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Last Update: January 22, 2026
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Welcome to The Lost Bookshelf where all Cervena Barva Press books are sold.

We no longer sell books on consignment, used books or new books by other presses or authors.
Our space at the Armory in Somerville, MA closed in December 2021. After being there for almost 9 years, we decided to leave. The Lost Bookshelf is a part of Cervena Barva Press. It is safe to order our books.

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Cervena Barva Press/The Lost Bookshelf
P.O. Box 53 / Union Square
Somerville, MA 02143

We publish many books each year. If you would like to be on our mailing list, email Gloria at editor@cervenabarvapress.com You will not be bombarded with emails. We do not believe in that. You will receive our monthly newsletter, new book releases, reading events and workshops offered. That is it. We NEVER share your email!

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Pre-release: Our Imperfect Bodies by Karen Friedland
If you order this book, it will ship on or about February 10, 2026.

Our Imperfect Bodies by Karen Friedland Červená Barva Press, 2026

Once a nonprofit grant writer by trade, Karen had poems published in the Lily Poetry Review, Nixes Mate Review, One Art, and others. She was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her previous books were Places That Are Gone (Nixes Mate Books) and Tales from the Teacup Palace (Červená Barva Press). Karen lived in the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston with her husband, two dogs and a cat. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in November 2021, and died on April 14, 2024.

"I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in November 2021, two days before my 58th birthday. I recurred only a month or two after 'frontline,' about a year later, rendering me incurable and inoperable, and have been in continuous chemo treatment ever since. Having terminal cancer has been a daily exercise in searching for and finding meaning, beauty, kindness and even hope amidst the brutality of a deadly diagnosis. Poetry helps me reflect on, process and share this experience."
—Karen Friedland

"With grace and courage and style, Karen Friedland brings us along on her cancer journey; urging us to look at the world as she does, through eyes that see the joyful sparkling of life in every gratitude-wrapped moment. Whether she's walking her beloved dogs, or sitting in bed with pen and paper, she glories in being on this side of the sod. Indeed, these poems about dying are really poems about living. I miss her, but I am happier for having read them."
—Robin Stratton, author of Some Have Gone and Some Remain

"Some days, / the warmth- / every sensation- / is so beautiful . . . . I can hear Karen Friedland saying these words. We're driving in my car on a hot July day. The sun is strong and the road glimmers. I can see her, in my rearview mirror, as we chat about our cats and politics. As I read Karen's posthumous collection, Our Imperfect Bodies, I think of the grace and honesty she displayed, allowing us all on her journey, through her constellations of cancers. And though she rendered this to us in her poetry, she also traveled on the knife-edge of hope and terror. Her poems are wild and kind and funny; all words I'd used to describe this amazing poet. I don't want to get cocky / in my aliveness- she writes, and who can't relate to this? I will miss Karen Friedland, and feel so honored to have called her my friend, for my moments with her trapped in amber. I am grateful for Karen's poetry, for her words she left behind, too. / Little brightly colored shards, / breadcrumbs. We can follow her voice, with our imperfect bodies, we can hear her poetry."
—Jennifer Martelli, author of The Queen of Queens

Cover photo: "A Wilting Flower with a Black Background" by Ksenia Chernaya

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-53-6 | 94 Pages

New Release: GODS of UNFINISHED BUSINESS by Nina Kossman

GODS of UNFINISHED BUSINESS Poems on History Transformed into Myth by Nina Kossman Červená Barva Press, 2025

Nina Kossman's ten books include three volumes of poetry, two volumes of short prose in Russian and one in English, an anthology she edited for Oxford University Press, two volumes of translations of Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry, and a novel. Her English-language work has appeared in over ninety magazines and anthologies and has been translated into twelve languages. Her plays have been produced in the US, the UK, and Australia. Her work in her native language, Russian, was published in Russian-language literary magazines. She received grants from the Onassis Foundation, the Foundation for Hellenic Culture, a NEA fellowship, and the UNESCO/PEN Short Story Award. She lives in New York where she edits EastWest Literary Forum, a bilingual literary journal.

