Sitemap | home > poetry chapbooks

Poetry Chapbooks

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 Floor

Francis 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 College

Reading 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.
-Eileen D'Angelo, Editor Mad Poets Review

$7.00 | 36 Pages | In Stock

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:
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

$7.00 | 24 Pages | In Stock

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.
Assistant Professor Adjunct
College Of Architecture And Planning
University Of Colorado At Denver

$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock

Two Chapbooks from from Angela Consolo Mankiewicz

Cancer Poems by Angela Consolo Mankiewicz
Undulating Bedsheets Productions, 1995

…. How to cope, how to survive, how to conquer the unknowable? This is down-home, extremely frightened, compassionate poetry…. Though Angela's words show insecurity and doubt, her poems exhibit inner strength and determination to survive a totally devastating, and very personal, crisis time: Help me hide the rage and terror swapping/1st place in my head … / Godamit - don't let me screw this up - please / make me what he hopes I am ("Prayer to Fidelio"); …. Who do I run to if not to you? Bearing / this doom that is not yet grief, rumbling / through my body …. ("Not Yet Grief"); Oh, of course. We / kiss, a sudden, hard kiss. / Our hands slip away and swallow you in. / You, just you ("We").
We can be comfortable from afar but throats will choke …. Read and weep alone, or with a loved one. These are life lessons to be recounted and learned.
Reviewed by Joyce Metzger

$2.00 | 20 Pages | In Stock

Wired And Other Poems by Angela Consolo Mankiewicz
Aquarius West Press, 2001

Very seductive poetry here, at the same time with an undertone of melancholia/despair: …. Will I be there again someday, if I'm alone/or because my body has closed me off /to deeper pleasures? Will I say I've had enough/or will I squirm on a couch with a weary moan? ("The Girl Who Loved Armchairs") …. one very vibratory poem, "Smiles of a Summer Night" about making love to another woman, then waking up and to pull her mate (husband/boyfriend?) over to drive her tongue down his throat and complain Why Now? And from "Young Girls in Young Girl Dresses": This poem is for the rest of us / blocking recall of how short/ the good part was, how few/the minutes of specialness. I finished WIRED and couldn't get it out of my mind. Even the drawing of garter-belted stockings on beautiful, ankle-strapped shoes. The sexuality is very much there and very effective. Not a book to read though, if you're suffering from depression; at the same time, magnificently performed.
Reviewed by Hugh Fox

$6.00 | 28 Pages | In Stock

Just released December 12, 2008 from Cloudkeeper Press

In The Limelight by Jane Etzel
Second Edition, Cloudkeeper Press, 2008

"Jane Etzel is a painter on the page and the canvas. Her strokes with the brush and the pen bleed color and insight."
Doug Holder, Arts Editor, The Somerville News

"For me the tour de force of In The Limelight is 'Alone', a poem which combines a Sartrean existentialist outlook with an understanding of the yin-yang principle…."
Richard Wilhelm, Art Editor, Ibbetson Street

"Jane Etzel writes about love, loss and pain in soft clear tones that show her courageous spirit."
Barbara Thomas, poet

"Jane Etzel's poems gently beckon us into the light of her kind, grateful, sincere attention. They remind us that anything seen in the limelight of love, no matter how painful, is transmuted into beauty."
Rich Borofsky, Ed.D., Jane's first therapist

About the Author
Jane Etzel has two major passions in her life: poetry and oil painting. Her poetry has appeared in "Lyrical Somerville," The Somerville News in 2006, the new renaissance in 2008, and Spare Change News in 2008. In 2006, Ibbetson Street showcased one of her oil paintings on its inside front cover. Two paintings will be published in the Spring 2009 edition of the new renaissance. Her poetry often deals with real life experiences: childhood memories to her father's death to her battle with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. A highly trained artist, Jane specializes in still-life oil paintings of fruits and vegetables and creates note cards and magnets from her paintings. Before concentrating on poetry and oil painting, she owned a small graphic design studio. Jane taught freelance classes at the Boston Center for Adult Education for five years and was a graduate school instructor at Emerson College. She received a BA in art from Hood College in Frederick, Maryland. Jane studied oil painting for seven years at the DeCordova Museum School in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Whenever possible, she spends time in the woods or near the ocean. Jane grew up in Branford, Connecticut, and has called the Boston area her home for many years.

