted compassion. His praise of a fellow poet ("Poetry Man") could apply to his own poems' "fire smoldering in the belly" rising "to enchant the heart and brain."
-Lyn Coffin, poet, playwright, fiction writer, and translatorSome of my favorite contemporary poems are in earlier books by Ed Morin, and this fresh chapbook offers several more, especially the family and love poems, poems of conscience and responses to the violence of needless war and domestic crimes. The poems have remarkable range in portraying a holdup, which almost cost his life, and his avocation as an actor and professor. This collection is a distinguished addition to the Cervena Barva Series. I hope it inspires a longer Collected Poems, for this poet deserves honors and attention.
$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9966894-7-2 | 44 Pages | In Stock
-David Ray, author of 20 books including Music of Time: New and Selected Poems
New Release June 15, 2016:
Duino by Martin Burke
Červená Barva Press, 2016-
Poet and Playwright Martin Burke is from Ireland but has lived for many years in Flanders (the northern Flemish speaking part of Belgium) a region with which he strongly identifies. More akin to the broad European visionary tradition than to any form of social realism, his work is noted for his insight and lyricism, qualities which are to the forefront in this version of the famous work by Rilke. He is currently working on a book-length poem The April Calends.
1
Who from the angels will hear me?
$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9966894-9-6 | 22 Pages | In Stock
Into what existence may I vanish?
Why is it that, though it can, beauty does not destroy us?
Why does terror spring from every angel's mouth in joy?
Yet this is the world's landscape where, somehow, we endure
And the lovers, who annihilate annihilations
Lock time like a prisoner in their arms but their hearts are birds in air
Spring and its stars require us and the mission of music also
As we require mirrors to hold our expectations
As sinful and profane are our chosen companions
Where Antaeus is livid in air but renewed on the ground (oh let there be praise for such falling for this is no elegy)
As lovers are (oh pleasurable earth that such joy be yours!)
Sap to earth-mould that love rise again in any space, region or occasion through which its arrow passes
To focus on the unseen voice prompting a saints' ecstasy
Listening only to the secretive breath of the world
Speaking histories and chronicles-but what will they tell of you?
Let them tell that you were enraptured and quivered
In the arrows flight within you.
New Release March 22, 2016:
Cimmeria by T. M. De Vos
Červená Barva Press, 2016-
T.M. De Vos is a 2015 Sozopol Fiction Seminars fellow; Co-Editor-in-Chief of Gloom Cupboard; and staff member of The Atlas Review. Her work has appeared in Juked, The Pacific Review, burntdistrict, Moonshot Magazine, Quiddity, Hawaii Pacific Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and the Los Angeles Review, among others. She has been named as a semifinalist for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and the Paumanok Poetry Award. De Vos is also the recipient of fellowships from Murphy Writing Seminars, Summer Literary Seminars, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. She is currently working on her first novel.
"Some poets jump up and down, make faces, pretend to act smart, or witty, or stupid as they write. T.M. De Vos comes up to your table as you sit alone in a cafe, sits down in the empty chair, and starts talking to you in near whisper. You're surprised at first, don't know how to react, but are soothed by the softness of her voice, the warmth it projects, push out of your mind the din than surrounds you, and let yourself be drawn in by her words. There isn't a single lie, a hint at pretense in what she says. It is all so honest and simple. Her story is yours but she tells it in a way you would have never thought of and you see yourself differently. You're amazed. You're grateful to her for having sat down at your table. You've gained a friend."
-Yuriy Tarnawsky, author of The Placebo Effect Trilogy"An illuminating collection, Cimmeria inspects human intimacies. These poems are at once clinical and compassionate as they slip from the ordinary to horror, from a boy's red balloon to his bag of blood. T.M. De Vos enlarges as she vexes our grounding in the everyday."
-Renato Rosaldo, cultural anthropologist and author of Diego Luna's Insider Tips"Cimmeria plumbs modern relationships from intimate perspectives. The poems talk from across the room, then sit down and whisper unexpected truths. Where the 21st century keeps the bright and beautiful at the forefront, De Vos provides a rich depth of field that shows there is nothing of significance to fill the vacuum left from loss."
-John Gosslee, editor of Fjords Review and author of 12: Sonnets for the Zodiac"In her collection Cimmeria, poet T.M. De Vos opens up a complex world of brutal emotional pain delivered in elegant, precise, yet emotive language. We are taken through a landscape scarred by anguish and littered with memories ground down to a powder by unsuccessful, at times stifling relationships. But the look back upon this scorched earth of ardent scars is that from a vantage point of forgiveness and transcendence. De Vos is magically able to simultaneously condemn and absolve the cruelty that lives within all of us."
-Alex Pruteanu, author of Gears"T.M. De Vos reaches beneath the surface of experience to examine what is primary and primordial in everyday-and not so everyday-actions. Her examinations sometimes cut like a surgeon's knife, other times magnify like a biologist's microscope, to reveal what (often) has been taken away from those who try to give. The precision of her language and clarity of her imagery open our eyes to what has remained hidden, buried and closed off for too long."
-Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Haywire, Tetched, and Roughhouse"T. M. De Vos sounds the depths of what we truly know. With tremendous tenderness, yearning and passion in her voice, she gives us the visceral truth, including the literal blood, bone and guts of experience. By knowing where the limits of desire come from, herself, she is able to wisely accept what it is that life offers."
$7.00 | 36 Pages | In Stock
-Jeffrey Ethan Lee, author of Towards Euphoria
New Release March 15, 2016:
The Last Gun by Anne Harding Woodworth
Červená Barva Press, 2016-
Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent being Unattached Male (Poetry Salzburg, 2014). The Last Gun is her fourth chapbook after Up From the Root Cellar and Herding, both from Červená Barva Press. A selection from The Last Gun won the 2015-2016 COG Poetry Award out of Cogswell College, San Jose, CA, judged by poet A. Van Jordan, who wrote: "You'll find that The Last Gun is 'a gathering place for... admirers, rememberers, the once-armed.'" Harding Woodworth lives in Washington, D.C., where she is a member of the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
"Just when you thought you knew all the arguments in America's gun debate, here comes Anne Harding Woodworth's powerful chapbook, The Last Gun. In these haunting poems, the "last" gun clears its throat and speaks. He speaks his fears and hopes in a voice as unexpected as it is unsettling. We almost feel sorry for him as we follow his arrest, imprisonment, and more. These poems aim straight at the rhetoric. They trigger some laughs but mostly they lament a country in which we hear too much from guns. Guns usually get what they want. But here, in this smart, insightful collection, Anne Harding Woodworth only appears to show the gun's humanity. Actually, she shows us our own."
-Joseph Ross, Author of Ache, Gospel of Dust, and Meeting Bone ManAn excerpt from The Last Gun was the winner of the 2015-2016 COG Poetry Awards (Cogswell Polytechnical College, San Jose, CA), judged by poet A. Van Jordan, who wrote:
The Last Gun opens with smoke and closes with a bang. These poems toggle between the spirits of the living and the spirits the living carry into death "to ask questions, to contemplate/ a state of being that is no more." These poems care about what we carry with us on our journeys and how others hold us in memory. As a reader, you'll find that The Last Gun is "a gathering place for... admirers, rememberers, the once-armed," and this poet has prepared us both "for the journey... where it will be judged," and for the "deeds on earth."
$7.00 | 37 Pages | In Stock
New Release December 29, 2015:
Chaos and Evolution by Olivia Bush
Červená Barva Press, 2015-
Olivia Bush is currently a junior at Simmons College, an all-women's college in Boston, Massachusetts, and is studying English and Communications. After she graduates, she aspires to become an editor. Born and raised in Central New Jersey, many of her poems are inspired by its scenery from the factories on the Turnpike facing the city skyline, to the picturesque shore. She is a poetry buff, who enjoys reading and draws inspiration from works from a variety of eras. Besides writing, she is an immature distance runner, and currently works as the director of a mentoring program for ninth and tenth graders. Despite the usually dark undertones present throughout most of her works, she enjoys a good comedy, and one of her long-term dreams is to write for a cartoon.
The Pin
Your peculiarity stuck me like a pin,
As I am a peculiar soul;
It met my delicate skin, drawing blood,
Which dripped to the floorIt was surprising: just a pin
drew such abundant blood;
but the bleeding roused my fancy,
as it poured from veins to the airWhen it collected in a puddle, stained the rug;
$7.00 | 18 Pages | In Stock
I knew I had to do something
To stop the bleeding—
I eventually learned bandages only go so far
New Release November 6, 2015:
THE EYES OF KEYHOLES by Milorad Pejic
Translated by Omer Hadziselimovic
THE EYES OF KEYHOLES by Milorad Pejic
Translated by Omer Hadziselimovic
Červená Barva Press, 2015-
Milorad Pejic was born in Tuzla, Bosnia, in 1960. Since 1992 he has lived in Sweden. His books of poems include The Vase for the Lily Plant (1985), The Eyes of Keyholes (2001, 2012), and Hyperborea (2011, 2013), for which he received the "Slovo Makovo-Mak Dizdar" prize in Bosnia in 2012.
Omer Hadziselimovic, formerly a professor at the University of Sarajevo, is now an adjunct professor of English at Loyola University Chicago and at North Park University, Chicago. He has published works in American studies, English literature, and travel writing. In recent years he has been translating poetry from Bosnian into English and from English into Bosnian, published in various venues.
FISHING VILLAGE
I mourn for the cypresses I brought
from Hvar: under tiny days, like through
sunglasses deficient they grow, breathing
with deaf leaves as if through a button.
From their horrible disease, like a thin trail
of ink spilled on a newspaper, they bleed out
at night over the yard wall into the moonlight.The long winter is drying out the boats down
$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9966894-1-0 | 44 Pages | In Stock
at the lake, a small church above smoking
roofs looks like a fishing buoy. No one from
anywhere to unlock me from the cypresses.
Planted in the snow, they traipse after me with
their shadows' needles like after a vial of lavender.
