The Lost Bookshelf Author's by last name R

P <<< Author: R >>> S

David Radavich

HERE'S PLENTY poems by David Radavich Červená Barva Press, 2023

David Radavich is the author of two narrative collections, America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (2007) and America Abroad: An Epic of Discovery (2019). Among his lyric volumes are Slain Species (London, 1980), By the Way: Poems over the Years (1998), Greatest Hits (2000), and Canonicals: Love's Hours (2009). Middle-East Mezze (2011) focuses on a troubled yet enchanting part of our world, while The Countries We Live In (2014) explores inner and outer geographies. Unter der Sonne / Under the Sun (2022) features Radavich's German poems with English translations. Here's Plenty celebrates the sometimes searing yet ultimately redemptive richness of our planet and human experience.

Radavich's plays, both serious and comic, have been performed across the U.S., including six Off-Off-Broadway, and in Europe. He has published scholarly and informal essays and presented in such far-flung locations as Canada, Egypt, England, France, Germany, Greece, and Iceland. He has served as president of the Thomas Wolfe Society, Charlotte Writers’ Club, and North Carolina Poetry Society and currently administers the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet Series.

The poems in David Radavich's Here's Plenty come in seamless variations of splendor. The whole shapes a music lyrical and beautiful as the morning rain.
—Shelby Stephenson, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina

The title of David Radavich's remarkable collection is apposite. Here’s Plenty characterizes a broad panoply of states of mind and feeling that are in process of change, leaving alterations that may be new problems. Chaos is held in check only by means of will power, a duty to one's own humanity. "Prometheus on the Crag" shows Everyman as a figure whose duty is to suffer. Many poets are strong but few are tough in this necessary way. "Be generous / in your hatred: // You never know / what you’ll become."
—Fred Chappell, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina

Sometimes when we pick up a book of poems, we want it to feel like we are calling an old friend on the phone who understands and accepts us; Here's Plenty is that kind of book. From the opening lines of the first poem "Sun Blanched," which turns out to be a poem about the acceptance of loss, Radavich announces: "This is the fertile / garden I never knew." Here is a poet at peace with himself and the life he has made in this garden. There's an honesty about family, aging, history and place that is comforting. Rooted in the South, "A place where old water / draws back / and memory / and pain are blended," Radavich's poems pave "the way / into the bright darkness."
—Marjory Wentworth, former Poet Laureate of South Carolina

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-31-4 | 84 Pages

Stella Vinitchi Radulescu

some words suicidal by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu Červená Barva Press, 2015

Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, Ph.D. in French Language & Literature, is the author of numerous collections of poetry published in the United States, Romania and France. She writes poetry in English, French and Romanian and her poems have appeared in Laurel Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Wallace Stevens Journal, Seneca Review, Pleiades, Rhino, Louisville Review among others, as well as in a variety of literary magazines in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Québec and Romania. She is the winner of several International Poetry Prizes awarded for her French books, including the Prix Amélie Murat (2013) and the Grand Prix de la Francophonie (2014). A collection of her New & Selected Poems is forthcoming from Orison Books Press. At the present she lives in Chicago.

Cover Art: Icône en confidence by Michel Bénard

Poetry is the record of hidden things in commerce with one another, and only that mystery allows us to live. Stella Vinitchi Radulescu's poetry is an alchemy, a magic of restraint and exposure, revealing the machinations of our invisible feelings, motives, appetites and fears. That she is a master of her condensary goes without saying, for this is a consummate language shaped with remarkable skill, and the voyages that these poems take are brilliant excursions into our inner lives, secret things pushed into the subconscious, broken promises and whispered asides. I have long admired Radulescu's bilingual ability to bend sentences to her will and those constructions are filled with a cross-cultural understanding that is consistently transcendent, that builds bridges into the landscapes of our shared interior lives.
—Keith Flynn, author of Colony Collapse Disorder

Some Words Suicidal, Stella Radulescu's newest poetry collection, is all at once experientially effusive and parsimonious, and is bravely so, both on and off the page. The meditative remittance of these works reminds us just how language means. Radulescu is not afraid to insist her readers subsist on the unnamable, in the spaces between ideas. The poems here thread rather purposefully through dimensions, all the while rending artifice's will without the prudence of architecture, where "words are bees stars ants roaming / on the page / beyond understanding" into truth. Radulescu takes nothing and everything for granted, and at her behest, every word, every line, every stanza and poem reminds us we should too. And, yes, every time, with absolute devotion.
—Ralph Pennel