$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-615-25931-4 | 35 Pages | In Stock

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 Pages | In 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

New Arrivals October 22, 2008

Dark Card by Rebecca Foust
Texas Review Press, 2008

"Fiercely smart and an absolute warrior, Foust's intelligence and courage drive every difficult poem home. The distilled vigor of Dark Card gives us the internal shock we look for in the best poetry."
-Molly Peacock, author of Cornucopia

"Centered on the experience of raising a special child and the cruelty we inflict on difference, these poems will break and heal your heart, their rage, hope, insight and love carried by a poetic power as targeted as a bullet-train."
-Barry Spacks, Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara

Dark Card is the winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize of 2007.

$12.95 | ISBN 9781933896144 | 36 Pages | In Stock: 5 copies

Woman Bathing Light to Dark
Prose poems by Paul Èluard, Translated by Justin Vicari
Toad Press, 2006

One of the greatest poets of the 20th century, Paul Èluard was born in France in 1895. In 1920 he met Andre Breton, the influential founder of the Surrealist movement, and became a member himself in 1924. His work is translated here by Justin Vicari, a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and translator. In 2005 he received the Third Coast Poetry Prize and the New Millennium Writings Poetry Prize, as well as the Plan B Press Short Fiction Award. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Phoebe, Megaera, and Postmodern Culture.

 

$5.00 | In Stock: 3 copies

Meditations of a Survivor by Dan Wilcox
A.P.D., 1991

A science fiction poem by Dan Wilcox, published by A.P.D., the alternative press for Albany's poets

 

 

$5.00 | ISBN 0-9714631-0-7 | 22 Pages | In Stock: 3 copies

Having Lunch with the Sky by Joan McNerney
A.P.D., 2004

The work of Joan McNerney has been published in over a hundred poetry journals and magazines in the US and Canada. This is her fourth book of poems. She has performed her poetry at many distinguished venues, such as the National Arts Club, the University of Texas at Houston, the McNay Art Institute, the Word Thursday series in Treadwell, NY, and at Café Web in Albany, in addition to performing on several radio and TV programs. She lives outside Albany, NY.

 

$5.00 | ISBN 0-9714631-5-8 | 14 Pages | In Stock: 3 copies

To the Husband I Have Not Yet Met by Mary Kathryn Jablonski
The Alternative Press for Albany Poets, 2008

Mary Kathryn Jablonski, a visual artist and poet, is Assistant Director of the Schick Art Gallery at Skidmore College. From 2000 to 2005, Jablonski was director of the Saratoga Poetry Zone, inviting renowned poets and initiating a program of literary readings to complement exhibitions at the Arts Center Gallery at downtown Saratoga Springs. She was a 2004 and 2006 finalist for the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, and in 2007 was awarded a NYSCA grant to create a new series of artworks and poems, and to interview artist/writers on the Internet.

 

$8.00 | ISBN 978-0-9714631-7-2 | 12 Pages | In Stock: 2 copies

Three Sides to the Looking Glass: A Poem for Albany by Rachel Zitomer
A.P.D., 2004

Three Sides to the Looking Glass is an important addition to the "Bob Kaufman Series" of chapbooks from A.P.D. (Another Pleasant Day). The intent of this project is to present unique works from Albany's best poets in cheap editions. This chapbook was written for her June 2003 reading as the featured poet at the Changing Spaces Gallery open mic, hosted by Dan Wilcox.

 

$5.00 | ISBN 0-9714631-3-1 | 14 Pages | In Stock: 3 copies

Voices by David Beard
Blue Violin Press, 2003

"David Beard presents us with a collection fierce and intoxicating, poems about himself interwoven with the plight of the mentally ill."
-Broken Streets

"A book brave and good, each poem is compelling."
-Green River Review

 

$8.00 | ISBN 0-943795-63-X | In Stock: 3 copies

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 Sleuth

Investigations 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

$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 Dark

Eric 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 Galluccio

Mike 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.
-Hugh Fox

$7.00 | 41 Pages | In Stock: 20

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.