New release July 24, 2015: Natural Histories by Mark Pawlak
Natural Histories by Mark Pawlak
Červená Barva Press, 2015-
Mark Pawlak is the author of seven poetry collections and the editor of six anthologies. His latest books are Go to the Pine: Quoddy Journals 2005-2010 (Plein Air Editions/Bootstrap Press, 2012) and Jefferson's New Image Salon: Mashups and Matchups (Červená Barva Press, 2010). His work has been translated into German, Polish, and Spanish, and has been performed at Teatr Polski in Warsaw. In English, his poems have appeared widely in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Anthology of Poetic Journals and in the literary magazines New American Writing, Mother Jones, Poetry South, The Saint Ann's Review, Solstice, and The World, among many others. For more than 35 years Pawlak has been an editor of the Brooklyn-based Hanging Loose, one of the oldest independent literary journals and presses in the country. He supports his poetry habit by teaching mathematics at UMass Boston, where he is Director of Academic Support Programs. He lives in Cambridge.
$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock
New release February 10, 2015: Until It Does Us In by Myles Gordon
Until It Does Us In by Myles Gordon
Červená Barva Press, 2015-
Myles Gordon’s book-length book of poetry, Inside the Splintered Wood, was recently published by Tebot Bach (Huntington Beach, CA), as winner of the press's "Patricia Bibby First Book Competition." His chapbook, Recite Every Day, was published by Evening Street Press (Dublin, Ohio) in 2009, as winner of the press's "Helen Kay Chapbook Competition." He is a past winner of the Grolier Poetry Prize, and honorable mention for an AWP Intro Award – Poetry. He currently teaches English in a Massachusetts high school.
Praise for Until It Does Us In
Myles Gordon's ambitious and affecting sonnet sequence not only conveys – sometimes with beautiful formal understatement, other times with bitter directness – the horrors of Jewish history, but also, heartbreakingly, how those horrors infiltrate the present. In Until It Does Us In, moving sonnets about the suicide of a hip, pot-smoking, peace-sign wielding older cousin function as continuations and repercussions of what is captured in this exquisite final couplet: "the Jews of Brest Litovsk; the German gun./The shadows dwindled, thinned. Then there were none."
—Jacqueline Osherow, Author of WhitehornThe 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 OptimismThis 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 UniversityHow 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 SlavesMyles 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.
$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9861111-0-5 | 35 Pages | In Stock
—Alyssa Pacy, Archivist – Cambridge Public Library
New Release October 7, 2014: THE AFTERIMAGES Poems by David P. Miller
THE AFTERIMAGES Poems by David P. Miller
Červená Barva Press, 2014-
David P. Miller's poems have appeared in print in Meat for Tea, Stone Soup Presents Fresh Broth, Ibbetson Street, the 2014 Bagel Bards Anthology, and Durable Goods, and online in the Muddy River Poetry Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Oddball Magazine, and the Boston and Beyond Poetry Blog. He has twice been a featured reader at Stone Soup in Cambridge, Mass., where he is a semi-regular on the open mike. His three "micro-chapbooks" - Caution: Many People Walking, Probably Not Haiku, and Reversible Folded Poem, are available online thanks to the Origami Poems Project. David was a member of the multidisciplinary Mobius Artists Group of Boston for 25 years, visits with the Bagel Bards in Somerville, Mass., and is a member of Tom Daley's Tuesday night poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education. He is a librarian at Curry College, in Milton, Mass.
Cover Art: Jane Wiley
SEE YOUR HEARING
Listener, burnish the sense
where it is felt, each jewel, sound-being.
Air's voices shift as skull pivots,
left side and right, six directions
set in unwavering mind.My scatterhead's listening checklists
church chimes' humid auroras,
mosaic clatter of startled bird babies,
flat thump of cardboard on plastic.
Heard that. Heard this. The roster ticked.Packed earbuds guard concentration's thin gate.
Play it again: repeat, fade, decay.
Repetition manufactures foreplay for the ears,
but with bare attention stillness' pulse shines.Now you, see your hearing. Introspect
$7.00 | 43 Pages | In Stock
sound in your skull's heaven: lustrous percepts.
Each beat, rasp, slide, crack, sigh,
manifest like honey, like water, like night.
August 12, 2014:
Midway Through Life's Journey 24 poems by Michael Estabrook
Midway Through Life's Journey
24 poems by Michael Estabrook
Červená Barva Press, 2014-
After 40 years of working for "The Man" and sometimes "The Woman" Michael Estabrook is finally free. No more useless meetings under florescent lights in stuffy windowless rooms. He can concentrate instead on making better poems and on pursuing his other interests including: history, art, music, theatre, opera, and his wife who is still the most beautiful woman he has ever known.
Midlife Crisis
Wasn't until my mid-fifties
that Sam-the-Tattoo-Artist
from Cambridge, Massachusetts, etched
my first tattoo onto my left shoulder:
a pair of red roses encircling one another
on a mat of shimmering green leaves.Robin, our youngest daughter,
was in cahoots with me,
driving me to the tattoo parlor,
in the room watching the whole while.
Our other daughter, Laura,
was excited and gleeful, yelling
to her husband, "Chris come and see,
you're not going to believe it,
my Dad got a tattoo!"
On the other hand, my son
was stunned, dumbfounded,
not sure what to say.While my wife, my poor wife,
$7.00 | 35 Pages | In Stock
she's away on business, hasn't seen it yet,
doesn't know of it either. But she can't
be too mad, I reason, seeing as this tattoo
was drawn by her, not as a tattoo,
of course, but as an embellishment
for a book of my poems. So she can't
be too upset because it's her art and,
as Laura said, "it is such a romantic thing
to have Mom's art on your body, forever."
July 30, 2014:
Herding by Anne Harding Woodworth
Herding by Anne Harding Woodworth
Červená Barva Press, 2014-
Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of five books of poetry and three chapbooks. She lived on a farm in New York State during much of her childhood, where her fondness for cows began. It has stayed with her in spite of living in New York City; Detroit; Athens, Greece; and Frankfurt, Germany. She now divides her time between a cabin in the mountains of Western North Carolina and a home in Washington, D.C., where she is a member of the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library. (www.annehardingwoodworth.com)
In Herding, cows rush in where angels fear to tread, as Anne Harding Woodworth finds the human in the cow and the cow in the human. Cows serve as figurative and literal witness here, be they standing by during a speaker's contemplative walk through a country morning or dressing up as a contest winner's best man, "forced to masquerade / as a bull masquerading as a best man // wearing a tailor-made bovine tuxedo." Woodworth's poems are funny and even ridiculous at times, but don't be fooled into thinking this is light verse. Here, we find the essential: our place on and of the earth, and in the immediate and more general human relationships that make up our personal herd.
$7.00 | 32 Pages | In Stock
—Ruth Foley, Managing Editor of Cider Press Review and author of Dear Turquoise
March 31, 2014:
The Art of Waving by Tim Suermondt
The Art of Waving by Tim Suermondt
Červená Barva Press, 2014-
Tim Suermondt is the author of two full-length collections: TRYING TO HELP THE ELEPHANT MAN DANCE (The Backwaters Press, 2007) and JUST BEAUTIFUL from New York Quarterly Books, 2010. He has published poems in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Blackbird, Able Muse, Prairie Schooner, PANK, Bellevue Literary Review and Stand Magazine (U.K.) and has poems forthcoming in Gargoyle, A Narrow Fellow and Plume Poetry Journal among others. After many years in Queens and Brooklyn, he has moved to Cambridge with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.
"Tim Suermondt's poems in this new collection are open, friendly and inviting, in "the voice of our familiarity," but always with a profound or humorous twist. He is devoted "to a bravery found only in the details," to the "the raspberries and the ball games," or his wife "in a strange and beautiful hat," as well as to the dreams, disappointments and possibilities of everyday existence. Not for him the modish pessimism and linguistic difficulties of much of contemporary poetry. "When my wife puts on some Schubert," he says, "I'm sure the world will never end/ and neither will we." Here is a poet who communicates directly and has some hope for us. The apparent simplicity and genial humor of these marvelous poems are grounded in an artful subtlety that reflects the way life really is."
—Norman StockCover Art: "Skull in a Landscape" (1946) by Edward Burra
$7.00 | 28 Pages | In Stock
December 10, 2013:
Incompetent Translations and Inept Haiku by Bill Yarrow
Incompetent Translations and Inept Haiku by Bill Yarrow
Červená Barva Press, 2013-
Bill Yarrow is a Professor of English at Joliet Junior College where he teaches creative writing, Shakespeare, and film. He is the author of Pointed Sentences (BlazeVOX, 2012) His work has appeared in many print and online journals including PANK, Poetry International, Thrush, DIAGRAM, Contrary, and RHINO.
"Incompetent Translations and Inept Haiku is a masterfully competent and original course in comparative poetics, an erudite inside joke that will make you laugh out loud. Hilarious and apt send-ups of Whitman, Rimbaud, Lermontov, Yeats, and Bishop and Yarrow’s own poetic voice make this literary tour a tour de force—funny, moving, and unique."
—Larissa Shmailo, In Paran"With brilliant wit and deadpan humor, Bill Yarrow captures our ripe imperfections and absurd beauty. This is a collection to be read over and over. Hilarious, unflinching, and right on the mark!"
—Meg Tuite, Bound by Blue
Bonnie ZoBell recommends Incompetent Translations and Inept Haiku in The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review:
$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9910091-1-4 | 45 Pages | Out of Print
http://thedoctortjeckleburgreview.com/2014/03/31/eckleburg-book-club-the-whack-job-girls-by-bonnie-zobell/
September 12, 2013:
Pleasure Trout by Gloria Mindock
Pleasure Trout by Gloria Mindock
Muddy River Books, 2013-
Gloria Mindock is founding editor of Cervena Barva Press, editor of the Istanbul Literary Review based in Istanbul, Turkey, and one of the USA editors for Levure Littéraire in France. She is the author of La Portile Raiului (Ars Longa Press, 2010, Romania) translated into the Romanian by Flavia Cosma, Nothing Divine Here (U Šoku Štampa, 2010, Montenegro), and Blood Soaked Dresses (Ibbetson, 2007). Gloria's poetry has been translated and published into the Romanian, Serbian, Spanish, and French.