"When the mythological and personal meet, something transforms for this reader; perhaps that very "semblance of meaning in a meaningless world" comes to the surface. What is that meaning, you might ask. Perhaps it is awareness of how one isn't alone, after all, and has never been alone on this planet, despite what humanity’s so-called "progress" seems so intent to insist on."
—Ilya Kaminsky

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-64-2 | 121 Pages

New Release: My Way Home by Mary Bonina (Fiction)

My Way Home a novel by Mary Bonina Červená Barva Press, 2025

Mary Bonina is both poet and prose writer. My Way Home is her debut novel. She is the author of My Father's Eyes: A Memoir, and three published poetry collections: Living Proof, Clear Eye Tea, and Lunch in Chinatown. Her poem "Drift," won the UrbanArts "Boston Contemporary Authors" prize, and is engraved on a granite monolith, a permanent public art installation in the City. She has been honored as a fellow and awarded several residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, including at the VCCA retreat in Auvillar, France. Her collaborative art experiments with composers, visual artists, and sculptors, have expanded poetry's vocabulary and reach. A longtime member of the Writers Room of Boston, where she served on the Board of Directors for more than a decade, Bonina is a graduate of the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

"Mary Bonina's captivating debut deftly explores themes we all must wrestle with during our short stay on planet Earth. How do we live meaningful lives while harboring dark secrets and gaping loss? What do we settle for when we cannot get what we want? What does family really mean? Written with great wisdom and acuity, My Way Home is a beautiful novel, full of truths about the human condition, the ways we delight and disappoint one another, the ways we save each other with our generosity and love."
—Mary E. Mitchell, author of Starting Out Sideways and Love in Complete Sentences

"—A cautionary story all too relevant to a time when a woman's right to control her body is somehow still—infuriatingly—unsettled."
—Gish Jen, author of Bad Bad Girl

"My Way Home is an often unsettling, always engaging novel full of honesty, heart, and grace. It is both seductive and disturbing, and it will remind you of why you started reading stories in the first place—to be carried away to a more vivid and compelling world."
—John Dufresne, author of My Darling Boy

"—A potent, provocative, and important novel."
—Anne Elezabeth Pluto, author of How Many Miles to Babylon?

"—Bonina’s novel is a haunting look at first love, teen pregnancy and the dangerous secrets about to erupt in a family. Magnificent."
—Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Days of Wonder and Pictures of You

"...My Way Home delves into a world of secrets, forgiveness, and 'a new idea of family.' Beautifully written...I loved it."
—Rosie Sultan, author of Helen Keller in Love and winner of the PEN Discovery Award

Cover Artist: Teresa Lagrange

$19.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-91-8 | 302 Pages

New Release: CROSSING THE LINE by Andrey Gritsman

CROSSING THE LINE by Andrey Gritsman Červená Barva Press, 2025

Andrey Gritsman, came to the US from Russia in 1981. He is a physician, poet and essayist, writes in two languages. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize several times and shortlisted for PSA Poetry Prize. Poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in many journals including New Orleans Review, Notre Dame Review, and Denver Quarterly, anthologized and translated into several European languages. He authored fifteen books of poetry and prose in both languages. He edits international poetry magazine Interpoezia (www.interpoezia.org).

Previous collections from Červená Barva Press: Live Lanscape and Family Chronicles.
www.andreygritsman.com

On CROSSING THE LINE
by Andrey Gritsman

"From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached."
"A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us."
These are quotes from Franz Kafka, who is the most important poet for the author of this book. In this collection, the author tries to reach that point, to approach the line. Nobody knows where this point is and at what moment there is no turning back. The collection mostly includes poems of the last ten years or so which, in metaphorical forms approach above mentioned point. Some of the texts are prose poems that open new possibilities of language and metaphor.

"...poetics explores meanings and mysteries of human memory. But here, in Crossing the Line, I also get a sense of clarity, as if one is writing about final things as if the perspective of a foreign language gives one a distance that allows one to see things with precision that is almost eerie. Yes, there isn't just a welcome strangeness here (as is often the case with writers who work in a foreign language), there is also a kind of wisdom which comes from the experience of crossing that line..."
—Ilya Kaminsky

Cover design: Asya Dodina
The cover features the work by Asya Dodina and Slava Polishchuk Exit XVIII from the Exits and Corners series.

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-87-1 | 86 Pages

New Release: Blood Moon by Carol Dine

Blood Moon by Carol Dine Edited by Jennifer Barber, Linda Cutting, Tehila Lieberman Červená Barva Press, 2025

Carol Dine was a celebrated poet, essayist, and memoirist. Art critic and author John Berger wrote of Dine's Van Gogh in Poems (Bitter Oleander Press, 2009), "Her observation of [Van Gogh's] drawings equals his observation of what he was drawing." Dine read from the book at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Her memoir, Places in the Bone (Rutgers University Press, 2005), which combines prose and poetry, deals with the redemptive power of art. Her poems appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Aesthetica Creative Arts Annual (U.K.), Bitter Oleander, Boulevard, Inkwell, Lilith, and Salamander, as well as within the anthologies After Shocks: Poetry of Recovery and Poems Against War: Bending Toward Justice.