$7.00 | 33 Pages | In Stock: 20

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 Ridl

These 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

$7.00 | 20 Pages | In Stock: 25

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

$7.00 | 47 Pages | In Stock: 20

Discarded: Poems for My Apartments by Chad Parenteau
Červená Barva Press, 2008

In this new collection by Chad Parenteau, the peculiar intimacies of the shared apartment experience emerge in imaginative and startling shapes. In Parenteau's stunning tropes, the apartment, now war zone, now toxic wasteland, now party palace, at once magical and mundane, finds its excited denizens "burning their hands on bulbs to stay awake, / afraid to miss a summoning." Parenteau musters poignancy, pathos, and the pathetic from the crowded sink and the discarded vodka bottles, breeding them into his lines with an acute and ironic sensuality. If, as the author contends, "The bed now leaves its own notches/on the backs of everyone/who's slept in it alone," these poems will leave their mark on the mind of any reader who has ever stammered through a roommate interview or suffocated from the incense sneaking under the crack at the bottom of a roommate's door.
-Tom Daley, Instructor for the Online School of Poetry

$7.00 | 25 Pages | In Stock: 25

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.
-Diane Wald

$7.00 | 20 Pages | In Stock: 25

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?

$7.00 | 30 Pages | In Stock: 25

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 Sharpening

In 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 Reason

One 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 Innocence

Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene review:
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/search?q=anne+harding+woodworth

$7.00 | 45 Pages | In Stock: 25

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.

Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene Review

$7.00 | 43 Pages | In Stock: 25

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:
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/search?q=gary+Fincke

$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock: 25

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.

$7.00 | 39 Pages | In Stock: 20

Survival Notes by Adrian S. Potter
Červená Barva Press, 2008

Winner of the 2006 Cervena Barva Press Fiction Chapbook Prize
Judge: Dorothy Freudenthal

Adrian 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.
Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ Jan. 2008/ Somerville, Mass.

$7.00 | 42 Pages | In Stock: 20

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: 20

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. Weaver

Gardner'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 Fox

Excerpt from a review
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

$7.00 | 45 Pages | In Stock: 20

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 Spindle

To 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."
--Mary Baine Campbell
author of TROUBLE (poems), Carnegie Mellon U Press and The World, The Flesh, and Angels (poems), Beacon Press

$7.00 | 46 Pages | In Stock: 20

PO/EMS by Richard Kostelanetz
PRESA:S: PRESS, 2008

Just when you think you're totally soaked in the possibilities in modern art, music, poetry, drama, dance, etc., along comes Richard Kostelanetz and you've got to start all over again.
--Hugh Fox

 

$6.00 | 40 Pages | In Stock: 3

New Arrivals from The Feral Press

Alchemy of Pages by B. C. Leale
The Feral Press, 2006

 

 

$8.00 | 6 Pages | In Stock: 4

Dean's Bar, Tangier an essay and two poems
by Francis Poole
The Feral Press, 2007

 

 

$10.00 | 19 Pages | In Stock: 1

Currents Unseen by E. F. Weisslitz
Feral Press, 2005

 

 

$5.00 | 9 Pages | In Stock: 4

My House by Suzanne K. Walther
The Feral Press, 2006

 

 

$6.00 | 12 Pages | In Stock: 4

Seventh Heaven and other poems by Bernadette Benati
The Feral Press, 2006

 

 

$10.00 | 15 Pages | In Stock: 4

The Devil's Swizzle Stick by Francis Poole
The Feral Press, 2006

 

 

$8.00 | 8 Pages | In Stock: 1

The Boy's Nightmare and other poems by Mary McLaughlin Slechta
The Feral Press, 2006

 

 

$10.00 | 14 Pages | In Stock: 4

The Key a fairy tale by Flavia M. Lobo
The Feral Press, 2006

 