Widely published, her work has appeared in Murmur of Voices, Vatra Veche, UNU: Revista de Cultura, and Citadela in Romania. Other literary journal publications include: Arabesques, Poesia, Phoebe, Poet Lore, Blackbox, River Styx, Bogg, Ibbetson St., WHLR, Web Del Sol, Lost in Thought, and in the anthology Hildagards Daughters (Belgium). Her flash fiction has recently been published in Thrice and Thunderclap. She has work forthcoming in Bliss.
Gloria has had nominations for the Pushcart Prize, St. Butolph Award and was awarded a fellowship from the Somerville Arts Council. She was co-founder of Theatre S & S. Press, Inc. and was one of the founding editors of the Boston Literary Review/BLuR from 1984-1994. Theatre S. received grants from the Polaroid Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Globe Foundation, NEFA, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Somerville Arts Council.
Gloria works as a social worker and freelances teaching workshops. She facilitates events in her Cervena Barva Press studio, located in the Center for the Arts at the Armory in Somerville, MA.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
The poems in this chapbook are all mistranslations taken from poems in languages unknown to me. Sometimes a foreign word would remind me of a word in English. I wrote what I thought the poems were saying knowing that I was wrong in my interpretation. The whole purpose was to write as quickly as I could while looking at the foreign language. I mostly used poems written in Romanian, Serbian, Italian, Spanish and Polish. This is one of my favorite ways to write. This is a work of fiction. Don't try to understand what is written here. Just enjoy the nonsense.
$7.00 | 42 Pages | In Stock
September 12, 2013:
Dead Letters by JP Reese
Dead Letters by JP Reese
Červená Barva Press, 2013-
JP Reese earned an MFA from The University of Memphis. Her poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, book reviews, and writer interviews have been published or are forthcoming in many online and print journals such as Metazen, Blue Fifth Review, A Baker's Dozen: Thirteen Extraordinary Things, and The Pinch. Reese is Associate Poetry Editor for Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, www.connotationpress.com, and Guest Fiction Editor for Scissors and Spackle. Reese's poetry chapbook Final Notes was published by Naked Mannekin Press in 2012. Reese's flash fiction has won the Patricia McFarland Memorial Prize and her poetry has won The Graduate School Creative Writing Award from The University of Memphis. Her published work can be read at Entropy: A Measure of Uncertainty, jpreesetoo.wordpress.com. Reese lives and works in Texas.
"In the new collection Dead Letters, the music of JP Reese's poetry never strikes a false note. The voice in her writing is always unmistakable, genuine, and penetrating. These poems – and you will keep them close to you – serve as maps for journeys over dark and grieving landscapes. This is a strong poetry that promises and delivers a place, finally, of human faith, of hope under 'the arid bone of flowered stars'."
—Sam Rasnake, poet and author of Inside a Broken Clock from Finishing Line Press."There is a sort of formal antiquity and modern lyricism at play in JP Reese's Dead Letters—lovers and family, mythology, allusion, and everyday moments so minute that it is only the persistent ache a reader experiences that alerts her of her own transport elsewhere. Reese's poetry is subtle that way. And powerful. A departure."
—Heather Fowler, poet and author of the new short story collection This Time While We’re Awake from Aqueous Books.
Midnight, 1960
The lamp spreads its yellow halo
over my mother's dark curls.
Smoke swirls around her face
as she reads, a tea pot in its cozy,
rose-painted cup and saucer near.
Pall Mall butts lie discarded
in the ashtray, tipped with Avon's
latest red. Unthinking,
she raises delicate fingers
to her pink tongue, dabs a sliver
of tobacco from its tip. Never
taking her eyes from the book
cradled in her lap, she lives
another life. My father
sleeps, rooms away, unaware
of the change taking place
in the cooling, midnight air.
Reviews:
Your Own Back Yard ~ Writing and Art ~ Michael Gillan Maxwell: http://michaelgillanmaxwell.com/2014/03/07/book-review-dead-letters-jp-reese-2013-cervena-barva-press/
$7.00 | 33 Pages |In Stock
June 29, 2013:
This is Not a Situation in Which You Should Remain Calm by Michelle Reale
This is Not a Situation in Which You Should Remain Calm
by Michelle Reale
Červená Barva Press, 2013-
Michelle Reale is an academic librarian on faculty at Arcadia University in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of publications both in print and online, including Nano Fiction, Smokelong Quarterly, Pank, Gargoyle, The Pedestal, elimae, JMWW and others. Her work was included in Dzanc’s 2011 Best of the Web Anthology. She is the author of four collections of short fiction and prose poems. She has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She blogs on immigration and Migration and Social Justice in the Sicilian context at www.sempresicilia.wordpress.com
Cover Photo: Isabella Reale
"Michelle Messina Reale's poems evoke a deep confessional visitation between the connecting North African landscape and Southern Italian Etruscan bloodlines. She has taken the sparse stones found among the terrain’s ruins and placed them one by one, each carefully aligned in unique prosaic consciousnesses that offer new and alluring formations of the old. Her rhythms are rough in prose, often at the edge as a stone cut at various angles, yet continuous and steadfast. The sensation of the hard and quick gallop of a horse through this horizon of remains and longing is heard. The fortitude of trudging onward, of seeing ruinous sights combined with delicious heated passions, leave the reader sweltering and swollen, understanding the validity of bruises."
—Sonia Di Placido, author of, Exultation in Cadmium Red"In the title poem Michelle Reale, This is Not a Situation in Which You Should Remain Calm writes: Breathed it in to my pulsating lungs. You will want to breathe in to your pulsating lungs each beautifully crafted poem in this chapbook. You connect with the speaker of these poems on many levels and are drawn into each poem, I found myself holding my breath many times while reading this collection of achingly beautiful poems that encompass the human condition and all that it entails."
—Helen Vitoria, Poetry Editor, Thrush Poetry Journal"Michelle Reale's poems are imbued in the "now" as much as they are journeys to the long-gone world of our ancestors. The stories she paints are harrowing and touching: alive as lizards and intoxicating as wild flowers. There is an exquisite touch to them: the robust flavor of wine, the taste of the nibbled food and the omnipresent homage to Sicilian religiosity. The beauty of this collection’s landscapes and soulscapes left me yearning for more."
—Alessandra Bava, Author of Guerilla Blues
This is Not a Situation in Which You Should Remain Calm
We held hands until the intersection. He dropped his first. I pulled
$7.00 | 32 Pages | Out of Print
my coat around me tight, for something to do, the buttons long
gone. My breasts were sore and I shuddered. Don't do that, he said.
He pointed with his head to the ATM machine across the street
from where we stood. Make it enough this time, he said. I hurried
across the street. I heard him greet some men in the street. The
keffiyeh's they wore waved like flags in the wind. They spoke
guttural and urgent. I could hear them over the vibrating traffic, cars
negotiating difficult turns. I stood with my coat open and the wind
ripping a gaping hole through me. I had the money in my hand. He
waved off his friends and came to me. He stood outside the market.
I chose some meat in a plastic package, pink tomatoes small and
premature, grown somewhere far from where we found ourselves.
There was a name for this in my language, but I forgot what it was.
At home I fried the meat. I sliced the tomatoes, cut my finger and
sucked the blood. He made a face, called me simple. Picked his
teeth right in front of me and I thought of what my father might say.
He stared at me, his face softening by degrees. I pulled down the
neck of my blouse, revealing my bruised breasts. Purple and green
and yellow flowers bloomed like a night flower. He set his toothpick
down. It wasn't me, he said. His coffee boiled over on the stove. I
smelled the scorch. Breathed it in to my pulsating lungs. Salvaged
what was left. Served it the way he'd become accustomed to; hot.
A curl of lemon skin. Never sugar.
May 27, 2013:
Refuge in the Shadows by Krikor Der Hohannesian
Refuge in the Shadows by Krikor Der Hohannesian
Červená Barva Press, 2013-
Krikor Der Hohannesian lives in Medford, MA and has been writing poetry for some 40 years though only submitting work over the past several years. Since then, he has had poems published in many literary journals including The Evansville Review, The South Carolina Review, Atlanta Review, Peregrine, The New Renaissance, Hawaii Pacific Review and Connecticut Review. He also received honorable mention for the New England Poetry Club's Gretchen Warren Award for best published poem of 2010. His first chapbook, "Ghosts and Whispers," has been published by Finishing Line Press (2010). He also serves as Assistant Treasurer of the New England Poetry Club.
Cover Art: Garabed Der Hohannesian
"In Krikor Der Hohannesian's poetry, we hear things we might not be able to hear otherwise. "A man is down" signals the wind and rain coming in from the east, and the poet listens. In another poem a wife is keening, a child is crying, and the poet listens, listens with all his imagination and his heart. We hear colonial whispers emanating from the Granary Burial Ground. We hear the particular beauty of the names of the winds in many languages, and in another poem we hear the equally specific sadness of parents grieving a lost child. We hear final words, and words that should have been said, and we hear in several of these poems the long, agonized memory traces of the Armenian genocide. In all there is a deeply empathic imagination at work, and these poems give the poet and the reader alike a place of refuge, a place in the shadows in which to hold onto what is so profoundly dear and filled with meaning."
–Fred Marchant, Author of The Looking House
CRATERS OF THE MOON
"…and the dead tree gives no shelter"
T.S. Eliot – The Wastelandthe land is not quite black here,
more the deathly gray of volcanic ash
that mimes the absence of color.