Dine received a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Sword of Hope from the American Cancer Society. She lived in Brookline and she taught writing at Suffolk University and the Massachusetts College of Art & Design.

In addition to Van Gogh in Poems and Places in the Bone, her previous books include Naming the Sky, Trying to Understand the Lunar Eclipse, and Orange Night.

Blood Moon explores twentieth and twenty-first century history through the stories of women who acted heroically under the most extreme circumstances, at great personal danger, during wartime and times of political oppression. It also focuses on the lives of women artists who documented the violence of their times through their art. The author drew on many memoirs in the writing of this collection, and the poems are both powerful and redemptive.

Dine's poems about women in extremis are pressed and compacted like diamonds. Her ability to empathize so completely with brave women who suffered terribly, in wartime, from the never-ending human appetite for cruelty, moved me profoundly. I have read Blood Moon over and over, and in my opinion, there is true greatness here. This volume of poetry surely deserves a place in the canon.
—Michael Sandle, British sculptor and artist

Carol Dine's poetry has always engaged. Immersed in her subjects, committed to their individual lives as humans, her language had to pursue, with deep compassion and trust, a full understanding of what it means to suffer and sometimes not survive life's unexpected consequences. We can be thankful for the path she opened up for us and the work she left behind so we, too, could observe the lives portrayed in Blood Moon.
—Paul B. Roth, Editor, The Bitter Oleander Press

Cover Image: SoHyun Bae, Jasper Lake: Wings, 2011, rice paper and pure pigment on canvas, 200 x 150 cm

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-96-3 | 82 Pages

Ash by Gloria Mindock from Glass Lyre Press

Ash by Gloria Mindock Glass Lyre Press, 2021

Gloria Mindock is the author of I Wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me (Nixes Mate Books), Whiteness of Bone (Glass Lyre Press), La Portile Raiului (Ars Longa Press, Romania) translated into the Romanian by Flavia Cosma, Nothing Divine Here, (U Šoku Štampa), and Blood Soaked Dresses (Ibbetson). Widely published in the USA and abroad, her poetry has been translated and published into the Romanian, Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Spanish, Estonian, Albanian, bulgarian, Turkish, and French. Gloria has been published in numerous literary journals including Gargoyle, Web Del Sol, spoKe, Constellations: A Journal of Poetry and Fiction, Ibbetson, The Rye Whiskey Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Unlikely Stories, Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing and Nixes Mate Review and anthology. Gloria has been awarded the Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award and was the recipient of the Allen Ginsberg Award for Community Service by the Newton Writing and Publishing Center. She received the fifth and fortieth Moon Prize from Writing in a Woman's Voice. Gloria was the Poet Laureate in Somerville, MA in 2017 & 2018.

In Gloria Mindock's powerful new book, the flames of love die out and the ashes linger until they dissolve into air. The body is hostage, in charred relics of failed intimacies—The burnt-out ends of smoky days (T.S. Eliot). There's beauty in the truth of Mindock's words and images: Things got smokier, battling the embers with//false waters. And there's hope: Not everyone believes in destruction.// All the heart wants is to beat. Above all, these poems radiate feeling, compassionately aware, attuned to a world of broken love that is burned beyond recognition, the ashes drifting and settling: how much sorrow can this heart take?// There is never an answer. Ash sears and sings.
—Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Bad Harvest

In Ash, Gloria Mindock writes a gritty, beautifully haunting collection of poetry. Ash is what remains behind after destruction, ruin, death, and burning. Similarly, the poems in this collection are what will remain. Fight the shadows and wade through the darkness on a path paved by Mindock's vivid imagery, stark language, and dynamic voice, all of which, make for a most memorable experience. Now more than ever, we need these poems. With the utmost economy of words, skillful syntax, and emotional connections, each poem reverberates into the depths of your consciousness. Dark, intense, and wholly unique, Ash, by Gloria Mindock is what you've been waiting for—a collection of poetry that consumes and smolders. Are you ready?
—Renuka Raghavan, author of Out of the Blue and The Face I Desire

Gloria Mindock is a poet with singular vision: in Ash, a human heart is rolled out, then baked, then thrown to the birds; broken crucifixes are shoved into junk drawers and gather dust; a spurned/murdered woman turns into a beautiful plant that gives her ex-lover a rash. With mordant, Pinter-esque wit, Mindock explores just how far love, and even human decency, can unravel—to the point of arson, to the point of war.