 

$8.00 | 16 Pages | In Stock: 4

The Three Masks a masque by Bob Goodnough
The Feral Press, 2006

 

 

$12.00 | 17 Pages | In Stock: 4

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.
Anthony Russell White

$5.00 | 20 Pages | In Stock: 15

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

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 Terris

There 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.
—Richard Silberg

$7.00 | 39 Pages | In Stock: 20

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. Winans

In 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 Sciences

A 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 Israel

Doug 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 Voices

Aside 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:
“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

$7.00 | 23 Pages | In Stock: 10

The Pursuit of Happiness
New and Selected Poems from Elizabeth, New Jersey
by Joe Weil

Excerpt from the back of the book
There's beauty everywhere, we know that. But no one perceives it all. It's easy to be impressed with towering mountain ranges, but Joe's knocked out over two old women gabbing over a broken picket fence, or his Uncle Pete not killing a deer after he thought he'd wanted to all his life, or riding home in a Yellow Cab and hanging out in the cool basement with the washing machine rocking on the uneven floor ("a convulsed and bulky tap dancer") or the Cuban lady "who claims to be the first cousin of Art Linkletter twice removed." But Joe's not only about loving "little people" and "humble" things…
--Harvey Pekar

$5.00 | 80 Pages | In Stock: 1

The Book of Answers by Lucille Lang Day
Finishing Line Press, 2006

The poems of Lucy Day's The Book of Answers posit the responses of a gentle, intelligent universe to the question of Kaleidoscopic - poetic - imagination. These poems are as delicate as rain and as lasting as redwoods. Let them be your companion late at night or on a dawn walk along your favorite paths.
--David St. John

In these scintillating poems Lucy Day's answers are as quirky and provocative as her questions, and while they leave the mysteries of the universe blissfully intact, they also remind us how often love's own fulcrum keeps creating new tipping points of grace.
--Susan Gubernat

$12.00 | ISBN 1-59924-089-0 | 24 Pages | In Stock: 1

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, NY

Review from Doug Holder's Authors Den:
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?AuthorID=3792

$7.00 | 17 Pages | In Stock: Out of stock-Restocking Soon

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

Absolut ® Death and Others
Art by Roz Dimon and Poems by George Held
Dimon Studios, 2000

Absolut Death & Others pairs Roz Dimon’s satiric “ads” for brand name products with George Held’s satiric verse about them. For instance, the title drawing shows a stylized vodka bottle, and the facing page bears the lines “Absolut’s the perfect ablution / For those in need of absolution.” Printed in full color on glossy 100-pound 10 x 7” paper.

$10.00 | ISBN: | 28 Pages | In Stock: 3

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

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

 

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

A NEW REQUIEM poem by Norman MacAfee
Cheap Review Press, 1988 (signed copy)

A New Requiem is a long poem, a non-religous text dedicated "to the future and its composers." Parts of it have been set to music and performed, and the poet encourages other composers to set the entire work. But above all A New Requiem is a poem to be read.

"One could listen forever, A New Requiem is so lovely."
--The Washington Review

$5.00 | ISBN: 0-945502-01-x | 45 Pages | In Stock: 4

Au chevets des mots by Denis Emorine
Written in French, 2006

Preface: Here is a collection of vignettes that invites the dreamer into the elusive, entrancing perpetual fever of poetry. Here you are in the town square of language, where words elope, make love, fight, and part like unsatisfied, restless lovers into the night. It is never enough, it seems, when it comes to language. There are words that masquerade and manipulate, and there is the purity of meaning, as Emorine seems to suggest from the opening quotation used: “And then, we’ll be able to talk without stumbling into those words that cause time to bleed.” —Joë Bousquet.