Hiroshima might have looked like this
the morning after. Squeezed hardbetween fissures in a vast mantle of tuff
haphazard scrub pine stretch gaunt fingers
skyward, clawing for what they cannot eke
from leached earth. Forlorn natural scarecrowswith no birds to scare off nor crops to shade
forsaken even by black buzzards
looping in futile parabolas.Craters of the Moon National Monument Idaho
Reviews
Boston Area Small Press And Poetry Scene
$7.00 | 44 Pages | In Stock
Review by Dennis Daly
June 9, 2013
Refuge in the Shadows: by Krikor Der Hohannesian
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/
May 27, 2013:
Imaginary Planet poems by Alan Elyshevitz
Imaginary Planet poems by Alan Elyshevitz
Červená Barva Press, 2013-
Winner of the 2011 Cervená Barva Press Poetry Contest
Alan Elyshevitz is a poet and short story writer who was born in New York City and now lives in East Norriton, PA. He is the author of a short story collection, The Widows and Orphans Fund (Stephen F. Austin State University Press), and two poetry chapbooks, The Splinter in Passion’s Paw (New Spirit) and Theory of Everything (Pudding House). He is a two-time recipient of a fellowship in fiction writing from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of English at the Community College of Philadelphia.
"To put it in baseball terms, Alan Elyshevitz is a five-tool poet: his poems smooth as silk, whether he's imagining Akhmatova, trying to make sense, as we all are, of this often confusing world, or acknowledging that while pizza may be bad for you, it’s heavenly and he’s going to enjoy some slices. How can you not love a poet who writes, "The soul cranes its neck to observe/the maximum number of yellow bikinis"? Imaginary Planet is full of such nuggets, a book with intelligence and compassion to burn. Elyshevitz is a poet to savor and be thankful for."
—Tim Suermondt, author of Just Beautiful
Reviews
Review by Doug Holder: http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2013/06/imaginary-planet-poems-by-alan.html?spref=fb
$7.00 | 35 Pages | In Stock
March 7, 2013:
Microtones by Robert Vaughan
Microtones by Robert Vaughan
Červená Barva Press, 2013-
Robert Vaughan leads writing roundtables at Redbird- Redoak Writing. His writing has appeared in hundreds of journals. His short prose, “10,000 Dollar Pyramid” was a finalist in the Micro-Fiction Awards 2012. Also, “Ten Notes to the Guy Studying Jujitsu” was a finalist for the Gertrude Stein Award 2013. He is senior flash fiction editor at JMWW, and Lost in Thought magazines. His book, Flash Fiction Fridays, is at Amazon. His website is at: http://www.robert-vaughan.com/
"Hip, rousing, and utterly winning, Microtones reveals Robert Vaughan as a sly master of concision, a nimble ringmaster of short-takes and X-ray-savvy mini-portraits. Buoyant, brimming with clear-eyed humor ("I have a bachelor of arts in folding laundry") and a larkish cinema verité candor, leavened with small gusts of compassion and social acumen, this is a chapbook Frank O'Hara would have loved."
—Cyrus Cassells, author of The Crossed-Out Swastika"Robert Vaughan sucks us into his luminous vortex with guts, humor and grit. Microtones is as much about transcendence as falling. Vaughan blasts through the subterfuge of the unsaid and lets us "face gravity head-on." This is a fearless, unparalleled collection reminiscent of Lydia Davis that takes us on a "free fall" of a ride we want to jump back on over and over again. Read it!"
—Meg Tuite, author of Domestic Apparition
Legacy
An observer would have
thought her unsuited
for that frame.I wondered why my
parents kept the photo on
the piano. She'd died overten years ago. Died on her
own, by her own stupidity.
A visitor would havethought her adorable,
precocious, serene.
Unable to see the contagiousrecklessness. Unable to see
the damage she inflicted.
How my family came undone.I slip her photo into
the desk drawer. Underneath
a stack of report cards.
Reviews
Sabotage Review:
http://sabotagereviews.com/2013/08/07/microtones-by-robert-vaughan/Flash Fiction Chronicles:
http://www.everydayfiction.com/flashfictionblog/book-review-microtones-by-robert-vaughan/Counterexample Poetics:
http://www.counterexamplepoetics.com/2013/07/meg-tuite-interviews-robert-vaughan-for.html"Microtones," reviewed by Michael Gillan Maxwell
$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9883713-9-2 | 36 Pages | In Stock
Your Own Backyard
June 9, 2013
http://michaelgillanmaxwell.com/
March 7, 2013:
amores gitano (gypsy loves) by Roberto Carlos Garcia
amores gitano (gypsy loves)
by Roberto Carlos Garcia
Červená Barva Press, 2013-
Roberto Carlos Garcia's work has appeared in Connotation Press- An Online Artifact, Wilderness House Literary Review, Poets & Artists Magazine, Metazen, Atticus Review, and others. His fiction is included in the anthology "The Lost Children," a book of 30 short stories to benefit children's charities PROTECT and Children 1st U.K.
"Amores Gitano (gypsy loves)" is his first chapbook.
A native New Yorker, he now lives and works in New Jersey where he is pursuing an MFA in Poetry and Poetry Translation at Drew University's Low Residency MFA Program.
You can follow Roberto Carlos Garcia on Twitter at @thespokenmind. His website is www.robertocarlosgarcia.tumblr.com
"In his chapbook, amores gitano, Roberto Carlos Garcia breathes adult passion into the craft of desire, these poems strip themselves, naked. They flirt and they want and each section a near erotic frame of determined risk ready to widen the realm of the reader's senses. Here is a poet who can dress and undress the lyric with his mind, hands and tongue."
—Thomas Sayers Ellis, Author of Skin Inc. Identity Repair Poems and The Maverick Room"Roberto Carlos Garcia gives us twenty stunning gypsy loves in amores gitano that together construct a language so wrought with desire it swaggers. This is a luminous book that marks the emergence of a new and important voice that is sure to stir up all kinds of bad."
—Sean Nevin, Author of Oblivio Gate
18.
There's a cruelty
about her
that's always hungry.When she finally takes,
finally tastes flesh
& is full,
what's left of me
is loved again,
her cruelty abates.In many ways
I'm a keeper
in a zoo.Once the lions are fed
$7.00 | 30 Pages | Out of Print
I can enter the cage
but still,
I'm leaving my life
to chance.
January 25, 2012:
Except for That Poems by Rachel Goldstein
Except for That Poems by Rachel Goldstein
Červená Barva Press, 2013-
Cover Artist: Rachel Goldstein
Rachel Goldstein is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She was born in Germany in 1946 in a displaced person’s hospital. At the age of two, she moved to La Paz, Bolivia with her parents. Five years later, her family emigrated to Montreal, Canada, where she completed her education with a degree in English Literature from McGill University. Her poems have been widely published. In 2005, she won Second Prize in the Robert Penn Warren Award.
"The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Rachel Goldstein writes with a searing authenticity haunting in its evocative power. Her spare, elegant poems provide intimate and poignant insights into a harrowing time and lives lived bravely afterward."
—Barbara Wallace Grossman, Professor of Drama, Tufts University; Presidential Appointee to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2000-2005)"In this biographical collection, the author chronicles her parents' experiences before, during and after World War II. She helps the reader understand, "you were not there [when] eyes tilted toward the impossible." Each and every one of them was a "skin-thin weight [with] miles of wind in their bones." Their story will not die as long as "the willows still stand faithful in leafy gowns" and daughter-poet "sing what will not be redeemed.""
—Michal Mahgerefteh, Publisher Poetica Magazine
Reviews
Feb. 2, 2013 Doug Holder Blogspot Review:
$8.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9883713-1-6 | 33 Pages | In stock
Review of Except For That by Rachel Goldstein
November 19, 2012:
Posture a fiction chapbook by Ateet Tuli
Posture by Ateet Tuli
Červená Barva Press, 2012-
Winner of the 2011 Červená Barva Press Fiction Contest
Judge: Catherine SasanovAteet Tuli lives and works in New York City.
Cover art by Ateet Tuli.
Fortune Teller
Perfume bomb whose silk surface protects a silver subcutaneous and is surrounded by parchment, you draw me close with evocations of mother preparing Dal for the week. The remembered architecture of you below cinnamon, against cardamom, below lime draws me so close I overlook your anger, which makes me cry.
You are capable of destruction, of warping a weft of garlic and chilies. I could cool you, put you in the fridge till you cannot overwhelm me. I could heat you, sweat you till natural sugar caramelizes and you can tell me nothing. I could hurt you also, dear onion. A mutual respect actualized as we grasp each other.
Pulled from a womb of dirt, you also have roots in ancient Asia. In eating you, I eat my relatives; their ashes fed your ancestry where they were spread. The dance of eating and burning you within my own burning body fertilizes the future, when in turn I will feed your children.
I dissect you, your rings akin to those of a tree, until I reach and consume your center. Its delicate youth lingers on my breath and is a flashlight for my tongue.
$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9883713-3-0 | 22 Pages | In Stock
August 23, 2012: A new chapbook from Teneice Durrant Delgado
Burden of Solace Poems by Teneice Durrant Delgado
Červená Barva Press, 2012-
Teneice Durrant Delgado is a co-founder and poetry editor for Blood Lotus: an online literary journal, and a proud graduate of Spalding University’s Low-Residency MFA. She is the publisher and managing editor for Winged City Press Chapbooks and also serves on the editorial board for New Sins Press.
Teneice is originally from Akron, Ohio but currently lives in Dayton, Ohio. Her poems have appeared in the Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Heartland Review, The Furnace Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Glass, Pisgah Review, Soundings East and in two chapbooks: Flame Above Flame and The Goldilocks Complex. She is currently pursuing a degree in Community Counseling at the University of Dayton.
Author’s Note
I have strived to make this chapbook as historically accurate as possible. There is not much information on the Irish Slave trade, but I found Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl by Kate McCafferty and To Hell, or Barbados: the ethnic cleansing of Ireland by Sean O’Callaghan to be particularly insightful. I’m also grateful to Dr. Natalie Zacek for meeting with me after a random email and an even more random trip to Manchester, U.K.
"In Burden of Solace, Teneice Delgado’s poems guide us through the brutality of the Irish slave trade while making a clear and poetic argument for human resilience and dignity under seemingly unendurable circumstances. This poet’s ear is clearly tuned to the past. Delgado tells a story that needs to be heard and she gives deft voice to the resigned and defiant."
—Kathleen Driskel, Associate Professor of Creative Writing, Spalding University"In Burden of Solace, Teneice Durrant Delgado boldly examines pain, fear, inevitability, and the soul’s arduous endurance. These poems yield an understanding of human captivity from new, devastating angles, and they vividly convey the ways in which hope can wither and flare."