Ash begin with a series of poems about lethal house fires that may be literal or metaphorical ("my skin was burned by your compulsion to be famous"), then expands to pinpoint the similar essence of human cruelty that enables soldiers to kill. As the narrator of "Doomed by the Numbers" explains: "the fact is people will still go on brutally/killing each other./Who will take my place and write about it?"

Ash concludes with an engaging, Rabelaisian roundelay of voices—mini-plays, summed up in just two stanzas, about complicated relationships between two people.

Once again, with Ash, Mindock proves herself to be unafraid of the dark. She is truly a leading, contemporary master of the edgy.
—Karen Friedland, author of Places That Are Gone and Tales from the Teacup Palace

Passionate and observant, Gloria Mindock is a tragic poet. Her books are wounds revisited. She knows that nothing, never heals.

"With a rolling pin in my hand, I roll your heart out flat... stop it from beating. The redness of blood turns to wax, sticky while wet." (Baked)

She senses the pain of the world in her being.

"The void looms deep, scorched like the desert blowing aimlessly." (Exit)

As her latest book Ash attests without doubt, Gloria is both a warrior and a martyr. Her words are swords that slowly transform into tears.

Her anger at life's injustice is mighty, but mighty is her generosity and her openness towards repair, harmony and universal peace. A must-read Ash conducts the reader through thorny labyrinths of pain and despair, allowing now and then a glimpse of ultimate resolve and liberation in verses of a rare beauty:

"...but gravity is about to free me into space... People will look at me day and night and ask, "what is it?" There is no control over what happens. The cathedral is high and my freckles fell on the floor as I left. Paleness now, that no one sees, but in the universe, I will be a prism." (Gravity)

"...A hunger surrounds us, dust gathers, and is wiped off, space evading all this as songs of the wind come through the window and we all hum." (Room)
—Flavia Cosma, author of In the Arms of the Father, Val-David, QC

$16.00 | ISBN: 978-1-941783-75-7 | 71 Pages

New Release: Our first children's book! Little Brown Mouse
by Jack Mindock, Gloria Mindock, and Kellis Mindock Dryer

Little Brown Mouse (Children) by Jack Mindock, Gloria Mindock, and Kellis Mindock Dryer Illustrations by William J. Kelle Červená Barva Press, 2020

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Jack Mindock (b. 1926), author of Little Brown Mouse, spent sixty years of his life as an educator. He was a junior high language arts teacher and K-12 principal in Illinois. He is a World War II Navy veteran and historian who frequently has speaking engagements about his knowledge and experiences. He started telling Little Brown Mouse stories to his children when they were young. They were oral stories, made up as he went along. It was Jack's desire to have some new Little Brown Mouse adventures in print and published for future generations of children to enjoy.

Kellis Mindock Dryer, daughter of author Jack Mindock, is a pianist and piano teacher in Cary, NC. She enjoyed composing the two Little Brown Mouse songs in the book. They can be sung with or without the piano accompaniment. If the children and parents reading this book cannot read music, they are welcome to recite the lyrics as poetry or make up their own melodies.

Gloria Mindock is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, I wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me (Nixes Mate books, 2018). She is the founding editor of Cervena Barva Press and one of the USA editors for Levure Litteraire (France). Widely published in the USA and abroad, her poetry has been translated and published into eight languages. Gloria has been awarded the Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award and was the recipient of the Allen Ginsberg Award for Community Service by the Newton Writing and Publishing Center. She also has been awarded the fifth and fortieth Moon Prize by Writing in a Woman's Voice. She was the Poet Laureate in Somerville, MA in 2017 & 2018.

NOTE
When I was three, four, and five years old, my Dad, "Daddy Jack," would make up bedtime stories every night about the adventures of “Little Brown Mouse.” He would leave me in suspense nightly. I couldn’t wait to hear what happened next to Little Brown Mouse. Why Little Brown Mouse? Because Little Brown Mouse did come to my house! This book, Little Brown Mouse, was written for mothers, fathers, and others to read to young children at bedtime.
-Gloria Mindock

PREFACE
Welcome to the land of curiosity and adventure! Little Brown Mouse is a bedtime story to make you think, be curious, and ask questions. Here are a few questions to get you started: Have you ever seen a mouse? What color are mice? What do they eat? Where do they live?

$13.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-35-2 | 28 Pages