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9861111-1-2 | 100 Pages | In Stock

Renuka Raghavan

New Release: Nothing Resplendent Lives Here Stories by Renuka Raghavan
If you order this book, it will ship on or about March 5^th

Nothing Resplendent Lives Here Stories by Renuka Raghavan Červená Barva Press, 2022

A Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions nominee, Renuka Raghavan, is an Indian-American author who writes short-form prose and poetry. She is the author of Out of the Blue (Big Table Publishing, 2017) and The Face I Desire (Nixes Mate, 2019). Her work has been featured in The American Journal of Poetry, Boston Literary Magazine, Bending Genres, and the South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. For a complete list of all her previous publications visit her at www.renukaraghavan.com. She writes and lives with her family and two Chihuahuas in Massachusetts.

"With the precision of a scalpel in the hands of a skilled surgeon, Raghavan cuts to the heart of the human experience, revealing characters at their most vulnerable. Raw and edgy, these stories bleed with emotional resonance. A powerful collection."
-Jayne Martin, author of Tender Cuts and The Daddy Chronicles-Memoir of a Fatherless Daughter

"In this literary braid of tragedy, irony, and humor, Renuka Raghavan delivers masterfully crafted stories that make you smile or break your heart. All of life’s messiest, saddest, weirdest, and most chaotic scenarios are here: from a soul deadening one night stand with a disc jockey and a calm stegosaurus skeleton who's not bothered by much, to the devastating consequences of a mother's criticism, no emotion is left unturned. Nothing Resplendent Lives Here is our choice for best short story collection of the year."
-Robin Stratton, editor Boston Literary Magazine

"Nothing Resplendent Lives Here is a beautiful swirl of tight, inventive stories that introduce us to invisible mothers who show up at a poetry reading, lovers who have died but continue to live in every corner of the house, and so many others. A mix of returning library books, fishing toys out of claw machines, and giant flowers that smell of decay, acts of ordinary life turned upside down. The stories are set in varying locales from Las Vegas to New Orleans to Delhi and, of course, the happiest place on earth. Skillfully crafted with charged language, poignancy, and unforgettable characterization, these stories will delight you and weave themselves into your heart."
-Francine Witte, author of Dressed All Wrong for This and The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-71-0 | 60 Pages

Ned Randle

DOWN CEMETERY ROAD by Ned Randle Červená Barva Press, 2020

Ned Randle resides in southern Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Mo., a region that informs his writing. His debut novel Baxter's Friends was released in 2013 by Coffeetown Press to good reviews. His third novel St. Michael Poker & Drinking Club is schedule for release March, 2020 by Regal House Publishing. His short stories have appeared in The Examined Life Journal, Soundings Review, Earth Review, and Prism Review. He's also published numerous poems in literary journals and reviews. Coffeetown Press published his full-length Running at Night: Collected Poems in 2013. His author website is: www.nedrandle.com

"The much-anticipated release of this prequel to the unforgettable Baxter's Friends was well worth the wait. Randle raises the curtain on the formative years of Billy Bright's life, revealing a formula for his adult years that is at once both intoxicating and utterly sobering. Down Cemetery Road delves into the disillusionment of adolescence sadly often shot down by mid-life."
—K.K. Snyder, Editor, Southwest Georgia Living magazine

During the 60s, the most divisive period of American history since the Civil War, coming of age was abrupt and ambiguous for able bodied boys fated by the shadow of conscription. This insightful novel explores death of boyhood replete with a bathtub baptism comically celebrating the slap dead end of innocence and the abrupt birth into the adult world, where high school graduates must decide to fight, fly or go to jail for resisting an immoral and unjust war. This novel is provocative and carefully written—a good read.
—O. Victor Miller, Author of short story collections One Man's Junk and The Tenderest Touch

$18.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-19-2 | 266 Pages

Vassiliki Rapti

Bathed in Moonlight by Vassiliki Rapti Translated from the Greek by Peter Bottéas Červená Barva Press, 2023

About the Author
Vassiliki Rapti was born and raised in Greece, and studied Comparative Literature and Media in Greece, France, and the United States. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with an Emphasis in Drama from Washington University in St. Louis, and is the author of several books, including Ludics in Surrealist Theatre and Beyond (Ashgate, 2013), the co-edited volume Ludics: Play as Humanistic Inquiry (Palgrave/MacMillan, 2021), and the bilingual poetry collection Transitorium (Somerset Hall Press, 2015). Her translation publications include Greek surrealist author Nanos Valaoritis, and her poetry and translations have been published in various international journals. She received a Parnassos Literary award in Greece in 1998.