Let us visit with the work assuming all the roles: as the words themselves, as the silence, as the narrator, as Franz Kafka even. The heart of this collection is in the segment “Fever”, when Emorine declares: “Only silence has the bedside manner needed to respond to words broken down by their plentitude”. You may try to stab its “voice face”, you may try to escape consonants and vowels from smothering you, you may even try to drink the colors of a rainbow, but there is no remedy to the intriguing ambiguity of words. -Lina ramona Vitkauskas

$5.00 | ISBN: 2-919942-15-8 | 33 Pages | In Stock: 3

Bits and Pieces by David Robert Boyce
Copyright 2006 by David Robert Boyce

David is a member of the Arizona, Utah, and New Jersey Poetry Societies, and is affiliated with NORAZ Poets. His work has appeared in many journals including Utah Sings Volume VII, The Collared Peccary, A String of Colored Beads, and The Noise.

$1.00 | 8 Pages | In Stock: 5

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 Perchik

The collection has an elegant focus and hush around it...
Timothy Donnelly, Boston Review

Susan 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 Columnist

Susan 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 Drum

Readers of Grasslimb will be familiar with Susan Tepper's fine poetry... We can enthusiastically recommend this fine further exploration of her work.
Valerie Polichar, Grasslimb

Susan's poetry is in touch with the human race... reaps with the knowledge of a poet well versed.
Shirley Gerald Ware, Fresh! Literary Magazine

$6.00 | 30 Pages | In Stock: 6

Canticles & Inventories by Tom Daley
Wyngaerts Hoeck Press, 2005

About Tom Daley's poetry:
"His panoramic scope is elegantly matched with a sensitive attention to nuance. Daley’s images leave us with a sense of beauty in things mundane, and of life emerging from a decaying world.”
Regie Gibson

$10.00 | ISBN: | 32 Pages | In Stock: 2

Dawn in the Big House
by Christopher Presfield
Pygmy Forest Press, 2006

I greatly admire the poems' craft, their irony and sudden wrenching perceptions. This little book performs a great service to its illuminations.
--William Styron

 

$10.00 | ISBN: 0-944550-73-8 | 48 Pages | In Stock: 3

Delirium Selected Poems by Lloyd Van Brunt
PRESA :S: PRESS, 2006

(Excerpts)
Lloyd Van Brunt writes good and elegant poetry about such everyday subjects as a wife awakening in bed, or a meal cooking on the stove. His metaphors are never predictable…
--Norman Mailer

What is remarkable, though…is his use of language which, in a word, must be termed brilliant.
--David Ignatow, The New York Times Book Review

The images display the poet's energetic imagination, at once holy and feral.
--Publishers Weekly

$6.00 | 46 Pages | In Stock: 2

Dreams at the Au Bon Pain
by Doug Holder
Ibbetson Street Press, 2000

"a delightful chapbook of poetry."
Diana Der-hoveanessian, NEPC President

Doug Holders newest chapbook, "Wrestling With My Father," was Nov-Dec 2005 SPR pick of the month

$5.00 | 16 Pages | In Stock: 3

Falling Dreams by Alison Hicks
New Women's Voices Series, No. 49
Finishing Line Press, 2006

(Excerpts of blurbs)

Her language aches, glows, leaches and breathes in the midst of its objects.
--Leonard Gontarek

In this collection, Alison Hicks explores desire and domesticity, shedding light on the "bare-knuckled teeth/of the familar."
--Moira Egan

Hers is a brushwork deeply physical, intelligent, sensual, and precise.
--Jane Hirshfield

$12.00 | ISBN 1-59924-098-x | 26 Pages | In Stock: 5

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

Grounded by George Held
Finishing Line Press, 2005

Filled with ironic wit and tinged with a sense of melancholy and loss, the poems in Grounded capture the reader's imagination and sense of wonder and speak to the timeless synergy between nature and poetry… --Timothy Monaghan

In Grounded, Held gives us a sense of place, and offers us an intimate look at red fox, grey squirrel, blue-spotted salamander, and much more… --Leah Maines

$5.00 | ISBN: 1-932755-89-6 | 21 Pages | In Stock: 3

Hot Rain by Lo Galluccio
Singing Bone Press/Ibbettson Street Press, 2003

"you think by 2004 that everthing that's do-able on the page has been done and then comes Lo Galluccio and creates a whole new word-game...- a totally original voice filled with psycho-social realities of contemporary America. It's act, react, get into the psych-underground and let it flow..."
--hugh fox, poet, critic, writer and founding member of COSMEP--Committee of Small Press Magazine Editors and Publishers

Lo Galluccio is an original and striking voice, based both on the quality of her work and her lyrically pleasing performance style. Her work is an interesting amalgam of the psychological, mythical and musical. Its content is entertaining and challenging at the same time, weaving in toughness and surrealism.

