Memoirs
Bad Decade by Polina Eisenberg (Memoir)
Červená Barva Press & Interpoezia, Inc., 2026Polina Eisenberg was born in Russia in 1991 and moved to the United States in 2000. She was raised in Tenafly, New Jersey, and attended Hunter College in Manhattan, New York, from 2009 to 2014, earning a BA in Media Studies. Shortly afterward, she pursued a nursing career in Denver, Colorado, completing an 11-month Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing program at Regis University. She then worked for two years in a psychiatric hospital. Polina currently lives in West Chester, Pennsylvania, with her beloved boyfriend, Anthony, and their cat, Indiana Jones. She continues to practice as a nurse and enjoys photography, hiking, and filmmaking.
Bad Decade is Polina's story: a messy, aching, and brutally honest journey through growing up when the world never felt built for you. After leaving Russia, she's thrown into a new country, a new language, a new version of herself that never quite fits. What starts as loneliness turns into something darker; nights that blur together, bad choices that feel like relief, and a mind that won't stop pulling her under.
But this isn't just a story about falling apart. It's about what comes after. It's about clawing your way back: one mistake, one apology, one moment at a time. As Polina learns to stay sober and start over, she discovers that recovery isn't easy. It's harsh, chaotic, and elusive.
Bad Decade is a raw coming-of-age saga about addiction, identity, and the hard, beautiful work of saving yourself.
"Bad Decade is an amazing literary document of teenage addiction and recovery, the resurrection of the strong soul. Written in concise, informative language, it is full of passion for survival. It is a rare document, in the form of a diary, reflecting the formative years of the troubled but wholesome person reclaiming their life through art."
—Andrey Gritsman, author of Crossing the Line (Cervena Barva Press) and Stranger at Home (New Meridian Arts)"This biographical novel is written not only with compelling sincerity but also with a natural stylistic and compositional deftness that is a rare find, especially in a first book. A gripping page-turner, a modern-day Bildungsroman, and, most of all, a work of true literary talent."
$19.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-99-4 | 183 Pages
—Alexander Stessin, author of 13 volumes of Russian-language prose and poetry, winner of the 2020 NOS New Literature Prize, 2014 Russian Book Prize, and the 2007 Tamizdat Prize
My Father's Eyes a memoir by Mary Bonina
Červená Barva Press, 2013-
Mary Bonina has published two collections of poetry, Clear Eye Tea and Living Proof. She is also the author of Lunch in Chinatown, a chapbook of poems inspired by the experience of teaching the English language to recent immigrants in their work places. Her poetry and prose has been featured in Gulf Stream, Salamander, English Journal, Hanging Loose, and in many other journals and several anthologies, most recently in Entering the Real World: VCCA Poets on Mt. San Angelo, celebrating forty years of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Commissioned by composer Paul Sayed, she wrote a suite of three poems, Grace in the Wind, and Sayed's composition for piano, cello, and soprano voice had its world premiere at the Longy School of Music of Bard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts in November of 2012. Bonina is a graduate of the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. In addition to being a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow since 2001 when she was named the finalist for the Goldfarb Fellowship in non-fiction, she is also a member of the Writers' Room of Boston, Inc. where she is working on a novel and a new collection of poetry. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, poet Mark Pawlak and their son, Gianni Bonina-Pawlak.
ADVANCE PRAISE for MY FATHER’S EYES
"Not many pages into this gloriously moving book, a feeling begins to grow that it would have been a humbling yet exquisite experience to have sat and talked with Biagio John Bonina. What his daughter Mary Bonina has given us is a solid and lasting portrait of a man who was simple and complicated. (That is not a contradiction once you come to know him.)…America is a country of grand men and women who live on a modest scale, and no one fits that category more than he does. Once his eyes began to fail him, he lived even more for his family and its welfare and his efforts and work make him in my mind, the kind of real hero we fail to glorify anymore. So enter this book and come to know her father and his dedicated overwhelmingly loyal daughter, as well as a large stage of family members and friends who are unforgettable and insanely knowable and human."