Her poetry is fueled by surrealist imagery, a pursuit of playfulness in artistic expression, and a desire to capture wonderment in everyday life. She is Chair of the Ludics Seminar of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, where she founded the Advanced Training in Greek Poetry Translation and Performance Workshop, and currently teaches World Literature and Digital Culture at Emerson College. She is the founding director Citizen TALES* Commons, an international collective of scholars and artists.

The poetry collection that forms the core of this volume was published in Greek in Athens in 2021. In November 2022, the Voice of Greece, the radio arm of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (EPT), featured Vassiliki as its Poet of the Week, with twice daily readings of her poetry throughout the week.

About the Translator
A native of Toronto, Canada, Peter Bottéas holds a Master's degree in Translation from the Université de Montréal and worked for many years as a translator, revisor, editor, and educator in French Canada. After a twenty-year detour as a psychotherapist in Boston, he recently returned to one of his first loves, literary translation, and is currently the primary translator of Greek Boston-based poet Vassiliki Rapti. The author and translator have done several poetry readings together in New York and Boston, as well as in on-line forums. He is a member of the multidisciplinary think-tank and creative forum Citizen TALES Commons and, along with Vassiliki, is co-host of the podcast series Borders Unbound: Hellenic Poetry of the Diaspora and Beyond. Peter is also an occasional voice-over artist, an infrequent poet, and an aficionado of French and Greek poetry set to music.

Ever since an insomniac, lovelorn Sappho looked up at the moon, Greek lyric poetry has echoed her register of gluko-pikron: the sweet-bitterness of longing. We open our mouths because we desire. Open Bathed in Moonlight to any page and you'll find the language of desire suffused by the tender, intensely focused erotic glow of Vassiliki Rapti's rapturous gift. Yet the moon, and Sappho, are not the only presiding spirits of illumination in this magical collection. Rapti has struck the Sapphic note in a new key by fusing it with the voices of some of the great surrealist Greek poets of the twentieth century. The result is a felicitous mix of mournful eloquence and expressionist imagination, delicate inwardness and evocative power-a testament to the "Perpetual Perseverance" of a disciplined and formidable imagination:

      you were cast among myriad
      multicolored peacocks
      so that you might learn the skill
      of perseverance
      dragged out, freed after aeons
      flung, whirling, whirling
      into the embrace of the moon.

In the pitch-perfect registers of Peter Bottéas's beautiful translation, Bathed in Moonlight is pristine.
-George Kalogeris, author of Winthropos, Associate Professor of English Literature and Classics at Suffolk University, Boston

As it moves back and forth over time, Bathed in Moonlight explores the ambiguity of what is lost and what is gained in poetry. While Vassiliki Rapti's poems certainly engage with the voices of her native Greek tradition they would also seem to be in dialogue with poetries beyond the borders of the western world. She tends to locate individual experience in the collective. And so, with intense lyricism and transformative, vivid expression, each poem creates its own separate world of emotional strength. These poems are fluent, vibrant, reflective, sensitive, open and brilliantly sensory. They reflect Rapti's wonder at the world, the cyclic nature of life and language. Her voice spins, floats, and whirls from spiral shells, floating lakes, the ever vigilant moon and calls through fragments of memory, the depths of the underground and the unspoken that hides between each line.
-Gonca Özmen

Vassiliki Rapti's luminous, capacious poems are journeys arising from hope and fears; aching and searching, they seek kinship and reconciliation with nature which is the true home for the restless, solitary self. Sensuous yet balanced, sparse yet containing multitudes, Bathed in Moonlight illuminates the life of the mind where remembrance and unbridled thoughts run together, where human yearnings are an enduring life force, where words, written from the innermost place resonate and affirm the power of poetry. This marvelous collection of poems is a balm in our fractured and chaotic time.
-Pui Ying Wong author of The Feast