—Marcus Jackson, Cave Canem FellowIt is ironic that theorists proclaim we may be in a post-racial society. Since poets are truth-seekers and truth-tellers, more and more books being published - and lauded - investigate race. Teneice Durrant Delgado’s latest effort, from her poems “Susan” through “Jamaica,” delve both deeply and deftly into the Irish slave trade, which has not been widely discussed. The poems in this collection, “Solace,” offer us the opposite. The Ship’s name remains one thing, while the planks rattle and the “air stood thick.” Reading work like this is what we need to do. We must remember slavery, for it is “something ancient and rage-filled,” but also current and must become forever “forbidden.”
—Glenn Sheldon author of Angels of Anarchy
Not John
I admire
the way he takes flogs
without flinching, hate him
for his strength when I cry
out. I wait, watch
his eyes. They are the color
of boiling molasses. He won’t lean
into any white womb. He spits on my
red face on his way through the field.
He doesn’t speak much
English, not many of us
slaves, white or black, do. But
he knows enough to say
I am not John. The mulatto driver
laughs with his whip. Get in line,
Not John.
Not white, he says,
not John. Not John won’t
say his real name. Barbados
isn’t big enough. He will not waste
his mothers' tongues
on rotting, sugar
sharp mouths.
Reviews
Poetry Matters: Poetry Book Reviews and Interviews
http://readwritepoetry.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-review-of-burden-of-solace-and.htmlReview by Barbara Bialick:
$7.00 | 26 Pages | In Stock
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2012/08/review-of-burden-of-solace-poems-by.html
July 9, 2012: A new chapbook from Matthew A. Hamilton
The Land of the Four Rivers
My Experience as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Armenia (2006-2008)
by Matthew A. Hamilton
Červená Barva Press, 2012-
Matthew is an MFA candidate at Fairfield University and a poetry reader for Mason’s Road and Drunken Boat. Prior to graduate school, he served as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Armenia (2006-2008) and the Philippines (2008-2010). He is also a former Legislative Assistant on Capitol Hill and a Benedictine Monk.
A 1999 graduate of Belmont Abbey College (BA History) Matthew is currently the librarian at Benedictine College Preparatory, an all-male, Catholic military high school. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.
The Land of the Four Rivers
I crawl out of the plane and walk
through a terminal that reminds me
of a prison I once visited in Moscow.
I smell soviet uniforms pushing people
out of moldy bread lines.
I see a black and white picture of two soldiers
beating a man in the frozen gulag.
I follow the line from baggage claim
out into the diesel air packed with greetings
and logistics, firm handshakes.
I throw my bag under the bus and take my seat,
fall asleep as we pull away toward the rising sun.
I wake up and look out the window.
Mt. Ararat is protruding
from the earth like a newborn’s tooth,
searching for the lost city of Noah,
the eyes of red delicious.
I see sun shadows, blue tears
of Eden dance in fields of cognac
and gold, the crevices of echoing snow
and yellow skies nourishing the navel
of the world.
Reviews
The winner for Peace Corps Writers 2013 Best Book of Poetry:
http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/pc-writers/2013/09/12/matthew-a-hamilton/Fairfield University Review:
http://blog.fairfield.edu/inspired/?p=912Christopher Allen interviews Matthew A. Hamilton on his blog "I Must Be Off"
$7.00 | 42 Pages | In Stock
http://www.imustbeoff.com/#!/2012/05/expat-author-interview-with-matthew.html
June 16, 2012: A new chapbook from John Elsberg & Eric Greinke
All This Dark 24 Tanka Sequences
by John Elsberg & Eric Greinke
Červená Barva Press, 2012-
This chapbook is a companion piece to Catching The Light: 12 Haiku Sequences by John Elsberg and Eric Greinke, which Červená Barva Press published in 2009.
Eric Greinke has been active on the literary scene for nearly fifty years. He has been a bookseller, a publisher, an editor, a creative writing teacher, a book reviewer and a social worker for special needs children. His published work includes poetry, fiction, translation, social criticism and poetics, and has appeared in many books and chapbooks and in journals such as The Hurricane Review, Abraxas, Chiron Review, New York Quarterly, Wilderness House Literary Review, Main St. Rag, The South Carolina Review, California Quarterly, Mad Poets Review, Home Planet News, The University of Tampa Review, and the Paterson Literary Review. He has won several prizes, most recently a 2012 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award from the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. His most recent books are Traveling Music (2011), Beyond Our Control - Two Collaborative Poems (with Hugh Fox, 2012) and Conversation Pieces - Selected Interviews (2012), all from Presa Press. He is known for his collaborations with other poets, including Ronnie Lane, Brian Adam, Mark Sonnenfeld, Harry Smith, Richard Kostelanetz, Marine Robert Warden and Hugh Fox. All This Dark is his second collaboration with John Elsberg. They are working on a third. Website: www.ericgreinke.com.
John Elsberg is a poet, reviewer, editor, and historian. He is the author of over a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, and his work has been in a number of anthologies. He was the host of open poetry readings at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, for almost twenty-five years. He also has led various writing workshops, including explorations of experimental poetry with high school students. In the late 1970’s he was the fiction editor of Gargoyle. He has since been the editor or poetry editor of several other literary magazines, ranging from Bogg to The Delmarva Review on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where he and his wife Connie now spend a good part of their time. As a young man he taught for the University of Maryland, and then he spent many years as an editor/publisher of history books. His poems have appeared in a wide range of journals, such as Hanging Loose, the New Orleans Review, Lost & Found Times, Edgz, RAW NerVZ (Canada), American Tanka, and the Lilliput Review.
boggmag@aol.com
All This Dark
all this dark
stubble in winter sun
but I know
beyond the next turn
the wheat is neon green*
cardinals
stay with us through
the winter
an oriental bush
that blooms in fall*
late geese
across a rising moon
long trumpets
playing in a royal court
they exit left on cue
Reviews
Verse Wisconsin:
http://versewisconsin.org/Issue111/reviews/elsberg_greinke.htmlReview by Dennis Daly:
$7.00 | 32 Pages | In Stock
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2012/07/all-this-dark-24-tanka-sequences-by.html
March 3, 2012: Circle Straight Back by Noel Sloboda
A new Poetry chapbook from Červená Barva Press
Circle Straight Back by Noel Sloboda
Červená Barva Press, 2012-
Originally from Massachusetts, Noel Sloboda lived in Missouri while earning his Ph.D. from Washington University. He currently serves as dramaturg for the Harrisburg Shakespeare Company and teaches at Penn State York. The author of the poetry collection Shell Games (sunnyoutside, 2008), he has also published several chapbooks. Learn more here: http://www2.yk.psu.edu/sites/njs16/
“In that ghostly area between flash fiction and prose poems, you’ll find the work of Noel Sloboda. At his best, his dry humor and easy way with a sentence propel you forward from each piece into the next. Not only will Sloboda show you where you’ve been in the world, he’ll let you know a bit about the future, too. His characters, ‘hungry for redemption,’ are the real achievement in this kind of short work. Solidly real, honest and forthright, they’ll stick with you like early childhood memories recalled by chance in the day-to-day struggle of living.”
—Rusty Barnes
Of Species
A tyrannosaurus and a triceratops put their heads together and guessed what would inevitably happen to all the dinosaurs, but the two could not agree how the end would come about.
It will surely be a flood, boomed the tyrannosaurus.
I rather suspect meteors will rain down, countered the triceratops in a loud contralto.
They debated for some time, before finally agreeing to disagree, since preventative measures—they decided—were more important, ultimately, than causes. United, they resolved to construct a massive canoe with a great umbrella mounted in its middle. They called their craft The Salvation, and as soon as it was seaworthy, they eagerly launched. In their haste, they forgot to bring paddles, and so the tyrannosaurus and triceratops drifted into the deeps, then drifted and drifted some more.
“It seems,” said the triceratops with an ironic smirk, “we’ve designed our own undoing. Surely, we’ll both starve out here.”
“One of us won’t,” said the tyrannosaurus, a gleam in one of his yellow eyes, which had a center shaped like a sharp tooth.
When he had finished his meal, the tyrannosaurs sighed heavily, regretting that his arms were too little to wipe his chops. Then he took down the umbrella and waited for the meteors.
Reviews
Flash Fiction Chronicles:
$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock
http://www.everydayfiction.com/flashfictionblog/book-review-circle-straight-back-by-noel-sloboda/
October 23, 2011:
A new chapbook by Preston H. Hood
2012 Maine Literary Awards:
The Hallelujah of Listening by Preston H. Hood won the Book Award for Poetry!
The Hallelujah of Listening by Preston H. Hood
Červená Barva Press, 2011-
The Cover Art is a photo of G. Buddy Swenson’s Elusive Liberty (August, 2001) Paint on Wood Panel (48”X”36”)
Preston Hood was born in Fall River, Massachusetts and grew up in Swansea, Mass. He served in Vietnam with SEAL TEAM 2 (1970), and was a graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Bachelor of Arts in English, Magna cum laude, the University of Southern Maine, Bachelor of Science, and the University of Maine, Orono, Master of Education. For fifteen years, he was a member of Veteran’s for Peace. He published a poetry CD, Snake Medicine (2002), which was recorded by Berred Ouellette, and produced by Master Mind Audio. Summer Home Press published his first book of poetry, A Chill I Understand (2006). The Hallelujah of Listening is his first Chapbook (2011).
A CD of Preston H. Hood reading his poems is also available for $7.00. It was recorded by Berred Ouellette and produced by Disc Makers. The cover art of the CD face is a photo of G. Buddy Swenson’s Elusive Liberty (August, 2001) Paint on Wood Panel (48”x 36”).
After attending The William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences for 9 years, he edited with Jacqueline Loring and Gary Rafferty the Summer Home Review I (2002), and II (2005).
Through the Cape Cod Writer’s Center, he was interviewed with John McHugh, Secretary of the Henrich Böll Association, County Mayo, Ireland for Books of the World Television Program in Harwich MA (2006).