-Edward P. Jones, author of The Known World"Mary Bonina casts her considerable spell with exquisite sentences and unerring evocative details. She is a writer of inordinate compassion, formidable intelligence, and unflinching honesty. My Father's Eyes documents a family’s coming to grips with the legacy of blindness, a daughter’s unflagging allegiance to her father, and one man’s heroic determination to live a life of independence and quiet dignity despite obstacles that would crush the strongest of us. The book is an inspiration. When I finished reading it, I walked around for days seeing the world through its lens. Yes, it’s that good. It’s that important."
-John Dufresne, author of Requiem, Mass. and No Regrets, Coyote"Packard. Record player. Telephone party line. Fallout shelter. Holy Ghost. These and other blasts from the past make up the world of this beautiful, clear-eyed memoir that reads like a novel. It’s partly the story of a girl who loved words on her way to becoming a writer. Of all the words in her universe, the most important were eyes and seeing, for this was a girl growing up with a beloved father going blind. Becoming his guide and his eyes, she becomes herself. And what a character he is! We come to know him as if we’re all his children, one minute consumed with terror at the dangers he faces, and the next minute awed by his courage, and the next exasperated by his human flaws. And ultimately, we see and feel for ourselves what his daughter means when she says, “I know about love from being my father’s eyes."
-Ellen Cooney, author of A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies
Reviews
Solstice Literary Magazine: http://solsticelitmag.org/mary-boninas-memoir-fathers-eyes/
$18.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9883713-8-5 | 290 Pages | In Stock
Sarasota VII by Lo Galluccio
Červená Barva Press, 2008-
Reading Sarasota VII is like watching, no staging, a play that happens to be written in poetry. By playing with structure, Galluccio has done something akin to Calvino where the structure itself is a character and a part of the plot, and you're right in the thick of it. You need to read it.
Ralph-Michael Chiaia, poet, Ten Poems & Ampersands, Coatlism Press.Passionate, poignant and concise, Lo Galluccio's Sarasota VII presents us with a story of loss and raw delinquent energy, woven into a great surreal web of metaphors and magic. Crafted with care and lucid honesty, this poetic prose offers its readers an intense vision of real and imaginary journeys across universal and interior landscapes. "We write as if it matters, so it does. We love as if it matters, so it does," declares the author.
Flavia Cosma, poet of Gothic Calligraphy and Season of LoveAs in the heavens, there is much beauty and much destruction, where even light cannot escape black holes, and "nothing's pure and nothing's stable." Galluccio takes the reader on a journey from a hotel room in Florida into the expansive cosmos of the soul, revealing a woman caught up between passion and intellect, raging to be free while seeking to merge; loving, losing, dominating and submitting in her evolution to reconnect and be whole.
Karen Bowles, Publisher Luciole PressSo this is what Anne Boleyn whispered to the men who took her head—both her husband and her executioner—so this is what the henchman replied; for nowhere has sinner and saint been so exquisitely linked than in Lo Galluccio’s Sarasota VII. As the curtain parts, it is not polar opposites that are revealed but a single conjoined child. Traversing Sarasota VII (it has less in common with reading, more so the navigation to heaven or the surrender into hell) is like giving definition to the word ‘passion.’ This is how to say profoundly simple words with often incomprehensible meanings: Love. Desire. Hate. Birth. Destruction. And who hasn’t attempted this— to grasp the single rose in the pit of thorns. And who hasn’t, on occasion, failed and been banished? But Lo’s beautiful, prophetic prose lulls us, even as we burn, and she tells us to “Fossilize the monster” and “Tend our rings like vain kings.” She is right. We must. For something so terrifyingly beautiful should, forever, be.
$12.00 | ISBN 978-0-615-26369-4 | 57 Pages | In Stock
Coleen T. Houlihan
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