$16.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-76-5 | 66 Pages

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)
The beauty of this poetry chapbook was the surprises I witnessed each time I turned the page. The author was quite adept in addressing different themes and different places. This rendered a kaleidoscope of writing and filled me with anticipation. --Francis Alix
Small Press Review, July-August, 2006

$6.00 | 35 Pages | In Stock: 10

Michelle Reale

Confini: Poems of Refugees in Sicily by Michelle Reale Červená Barva Press, 2021

Michelle Reale is a full professor at Arcadia University. She is the author of twelve collections of poetry including Season of Subtraction (Bordighera Press, 2019) and Blood Memory: Prose Poems (Idea Press, 2021). She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Cover art: "Portal" by Michelle Reale

Many Italians see the refugees and migrant workers arriving on Italian shores, mainly in Sicily, as a threat to Italy's economy, culture, demographics, and even its national identity. But who are the actual human beings who often are reduced to a horde of faceless invaders? In Confini: Poems of Refugees in Sicily, Michelle Reale lets us hear their voices by turning the interviews she conducted in Sicily into poetry. In the 27 poems she has created from the refugees' accounts, they tell us of the traumas that forced them to leave their home countries and how they nonetheless yearn for the familiar places (and people) they likely will never see again. They tell of the suffering they endured crossing the Mediterranean in unseaworthy vessels. They speak of the experience of being stateless, homeless, without work. "My cap is the only roof over my head," says "Suleiman." Their voices are anguished, ironic, matter-of-fact, and angry as they recount the quotidian but disorienting realities of adjusting to a new and often hostile society. Reale acknowledges her status as a privileged outsider. In one poem, she bears the brunt of "Ibrahim's" anger at "you white people with your notebooks and microphones." Reale has no illusions that the poems will save "the world or even the people that I wrote them about." But she hopes that they will promote understanding and compassion and ultimately help change inhumane policies.
-George De Stefano, author and journalist

A powerful collection, Confini offers a rare and intimate portrait of refugee life in Sicily, showcasing the complex nuances and heart-wrenching realities of lives displaced. Written with raw honesty and startling compassion, these tender, lyrical poems transport readers from the camps of Lampedusa to the streets of Siracusa, portraying the experiences of those navigating the treachery and hardship of life in a new country as they struggle to obtain work and legal status. Driven from their homelands because of severe poverty, economic turmoil, and the brutalities of war, these souls remain preserved in their agency and dignity as they seek to earn a new life free from violence and turmoil. Wrought with hope and compassion, Confini is an essential collection that should be read by anyone who values a deeper understanding of Italy's ongoing refugee crisis.
-Olivia Kate Cerrone, Author of The Hunger Saint

Here are cameos of rescued Africans in Sicilian camps. And here is a call to action via her poems. We listen, rapt and dismayed, to the (translated) anguished soliloquies and dialogues of refugees-as they are pulled out of the Sea of Death, barely alive, confronted on the streets with indifference or hostility, in state offices, in the food line, in maternity wards, in work fields-with just enough caritas to permit survival, little more. The ennui and smarrimento that take hold represent the stillness of post-trauma, sometimes alternating with moments of joy and reprieve: dancing to Bob Marley, "patron saint of the struggle." Michelle Reale has insightfully captured all of this baffling human tragedy with poignancy and solidarity, even braving the ireful rebukes of the ethnographic project: "you white people with your notebooks and microphones! [...] you want me to tell a fairy tale or a story of hard luck. Get out!"
-Luisa Del Giudice, Independent Scholar, Los Angeles

$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1950063-25-3 | 35 Pages

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
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.