With Jacqueline Loring, he co-presented an overview of the Sixties Beat Poetry for The Wrinkle in Time: San Francisco Summer of Love (1967) Conference at Osher Life Long Learning Institute at University of Southern Maine. At the same workshop, he served on a panel discussion of both Civil Rights Issues and Why We Were in Vietnam (2009).
His poetry has been published in national and international journals and anthologies. He is a retired teacher and administrator currently writing his memoir. He spends his other time bicycling, kayaking, and hiking with his spouse Barbara J. Noone. He lives in Lyman, Maine.
The Hallelujah of Listening
From Dooniver we’re lured
by angels in the sun-dappled wind. They dance
with shadows, their radiant hair,
a seascape of waves & salt sundog air.Some of us walk through Achill’s mist
anointed by the whispering surf. Or charge into a valley
of an image, rave about the lowered moon
behind Slievemore’s cloud-covered top.Like first-light finches, I dart
into the thicket, feel the cool
morning silence. I climb with pilgrims
under a salmon-coral sky, voices chant invocations.The red-bellied fuchsias lift & sway
on this steep path, bloodstones of penance. Even sheep
turn to listen. I wish I knew if Croagh Patrick could be mindful
of them, & us, rapt in our chorus of hallelujahs.
With this stunning collection, THE HALLELUJAH OF LISTENING, Preston Hood will take his place among the greatest of the poet-warriors and poet veterans of our times. Hood’s poems bear witness to how the human spirit survives that which would kill it. One speaker stitches up the opening in the sky “before the dead crawl out” (“Opening in the Sky”). Another, painting naked in the yard among the blue jays and bees, draws “a door in the sky to enter,” hoping to “find what’s lost” (“first born”). I’m awed by the poetic joining of courage and beauty in these fierce and precise poems.
—Cynthia Hogue, Professor, Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, Tempe; Or Consequence (2010).I love Preston Hood’s new poems, and I cherish the spots of time he has been able to hold still in these poems just long enough to change your life. (From the Forward)
—Bruce WeiglWith Preston Hood’s The Hallelujah of Listening, I see a newfound confidence in the expression of his art. His beautiful images are often intimate and passionate, illusive and questioning, then shocking, real and haunting. As with other veteran poets, even when Preston’s poem is not about war, it forces you to think about warring, keeps you out of your comfort zone. In this new book, Preston asks us to “enter the mist, sit down in the fire of thought” to “let go of sorrow, let sorrow go” and promises, “the spirit lives to a renewal.” The journey is worth taking.
—Jacqueline M. Loring, Poet, Playwright, and Editor, Summer Home Review Anthologies, Volumes I and IIThe poetry of Preston Hood’s The Hallelujah of Listening is indeed a “climb from the struggle into the marvelous” as he says in his poem, “Our Singing.” His new book reads almost like the scripture of Psalms such is its beauty and transcendence. Indeed, “a tongue of the sky” slipped into his mouth and our soul is awakened to the realms in which only poetry has a voice.
—Lamont B Steptoe, Publisher/founder of Whirlwind Press, Winner of the American Book Award (2005)
Reviews
Hayden's Ferry Review:
$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9831041-7-9 | 56 Pages | In Stock
http://haydensferryreview.blogspot.com/2012/03/book-review-hallelujah-of-listening.html
Buy the Book for $7.00 >
Buy the CD for $5.00 >
Buy the Book & CD for $12.00 >
May 24, 2011:
A new chapbook by Stephen Frech
A Palace of Strangers Is No City
by Stephen Frech
Červená Barva Press, 2011Cover 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 IntroductionA 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.
$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9831041-3-1 | 33 Pages | In Stock
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.
May 15, 2011:
A new chapbook by Pamela Annas
MUD SEASON by Pamela Annas
Červená Barva Press, 2011-
Pamela Annas grew up in the Navy, constantly moving from country to country. She singlehandedly raised a child who’s now in college and is herself a professor and associate dean at University of Massachusetts Boston, member of the editorial collective of The Radical Teacher, author of a Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath and co-author of two textbook/anthologies, Literature and Society and Against the Current. She looks forward to taking up blues harp in her retirement and in the meantime is quite pleased to see this first chapbook appear beautifully in print from Červená Barva Press.
"What resonates most clearly and powerfully in Pam Annas’s Mud Season is her ability to assume a variety of distinctive voices, and in so doing, speak from a variety of experiences. This is made possible because of the poet’s good ear for a diction that is not present simply to announce or decorate or please, but instead to carefully lure the reader into the lives she inhabits in order to tell a fresh and illuminating story of who we are."
—Bruce Weigl
Clotheslines
Back of the Navy housing project
the women hang the laundry.
Under a thin morning sun, braced
against a keening wind, my mother lifts
wet towels out of the wicker basket
heaves them to the curving clothesline
higher than the top of her head
and a late setting sickle moon.
I hand up the wooden pegs one by one
adrift in a cotton trance.The back yards are a harbor of sails
rippling in the icy breeze.
Freezing stiff, cotton diapers
are lined up in ranks on review.
My brother and I play hide and seek
among the swaying sheets, or crouch
between two lines as in a bivouacked
tent, telling stories of heroes and feasts.
Rows of back doors, scuffed dirt,
a red tricycle.Family uniforms come off the line
in a fading yellow afternoon. We
slide the pegs back into their cloth bag,
stack frozen diapers in the basket.
Red chapped hands wrapped
around mugs of hot chocolate thaw
in the cramped steamy apartment.
Clean clothes relax into tenderness
throwing off a fresh cold scent,
silver notes from a Celtic harp.My mother's life, the story of a day:
$7.00 | 40 Pages | In Stock
gathering, washing, hanging, drying,
sorting and folding, putting away.
February 10, 2011:
A Story and Poetry Chapbook Collection Edited by Susan Tepper
Valentine Day Massacre Edited by Susan Tepper
Červená Barva Press, 2011-
Fictionaut Authors' Valentine Day Massacre Challenge
Because I am a fool for love, I couldn't resist starting a Valentine Day Massacre challenge at Fictionaut. The result, as you see, is a complex assortment of printed goodies (white, milk, and dark chocolate) dedicated to valentines everywhere.
—Susan TepperStories & Poems by:
Doug Bond, Angela Brett, Estelle Bruno, Sheldon Lee Compton, Sara T. Einhorn, David Erlewine, Susan Gibb, Frank Hinton, Matt Kang, Dorothee Lang, Ryan McDermott, John Minichillo, Kevin Paul Myrick, Nora Nadjarian, Ajay Nair, Gabriel Orgrease, Derek Osborne, Meg Pokrass, Sam Rasnake, Beate Sigriddaughter, Marcus Speh, Paul Steven Stone, Miles Tepper, Susan Tepper, xTxFebruary 11, 2011, Fictionaut blog:
$7.00 | 49 Pages | In Stock
http://blog.fictionaut.com/2011/02/11/valentines-day-massacres/
January 15, 2011: A new chapbook from Zvi A. Sesling
Across Stones Of Bad Dreams
Poems by Zvi A. Sesling
Červená Barva Press, 2010-
Zvi A. Sesling has published poems in Midstream, Saranac Review, New Delta Review, Voices Israel Anthology, Cyclamens & Swords, Ship of Fools, The Chaffin Journal, Poetica, Ibbetson Street, Istanbul Literary Review, Illya's Honey, Wavelength, Asphodel, Main Channel Voices and Hazmat Review, and many others. In 2004 he was awarded Third Place in the Reuben Rose International Poetry Competition and in 2007 he received First Prize in the Reuben Rose International Poetry Competition. He was selected to read his poetry at New England/Pen "Discovery" in 2008 by Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish. He is editor of the Muddy River Poetry Review.
January 17, 2010
Review: Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/This great chapbook is about the giant dumpster of memory in the realm of past loves gone dead. The image of death carries right into the end, where Sesling imagines heaven as a welcoming place with a beautiful aquamarine sky like his mother’s ring…and yet there are his mother and father and relatives still instilling guilt and criticism and where “Piles of ancestors like old newspapers in the basement/will present themselves as headlines for me to acknowledge,…the sun yellow as the stars my aunts, uncles, cousins wore.” Only “Dogs from my past will bound forward through green fields,/tails wagging a quick metronome to their happy bark…” Continued...
$7.00 | 38 Pages | In Stock
October 16th: A new chapbook from Elaine Terranova
Elegiac: Footnotes to Rilke’s Duino Elegies by Elaine Terranova
Červená Barva Press, 2010-
Elaine Terranova is the author of four collections of poems, Not To, New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 2006) which was a runner-up for the Poetry Society's William Carlos Williams Award, The Dog's Heart (Orchises Press, 2002), Damages (Copper Canyon Press, 1996), and The Cult of the Right Hand, winner of the 1990 Walt Whitman Award (Doubleday, 1991) and an earlier chapbook, Toward Morning/Swimmers (Hollow Spring Press, 1980), Her poems have appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares, Boulevard, and Pleiades, and in these and other anthologies, A Gift of Tongues, Blood to Remember: American Poets write about the Holocaust, A Cadence of Hooves, and Riffing on Strings. Her work has been part of The Poetry Society's Poetry in Motion project. Her translation of Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis appeared in the Penn Greek Drama Series (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). She has received a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a National Endowment in the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants. She won the Anna Davidson Rosenberg competition in 1992 and has been Banister Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College and a Fellow at Bread Loaf. She is a writing specialist at the Community College of Philadelphia and a faculty member of the Rutgers, Camden, MFA Program in Creative Writing.
"I've long admired Elaine Terranova's poetry and Elegiac is another first-rate collection. Taking Rilke's Duino Elegies as a starting point, these "footnotes" to the older poet's work are technically sophisticated and sonically lovely. They're also deeply moving, meditating on mortality, God, and the constantly vanishing past, retrievable only through the vagaries of memory or the creative imagination. These are beautiful, impressionistic poems distinguished especially for their shifting, subtle intelligence and their emotional force."