HOT RAIN is a musical and sustained piece of work. In her Acknowledgments, Lo writes "These poems are about love, loss, identity and just the language out of which they are made." This is accurate but also an understatement. For Lo Galluccio’s best work is earthy, vivid, painful and haunting. Her style is marked by interesting use of conventional poetic devices like internal rhyme, alliteration, the use of refrain, lending to a distinctive, lyrical style. Her voice is sometimes nonsensical, almost like Dame Edith Sitwell on acid! She makes playful use of rhyming preconscious language in wordplay poems like "The Sweat of His Labor"’s lines: "A mermaid is caught./A mermaid is not."
-Carolyn Gregory, Poet

$7.00 | 40 Pages | In Stock: 3

Inside the Boar's Circle by Stephen P. Miller
Pygmy Forest Press, 1994

Stephen Miller's work has appeared in Toyon, American Mosaic, Orbis, Journal of American Culture, and Northcoast Magazine. His book, An Act of God: Memories of Vietnam was published in 1982 and reprinted in 1987.

 

$5.00 | ISBN: 0-944550-35-5 | 41 Pages | In Stock: 2

Intersections by Gaynell Gavin
Main Street Rag

Gaynell Gavin's poetry, fiction, and essays have been published in numerous journals including Praire Schooner, Fourth Genre, Natural Bridge, Viet Nam War Generation Journal, The Comstock Review, and others. She was the winner of the 2001 Audre Lorde Creative Writing Award.

$7.00 | ISBN: 1-930907-96-6 | 41 Pages | In Stock: 5

LAP GUN CUT
by John M. Bennett & F. A. Nettelbeck
Luna Bisonte Prods, 2006

LAP GUN CUT - A long collaborative poem by Bennett and "Bug Death" author F. A. Nettelbeck. Like nothing you've ever read.

 

$7.00 | ISBN: 1892280507 | 14 Pages | In Stock: 1

Lest They Become... Poetry by Harris Gardner
Ibbetson Street Press, 2003

…welcomes readers of all faiths into that quiet, reflective space that, like a comfortable pew and a rousing sermon, leaves us feeling a little bit challenged and a lot renewed.
Lisa Beatman, Author of The Ladies at the Blue Hill Spa

 

$6.00 | ISBN: 0-9724601-6-0 | 26 Pages | In Stock: 5

Living In Dangerous Times by Linda Lerner
PRESA :S: PRESS

Linda Lerner should be one of the most visible of our poets in this country...she is a special outsider group of powerful and original American poets largely ignored by Poetry Establishment forces. Her amazing energies zap her poems into high voltage...
--Robert Peters
Chiron Review

 

$6.00 | 52 Pages | In Stock: 3

Luminal Wait by Anne Brudevold
Eden River Press, 2006

I relish the times I have the priviledge to read her prose and poetry; I am always astonished by her ability to surprise the reader with a turn of phrase, an apt metaphor that I never have thought of myself, or a new way to examine human behavior or a social issue.
--Fanny Rothschild

As a writer, Anne has had many of her poems published and her desire to return to writing fiction will no doubt result in further publishing achievements. She has a good eye for critique and has worked with aspiring writers, (myself included) to further their vision and edit their work to a polish.
--Mary Lawrence

$6.00 | 26 Pages | In Stock: 3 (signed copies)

Lunch at the Table of Opposites by Roger W. Hecht
Red Dancefloor Press, 1997

These poems impress for the ease and unexpectedness of their phrasing, the balance that is struck in them between reticence and revelation. Every word, every line counts. The effect is not of meaness, but of energy; the poet living up to the rigors of his imagination with equal parts wit and gravity.
--JoEllen Kwiatek
Author, Eleven Days Before Spring