$7.00 | 32 Pages | Out of Print

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

Jendi Reiter

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 Desrosiers

Barbie 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 College

Throughout 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

Charles P. Ries

I'd Rather be Mexican by Charles P. Ries Červená Barva Press, 2010

Charles P. Ries lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His narrative poems, short stories, interviews, and poetry reviews have appeared in over two hundred print and electronic publications. He has received four Pushcart Prize nominations for his writing. He is the author of THE FATHERS WE FIND, a novel based on memory and five books of poetry. Most recently he was awarded the Wisconsin Regional Writers Association "Jade Ring" Award for humorous poetry. He is the former poetry editor for Word Riot (www.wordriot.org) and a former member of the board at the Woodland Pattern Book Center. Charles is Co-Chairman of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. He will have a book of poetry published in early 2010: Girl Friend & Other Mysteries of Love that will be published by Alternating Current Pre, Leah Angstman, Editor. He is a founding member of the Lake Shore Surf Club, the oldest fresh water surfing club on the Great Lakes (http://www.visitsheboygan.com/dairyland/). You may find additional samples of his work by going to: http://www.literati.net/Ries/

El Latino Blanco
(The White Latin)

I woke up throughout the night
as the fleas kept biting my toes.
Just my toes – the rest of me
didn t seem to interest them.

"El Latino Blanco" the bartender called me as
I ordered double shots of tequila throughout the night,
one for me and one for my friend the large white rabbit
called El Conjito Blanco Grande who sat invisibly next to me,
as he has next to the other drunks who have used him as an
excuse to order doubles.

My dreams that night were ones of desolation and consolation.
Always in that order. I remember because the fleas kept me
on the edge of real time. Maybe they weren't fleas at all,
but insect sized psychic miners, biting me to lucidity and
injecting me with some sort of drunken-poet-dream-sex-venom.
I'm sure I'm not the first drunken poet to be visited in this way.
I'm sure I will not be the last.

As the morning came, the fleas went to sleep and I too drifted away
into a deep cold river, waking to a pure blue sky, a massive Mexican
hangover and the smell of black coffee served to me by a mescal worm named Little Rico.

$7.00 | 28 Pages | In Stock

Tree Riesener

EK: Poems of Ekphrasis by Tree Riesener Červená Barva Press, 2017

Tree Riesener is the author of Sleepers Awake, a collection of short fiction, winner of the Eludia Award from Hidden River Arts, published by Sowilo Press in 2015. Her collection of poetry inspired by astronomy, The Hubble Cantos, was published in 2016 by Aldrich Press. Her achievements include three first prizes for fiction at the Philadelphia Writers Conference, finalist for Black Lawrence Press's Hudson Prize, finalist in PANK magazine's Fiction Chapbook Contest, the William Van Wert Fiction Award, semi-finalist in the Pablo Neruda Competition, three short stories staged in the Writing Aloud Series of InterAct Theatre, Philadelphia, a Hawthornden Fellowship at Hawthornden Castle, Scotland, and three poetry chapbooks: Liminalog, Inscapes, and Angel Poison.

The poems in Tree Riesener's EK: Poems of Ekphrasis hark back to the original meaning of ekphrasis- "to speak" "out." Driven by a kind of surrealistic urgency, the poems use all the language at their disposal to name what they see so that one bird "might escape the net." Whether focusing on works of art, photos, ultrasound images, relics, a bull fight, Chernobyl, or a shrine for a boy struck while bicycling, Riesener is an "eye witness," combining a longing for an "otherworld" with a sharp awareness of the "dead zones" of our making.
-Rebecca Seiferle, Editor of The Drunken Boat, Tucson Poet Laureate, author of Wild Tongue

In the epigraph to EK, Goethe speaks of reproducing the world that surrounds by means of the world within. No argument there as far as it goes - but he may have, in his heart, aimed for more. Tree Riesener applies wit and sometimes ecstatic imagery to form and to literary conceit, clearly aiming for more; beyond reproduction toward provocation; in this case, evoking not just the world but the mystery of encountering it. In EK, such evidence is abundant, first poem to last: "clear bright dense mysterious dusky bluish venous arterial subterranean multi-layered sustaining singing vulnerable scarlet" or "you signed the forms to be present in this room because being here where perpetual light shines upon you is better than being in the prison yard buried under a number"
-Kathryn Rantala, Founder-Editor of Ravenna Press, author of The Finnish Orchestra and other collections

The breadth and range of subjects in Tree Riesener's latest collection, EK: Poems of Ekphrasis, stretch the boundaries of the form, demand attention, enthrall, unsettle, and delight the careful reader. In "annunciation of reluctance," she has captured both Mary's terror and her desire for things to be normal with an unpleasant but quite ordinary migraine, a signal of that surreal occurrence. Brilliant! In a group of poems inspired by the Messiaen musical quartet, written in a concentration camp during WWII, the reader joins her in "searching the ruins of the rainbow for the angel who announces the end of time" (after Katrina). The ending dirge, "owed to thanatopsis gardens," is written for the plastinated bodies in an exhibit. The beautiful questioning meditations on the sublime round out these poems of witness truly written on the body and the soul.
-Michele Belluomini, poet and storyteller, former Literature Librarian of the Free Library of Philadelphia, author of Crazy Mary and Others (winner of Plan B Press chapbook contest), Translations from the Dark and signposts for sleepwalkers.