—Kevin Prufer, author of National AnthemNovember 6, 2010
$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock
Review by Irene Koronas: http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2010/11/elegiac-footnotes-to-rilkes-duino.html
October 16th: A new chapbook from Jendi Reiter
Winner of the 2010 Červená Barva Press Poetry Contest
Barbie at 50 by Jendi Reiter
Červená Barva Press, 2010-
Winner of the 2010 Červená Barva Press Poetry Contest: Judged by Afaa Michael Weaver
Jendi Reiter's first book, A Talent for Sadness, was published in 2003 by Turning Point Books. Her poetry chapbook Swallow won the 2008 Flip Kelly Poetry Prize and was published in 2009 by Amsterdam Press. In 2010 she received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist's Grant for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The New Criterion, Mudfish, American Fiction, The Adirondack Review, The Broome Review, FULCRUM, Juked, The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Alligator Juniper, MARGIE: The American Journal of Poetry, Phoebe, Best American Poetry 1990 and many other publications. She is the editor of Poetry Contest Insider, an online guide to over 750 literary contests, published by www.winningwriters.com.
Visit her blog at www.jendireiter.com.
Jendi Reiter's Barbie at 50 contains an inventive re-imagining of the fairytale woman as well as iconic images of women, including Barbie. The poems are replete with surprise and peppered with humor. In her poem, "The Fallen Angel Writes a Letter Home" she writes, "I never run out of language. I'm easy listening. /Background music for the long drive away /from that sunset field where they fell under / the sweep of a great and lively silence." Her poems resound with lyrical language, and are not bound for silence, but for reading.In "The Happiness Myth" she jests, "Inside me is a thin person,/ two policemen, a rhododendron, and a sheepdog /trying to get out." Inside Barbie at 50 there is much more; a collection of well-crafted and delightful, well-imagined poems.
—Lori DesrosiersBarbie at 50 is a lush collection of poems with lines embroidered with the craft of a studied life. It's Barbie outdoing herself, leaving off the accursed weight of a 1950's perfectionism to discover the truth of genuine joy. These are poems of a life more real than any doll's, as they point up the grace of having confronted the problematic entanglements that attempt to derail a woman making her way through the puzzles of maturing in the last fifty years, a time studded with all ridiculous matter. These poems show us a difficult tenderness harvested from what makes us weep and what makes us shout out in celebration, what makes us laugh.
—Afaa Michael Weaver, Simmons CollegeThroughout this collection, various poems include reference to the following brands: Barbie and Ken, trademarks of Mattel Corp.; Maybelline, a trademark of L'Oréal USA Creative Inc.; and Project Runway, a trademark of Fashion Cents, LLC. No rights in these marks are claimed nor commercial affiliation intended.
$7.00 | 28 Pages | In Stock
September 2: A new chapbook by Hugh Fox
Where Sanity Begins by Hugh Fox
Červená Barva Press, 2010-
Hugh Fox is a 78 year old poet originally from Chicago, has spent most of his life teaching writing, American literature and film in Champaign-Urbana, Los Angeles, Caracas, Santa Catarina (Brazil), Buenos Aires, etc. He has 110 books published, his most recent being, The Collected Poetry of Hugh Fox, published last year by World Audience in New York.
CONJURING
My mind and clothes are caught
$7.00 | 57 Pages | In Stock
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.
August 26: A new chapbook by Daniel Y. Harris and Adam Shechter
Paul Celan and the Messiah's Broken Levered Tongue: An Exponential Dyad
by Daniel Y. Harris and Adam Shechter
Červená Barva Press, 2010-
As Ron Sukenick so aptly put it in his last book "Mosaic Man," Jews are both proto and posthuman. Adam Shechter and Daniel Y. Harris are possessed of that molten globe of fiery perdition that draws the brighter children of the tribe to the flame. Add poetry and oy! What can I say? Shechter and Harris have made another journey to the hellchamber of Jewish mystery/creation/death and came out in company, a big company that includes a lot of fried geniuses, but most of all they came out, and it's good to see them.
—Andrei Codrescu (www.codrescu.com), is the author of The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess (Princeton University Press) and edits Exquisite Corpse at (www. corpse.org).I can't begin to comprehend/surround all that is transpiring here in this Harris/Shechter collaboration/fusion—I'll need other readings toward adequate bearings—but as Seine suicide Paul Celan hovers among these pages of prayerful heresies—"no Shabbos-always Shabbos"—I experience a language that wields "pen as scalpel," and I feel flayed but grateful for this awakening into wild inquiry/attack. By way of thousands of years of Jewish history & of their own lives slashed out in poems & prose pieces of mesmerizing power, even as they wonder if they've gone too far, these two visionaries/revisionists have made something powerful & new here, something of charismatic complication. Oi Vey, & mazel tov.
—William Heyen, author of Shoah Train: Poems, finalist for the National Book Award
Adam Shechter is from Un-Brooklyn, the imperceptible imperialist brownstone aesthetic of 1989 Prospect Park West benches by Garfield Street. Adam has never been published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review and this fact is likely to never change. For this reason, he started the online journal, The Blue Jew Yorker. Sadly, this quaintly anarchistic periodical has not found its reputation competitive with the above named titans of publishing. Still, Mr. Shechter receives great emotional satisfaction in publishing authors and artists in the journal. A tragic and ironic fact of Adam's life is that his neighborhood of birth and raising, Park Slope, now houses some of the most successful authors of the writing world. Roger Cohen moved in next to his parents, a house where the fabled Christiansen family once lived. In line with Freud, listening to the same song over and over is one of Adam's favorite hobbies.
Daniel Y. Harris, M.Div, holds a Master of Arts in Divinity from The University of Chicago, where he specialized in Jewish theology and comparative religion and wrote his dissertation on The Zohar. He is the author of Unio Mystica (Cross-Cultural Communications Press, 2009) and Hyperlinks of Anxiety (forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press, 2012). He is the associate editor of The Blue Jew Yorker. He is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Among his credits are: The Pedestal Magazine, Exquisite Corpse, In Posse Review, European Judaism, SoMa Literary Review, Mad Hatters' Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Wheelhouse Magazine, Moria, Ygdrasil, Wilderness House Literary Review, Poetry Magazine.com, Denver Quarterly, Convergence, Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture and The Other Voices International Among his art exhibitions credits are: The Jewish Community Library of San Francisco, Market Street Gallery, The Euphrat Museum and The Center for Visual Arts. His website is www.danielyharris.com.
Big Bridge, Jake Marmer’s review:
http://www.bigbridge.org/BB15/toc.html
Click here for PDF VersionReview in The Pedestal:
http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/gallery.php?item=16628Review in The Jewish Forward by Jake Marmer: http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/132899/
Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue was picked as one of the 5 most important poetry books of 2010 by The Jewish Daily Forward. http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/134268/
$7.00 | 58 PagesOut of Stock
May 27th: A new chapbook 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' WorkshopGulnar'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 musicSorrows of the body's reeling roar;
$7.00 | 38 Pages | In Stock
and the Spirit is still a virgin
which Lies on the lips of glamour
Calling the Moon
Waiting for the morning star.
A new chapbook from 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
$7.00 | 28 Pages | In Stock
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.
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 andyou 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 andyou 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 andyou 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 picturehow then does your brush still hang lamely at your side?
$7.00 | 28 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! MagazineCommodity 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
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. SeslingLike 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.
$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock
-George Economou
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
$5.00 | 18 Pages | In Stock
To catch a spotted lizard
That darts in the sand.
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.comEngland'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.
$7.00 | 32 Pages | In Stock
Check it yourselves at www.purplepatchpoetry.co.uk
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."
$7.00 | 43 Pages | In Stock
-David ferry
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 byBegin with time ripening to a specific purpose
With events entering history at a critical moment
Begin with GrendelGrendel: beast/man/beast
Grendel: purpose-driven like no other
Grendel: a law unto himselfThis is the one who names the hero for all time
The one doomed from the beginning
And yet this is not a minor roleO 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 prospectAnd he will bring destruction
O yes
Destruction and wanton despair
To those who cannot fight himMartin 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
May 5, 2009: Opuscula Small thoughts, hardly worthy of note by 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
April 28, 2009: Balancing on Unstable Ground by Francis Alix
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 FloorFrancis 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 CollegeReading 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.
$7.00 | 36 Pages | In Stock
-Eileen D'Angelo, Editor Mad Poets Review
April, 2009: A Settlement of Words Poems by Ioan Tepelea
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:
$7.00 | 24 Pages | In Stock
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
Released April, 2009: The Book Of Colors And Painters by Korkut Onaran
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.
$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock
Assistant Professor Adjunct
College Of Architecture And Planning
University Of Colorado At Denver
Just released November 28, 2008
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 PagesOut of Stock
Just released November 28, 2008
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
Just released October 30, 2008
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
Released in 2008 from Červená Barva Press
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 SleuthInvestigations is a celebration of Nancy Drew novels (50 years) during the late 1950’s. she led a way for young women who wanted more than what they, may of perceived, as domestic boredom. Nancy did not have the proverbial mother to relate too. she also had an absentee father, a lawyer. this left the young investigator on her won to rife out her suspicions. unlike superman who needed superpowers to accomplish his task of riding the world of evil doers, Nancy worked closely with her friends for what seemed a more human story.
“I understand, the mysteries of the scoured pot,
clogged toilet, tolling dinner bell,
hold no appeal. but chances are you’re not
going to marry Carson Drew,
conveniently absent when the action starts,
never demanding you halt mid-case to listen
to his tale of triumph at the office…”Nancy Drew’s tale has been placed into the capable hands or words of Kathleen Aguero. Aguero translates, reinvents and looks for clues that relate to her present situations as in, ‘the case of the suicidal friend,’ “you didn’t leave a note, just your own body on the stairs.” and again in ‘jewel box,’ which I had the privilege of hearing the poet read Aguero shows us her mother’s delusional clarity, her mother’s love, the perception of honesty in leaving, of placing value in memory, connecting, collecting personal items, identifying their significance, “we have to do this now…” her poems are full of references, clues; the password:
“she was clever.
she found the wooden gate where they put the garbage out.
she pulled, but it was locked.
she waited, but no one came
so she joined the walkers, round and round the halls
out one door, in the other…this is a clear case. this chapbook will leave you wanting more of Kathleen Aguero’s writing.
Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor
Ibbetson Street Press
www.ibbetsonpress.com
Fiddler Crab reviews chapbook "Investigations" by poet Kathleen Aguero: www.fiddlercrabreview.com
$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock
Brothers by Eric Wasserman
Červená Barva Press, 2008-
Advance Praise for Brothers:
Take Faulkner's dicturn that "the past is never dead, it's not even past" and transpose it to late Forties L.A. In the grand tradition of John Gregory Dunne's True Confessions, Wasserman's taut little tale finds a mismatched pair of brothers clashing. explosively, at the dawn of the Blacklist era.
-Wesley Strick, screenwriter and author of Out There in the DarkEric 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 GalluccioMike 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.
$7.00 | 41 Pages | In Stock
-Hugh Fox
The News Today by George Held
Červená Barva Press, 2008-
The News Today is George Held's second chapbook from Červená Barva Press, the first being W Is for War (2006). His other poetry books include Beyond Renewal (2001) and the chapbooks Winged (1995), Salamander Love and Others (1998), Open & Shut (1999), Grounded (2005), The Art of Writing and Others (2007), and Phased (2008). Other books include the e-book American Poetry (2004), the art book Absolut Death & Others (2000) (with paintings by Roz Dimon), Martial Artist (2005) (translations of Martial's epigrams), and the anthology Touched by Eros (2002), which he edited. Held's poetry has appeared in more than a dozen anthologies, received five Pushcart Prize nominations, and been read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac (NPR). He has co-edited The Ledge Poetry and Fiction Magazine since 1991. In addition, he served as a Fulbright lecturer in Czechoslovakia, 1973-76, and has been on the executive board of The South Fork Natural History Society and Museum (Bridgehampton, NY) since 1991.
Mark Lamoureux on four Červená Barva Press Chapbooks,
$7.00 | 33 Pages | In Stock
Gently Read Literature Review:
http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/mark-lamoureux-on-four-cervena-barva-press-chapbooks/
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 RidlThese 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,
$7.00 | 20 Pages | In Stock
Gently Read Literature Review:
http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/mark-lamoureux-on-four-cervena-barva-press-chapbooks/
A Cure For Suicide by Larissa Shmailo
Červená Barva Press, 2008-
In "A Cure for Suicide” by Larissa Shmailo, Shmailo writes (as the founder of Fulcrum Magazine Philip Nikolayev points out in his introduction) as if she is …” constitutionally predestined to sing out her lines…her eyes filled with life and love, pain and death, freedom and coercion, the real of the mind and the imagined of the heart.” In the poem “Dancing with the Devil,” the poet sings about the need to throw caution to the wind and trip the light fantastic with the Devil:
“They say if you flirt with death,
you’re going to get a date;
But I don’t mind—the music’s fine,
And I love dancing with someone who can really lead.”Shmailo put herself in the deceptive calmness of the eye of a hurricane, asks us to tell her what makes us tic, and takes us on the Harlem River Line, like the “Duke” took us on the “A” train. In a sea of mimics this poet is an original voice.
~Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ May 2008
Mark Lamoureux on four Červená Barva Press Chapbooks,
$7.00 | 47 Pages | In Stock
Gently Read Literature Review:
http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/mark-lamoureux-on-four-cervena-barva-press-chapbooks/
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.
$7.00 | 25 Pages | In Stock
-Tom Daley, Instructor for the Online School of Poetry
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.
$7.00 | 20 Pages | In Stock
-Diane Wald
Tara by Catherine Sasanov
Červená Barva Press, 2008-
In 2005, poet Catherine Sasanov made an unsettling discovery: slaveholding had been an unspoken part of her family's history. Sasanov's painstaking search to find out what happened to the men, women, and children held by her ancestors is at the heart of her new chapbook, Tara. In its pages, Sasanov conjures Missouri's Antebellum landscape out of the ravages of urban sprawl. She pieces together a portrait of slaves and freedmen in poems haunted by the question: How does one write a coherent life of a people if only bits and scraps of their existence can be found?
Reviews: http://www.jendireiter.com/2015/06/09/chapbook-spotlight-poetry-from-catherine-sasanovs-tara/
$7.00 | 30 Pages | Out of Print
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 SharpeningIn 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 ReasonOne 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 InnocenceBoston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene review:
$7.00 | 45 Pages | In Stock
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/search?q=anne+harding+woodworth
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.
$7.00 | 43 Pages | In Stock
The Lengthening Radius For Hate
by Gary Fincke
Červená Barva press, 2008-
The Lengthening Radius for Hate is a poem sequence that has, at its foundation, the shooting of Kent State students on May 4, 1970, by the National Guard. Gary Fincke was a student at Kent State in 1970, and he chronicles both the shooting and its residual effects over decades in a series of strongly observed narrative poems that explore disillusionment, anger, and the difficulties of reconciliation.
Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene Review:
$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/search?q=gary+Fincke
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,
$7.00 | 39 Pages | In Stock
Gently Read Literature Review:
http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/mark-lamoureux-on-four-cervena-barva-press-chapbooks/
Survival Notes by Adrian S. Potter
Červená Barva Press, 2008-
Winner of the 2006 Cervena Barva Press Fiction Chapbook Prize
Judge: Dorothy FreudenthalAdrian 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.
$7.00 | 42 Pages | In Stock
Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ Jan. 2008/ Somerville, Mass.
Illegal Border Crosser by Michael Graves
Červená Barva Press, 2008-
Michael Graves was a student of James Wright. He is the author of a chapbook Outside St. Jude's (REM Press, 1990), which was re-issued as an ebook by Rattapallax, and is the recipient of a grant of $4,500 from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation for two thousand four. His first full-length collection of poems is Adam and Cain (Black Buzzard, 2006). He has published thirteen (13) poems in the James Joyce Quarterly and read a selection of his poems to a meeting of the James Joyce Society at the Gotham Book Mart in New York City. Professor A. Nicholas Fargnoli, President of the James Joyce Society has adopted some of his poems as required reading for his survey course in Modern American Literature. His poem "Apollo to Daphne" appears in Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths (Oxford University Press 2001). He has published widely in journals and magazines, some of which include The Classical Outlook, European Judaism, The Journal of Irish Literature, Cumberland Poetry Review, nycBigCityLit-New York Edition, Writer's Forum, Rattapallax, The Hurricane Review, The Hollins Critic, Archipelago, and Salonika.
$7.00 | 36 Pages | In Stock
Among Us by Harris Gardner
Červená Barva Press, 2007-
It is said the angels walk among us, the invisible. Gardner drapes the invisible with language in the hopes that we can see ourselves.
–Afaa M. WeaverGardner'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 FoxExcerpt from a review
$7.00 | 45 Pages | In Stock
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
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 SpindleTo 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."
$7.00 | 46 Pages | In Stock
--Mary Baine Campbell
author of TROUBLE (poems), Carnegie Mellon U Press and The World, The Flesh, and Angels (poems), Beacon Press
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.
$5.00 | 20 Pages | In Stock
Anthony Russell White
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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
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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 TerrisThere 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.
$7.00 | 39 Pages | In Stock: 20
—Richard Silberg
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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. WinansIn 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 SciencesA 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 IsraelDoug 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 VoicesAside 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:
$7.00 | 23 Pages | In Stock: 10
“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
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, NYReview from Doug Holder's Authors Den:
$7.00 | 17 Pages | In Stock: Out of stock
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?AuthorID=3792
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 PerchikThe collection has an elegant focus and hush around it...
Timothy Donnelly, Boston ReviewSusan 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 ColumnistSusan 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 DrumReaders of Grasslimb will be familiar with Susan Tepper's fine poetry... We can enthusiastically recommend this fine further exploration of her work.
Valerie Polichar, GrasslimbSusan's poetry is in touch with the human race... reaps with the knowledge of a poet well versed.
$6.00 | 30 Pages | Out of Print
Shirley Gerald Ware, Fresh! Literary Magazine
Judy Ray
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)
$6.00 | 35 Pages | In Stock: 10
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
The Whole Enchilada by Ed Miller
Červená Barva Press-2006-
Think of The Whole Enchilada as an absurdist playground, and you're invited. There you'll find an abundance of whooping, hollering, cussing and adolescent ridicule. There you'll find a lot of sand being flung around, kicked around. It's a ruckus of mockeries, a splenetic free-for-all.
The poems: more than a few are found-text pieces, derived from the ephemera and detritus of life, which are combined or manipulated or both; some are casual narratives; some began as correspondence and later stood trembling on their own.
$6.00 | 48 Pages | In Stock
W Is for War by George Held
Červená Barva Press-2006-
In one way or another, ranging from inconvenience to death, we all become victims of war. In these fine, even-toned poems, Mr. Held outlines the price in folly and flesh paid by all sides. Ultimately, war is the last of last resorts--and not to be undertaken but for the direst circumstances.
THE ICONOCLAST #94W Is for War, a new poetry chapbook by political activist George Held. In this collection of poems, his ninth, George expresses his protest against the war in Iraq. "Because he supports our men and women in arms, he resists sending them into battle without compelling, legitimate reasons."
The whole collection hangs together very well. I admire your guts in publishing the volume, and I'm glad I own a copy as it's a little piece of history. --Gretchen Fletcher
WIFW gives precise and true voice to what many patriots think. It's courageous and passionate. --Michael Graves
Some of your best work is in this book. They say no one in love ever wrote a good love poem, the point being that passion gets in the way of craftsmanship. But it hasn't in your case. --James McGowan
This chapbook is wonderfully cohesive, and I admire the way you move through the war by moving through all the players: President, populations on both sides, a Vietnam vet, poets writing on the war, a mother and child, a single Everyman speaker, and by invoking the government of ancient Rome. This endows the collection with variety, a quality I prize highly in any collection. --Margot Farrington
Small Press Review /September-October Picks, 2006
$7.00 | 29 Pages | In Stock
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