In this new collection, Riesener's "poems of witness" move into powerful, unexplored worlds of language. What strikes me the most? The vitality and freshness of her work-the beautiful side by side with the ugly and the sacred with the profane. The author dares you to tell the difference.
-John Sweet, author of Famine, Human Cathedrals, and Century of Dreaming Monsters, winner of the 2014 Lummox Poetry Prize

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9981027-6-4 | 114 Pages | In Stock

Brad Rose

WordinEdgeWise by Brad Rose Červená Barva Press, 2024

Brad Rose was born and raised in Los Angeles, and lives in Boston. He is the author of five collections of poetry and flash fiction: Lucky Animals, No. Wait. I Can Explain, Pink X-Ray, de/tonations, and Momentary Turbulence. Seven times nominated for a Pushcart Prize and three times nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology, Brad's poetry and fiction have appeared in Los Angeles Times, The American Journal of Poetry, New York Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Clockhouse, Folio, Cloudbank, Baltimore Review, 45th Parallel, Best Microfiction 2019, Lunch Ticket, Sequestrum, Unbroken, Right Hand Pointing, and other publications. Brad is also the author of seven poetry chapbooks, among them Democracy of Secrets, Collateral, An Evil Twin is Always in Good Company, and Funny You Should Ask. His website and blog can be found at bradrosepoetry.com.

The poems and microfiction of WordinEdgeWise, are predominately surreal and playful. Many are unified by the quirky voices of hardscrabble speakers who have experienced social and economic turmoil, and a resulting psychic instability. Via interior monologues and uncanny dialogues, speakers take liberties with standard colloquial speech, invent unusual similes, and employ unconventional variants of American idioms. They also offer startling insights and unexpected moments of wisdom. Both in spite of, and because of, speakers' peculiarities, the poems and microfiction of No. Wait. I Can Explain. seek to offer keen, if unsettling, glimpses into the darker—and often darkly humorous—underlying dimensions of contemporary American life.

Brad Rose's WordinEdgewise displays the madcap features that readers have come to relish in his work—fast-talking, unreliable narrators and surreal situations depicted with brittle sympathy and manic humor. When it comes to prose poetry, Brad Rose plays, to borrow his own phrase, "first violin in the orchestra of the absurd."
—Howie Good, author of Famous Long Ago and The Bad News First

WordinEdgewise, poet Brad Rose's most recent collection, is as high energy as the title advertises. This language-driven tour de force leaves the reader breathless, from line to line and poem to poem, as the speaker explicates on everything from blind dates to mobile homes, from lightning to ghosts. In this world, blind dates are lightning and mobile homes and ghosts, as the author makes expert use of such literary devices as chiasmus and zeugma to bring it all together. Each poem is a glittering tautology, each line disparate in its sameness. The pace of this book is addicting, and you will pick it up over and over again to the delight of your senses.
—Ralph Pennel, author of A World Less Perfect for Dying In, and fiction editor of Midway Journal

Brad Rose: master of the synaptic leap. He unearths suppressed premises (hidden in stark sight thanks to our jones for consensus reality), leading us to the inevitable across no matter how many unexpected ceiling tiles. Multiple vectors are at subcutaneous work here, clause by clause. These paragraphs are like incognito erasure poems, extended family trees with insoluble fan charts. "When I was counting backward in dog years, the judge sentenced my jury to another week of hard labor." Yes, ordinary life is exactly like this. We just need reminders.
—David P. Miller, author of Bend in the Stair and Sprawled Asleep

Cover: Hannah Rose

$19.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-69-7 | 108 Pages

Momentary Turbulence by Brad Rose Červená Barva Press, 2020

Brad Rose was born and raised in Los Angeles and lives in Boston. In addition to Momentary Turbulence, he is the author of a collection of poetry and flash fiction, Pink X-Ray (Big Table Publishing, 2015, http://pinkx-ray.com and Amazon.com.) Brad has two forthcoming books of poems, WordinEdgeWise, from Cervena Barva Press, and de/tonations from Nixes Mate Books. He is also the author of five chapbooks of poetry and flash fiction. Four times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and once nominated for Best of the Net Anthology, his poetry and micro fiction have appeared in, The Los Angeles Times, The American Journal of Poetry, Sequestrum, Hunger Mountain, Folio, decomP, Lunch Ticket, The Baltimore Review, and other publications. His story, "Desert Motel," appears in the anthology Best Microfiction, 2019. Brad's website is: www.bradrosepoetry.com

"The paragraphs in Momentary Turbulence are perhaps the closest we will get to that razor edge where prose poem and story balance perfectly. They also highlight the many ways in which the works in verse here recall Pound's dictum that poetry must be as well written as the best prose. If it didn't have such a big Yankee heart, Momentary Turbulence might also be the answer to the question of what a Robert Bolano raised north of the border would look like: blue collar pomo, searing, with a noir eye. But there is a twinkle in that sad smile, a delight in the beauty of a toxic sunset that comes from knowing just how long night will last."
—Ron Silliman, author of The Alphabet. (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/ron-silliman)

"Momentary Turbulence—a perfect name for this Brad Rose collection of prose poems. They take but a few moments to read and are filled with wondrous turbulence. Rose has an uncanny ability to write a sentence, fling it into space, and have it return in perfect harmony from its journey—matching up to the following sentence. These terrific stories leap from philosophy to stand-up, and add a little mystery and some shtick. But make no mistake about this description—this is the work of a pro who wields language liked a sculpture wields his hammer and chisel—chipping away at every unnecessary word. Bring a copy of this book for a hostess gift—it'll hold so much better than the wine you were considering."
—Paul Beckman, author of Peek

"The good folks in Brad Rose's Momentary Turbulence live like we all do, alone alone or alone around other people. They know "the emptiness of one thing is in the emptiness of all things. This is the shock of the world." When one of them splits the skin of a prose poem to stick out his head, look right at me, and say, "I warn you my friend, never turn off your eyes. The trees lie in wait. You never know when you're going to hear shots," I listen. You should, too. We're heading into some rough wind and this book will help us through."
—Christopher Citro, author of The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-09-3 | 52 Pages

Margara Russotto

MEMORY OF THE SPECIES Selected Poems Margara Russotto translated from the Spanish by Peter Kahn Červená Barva Press, 2023

Note on the Author | Margara Russotto
Venezuelan poet, scholar and translator born in Italy. PhD in Comparative Literature, University of São Paulo. Professor of the Universidad Central de Venezuela where she founded the Women's Studies. Translator of poetry and essays by Italian, Venezuelan and Brazilian writers, such as Antonia Palacios, Enrique Bernardo Núñez, Oswald de Andrade, Antonio Candido, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Claudio Magris, among others. She has received award for her poetry and her literary research, including the Poetry Award "José Antonio Ramos Sucre" (Venezuela, 1995), a Fulbright Scholarship (USA, 1998), and the LASA Award (USA, 2007) for editing the volume La ansiedad autorial. In 2010 she was a writer-in-residence at the Chateau de Lavigny International Writer's Residence. Currently, she is a Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she also teaches Creative Writing in Spanish. Recent book (selected essays): Cantabile. Celebración de la poesía latinoamericana (Madrid, 2020).

Note on the Translator | Peter Kahn
Peter Kahn is a professional translator living in Vermont (USA). He has translated works of fiction and nonfiction by numerous Latin American and Spanish writers, including Tununa Mercado, Elvira Orphée, Esther Cross, Javier Moreno, Hugo Clemente and Gwendolyn Diaz. His fiction and poetry translations have appeared in various publications, including Grand Street, Gastronomia, Santa Barbara Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Massachusetts Review, and several anthologies. In 2015, he was awarded the Massachusetts Annual Chametzky Prize for his translation of Margara Russotto's poem "Of Useless Knowledge."

$19.95 | ISBN 978-1-950063-22-2 | 106 Pages

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