$5.00 | ISBN 1-881168-44-1 | 31 Pages | In Stock: 5

Martial Artist A Selection of Martial's Epigrams
Translated from the latin by George Held
Toad Press, 2005

The poems in Martial Artist collect some of his many epigrams about his own work and his life as a poet. --Toad Press

 

$5.00 | ISBN: | 31 Pages | In Stock: 1

Mirrors of Darkness and Light by M. Teresa Blaylock
Publish America

(Excerpt from back of the book)
Mirrors of Darkness and Light is a compilation of stories,myths, and magic in poetry. It encompasses a wide range of subjects from political commentary to gothic fairy tales and murder...

 

$14.95 | ISBN 1-4241-0359-2 | 76 Pages | In Stock: 5

MOFO' RISIN' by Joseph Powell
2004

Joseph's work has been published in many literary journals and online journals including Circle Magazine, In Our Own Words, A Generation Defines Itself, Best of MAP Featured Poetry, Di-verse-City-Austin International Poetry Festival, Comrades.org, and ilovepoetry.com. He is the author of three chapbooks called, Blood on the Page, With Unveiled Faces, and Remaining Remnants Of Remembered Ruminations. Joseph was the featured poet in the National Geographic documentary, "Skin."

$7.00 | 33 Pages | In Stock: 3

MORPHEUS RISING by Ronnie M. Lane
PRESA :S: PRESS, 2005

Ronnie M. Lane hallucinates about the bizarre, the absurd and the ugly. His poems are apocalyptic. Lane presents images out of a Dali gone wild.
--Herbert L. Carson, in The Grand Rapids Press

 

$6.00 | 37 Pages | In Stock: 3

Naiad's Lantern by Esther Triess
Mothwing Press, 2003

This collection is a sisterhood of arresting imagery, that traverses the ethereal landscape of nature and puts us in intimate contact with her crowning mysteries.
Doug Holder/Dianne Robitaille of Ibbetson Street Press

This collection is enchanting and inviting from the beginning, connecting the human spirit to nature in ways that challenge my imagination. A pleasure.
Cynthia Brackett-Vincent, Publisher, The Aurorean

$10.00 | ISBN: 0-9724528-0-x | 48 Pages | In Stock: 4

POEMS by Ben Tibbs
PRESA :S: PRESS, 2005

I appreciate the poems for new images, new sounds, new wits, the reality & illusion, play on words, secret sorrows, melodies, serenades all good, substantial & yet poetic - they float your phrases & cling to memory as all good vintage does.
--Anais Nin

Publishers note (excerpt)
Ten years after the death of Ben Tibbs, his work has a timeless, contemporary feel…He published 16 collections of poetry, an autobiography, and 4 collections of cartoons during his life, over a thirty year period. All were small press editions. He designed the first cover for Charles Bukowski's first book, as well as for many other small press books and magazines.
--PRESA :S: PRESS

$6.00 | 39 Pages | In Stock: 3

PRISON POEMS by Christopher Presfield
Pygmy Forest Press, 2000

Your poems…they carry weight. But more than that they have strength. They are the words of a man committed to loving and fighting, with the taste of blood, and salty like the earth I've eaten myself.
--Leonard J. Cirino

$7.00 | ISBN: 0-944550-56-8 | 30 Pages | In Stock: 3

Seedpods by Glenna Luschei
PRESA :S: PRESS, 2006

Glenna Luschei's poems are always lively, brave, sometimes biting as lime juice - written by an enchanting mind.
--Robert Bly

 

$6.00 | 39 Pages | In Stock: 3

Side by Side by Denis Emorine
Foothills Publishing, 2006

Denis Emorine has published essays, poetry, short stories and plays. He has had numerous publications in France, Belgium, Romania, India and the USA. His plays have been performed in France, India and Russia.

(Excerpt)
Themes that re-occur throughout his writing include the lost or shattered identity, and mythical Venice. He also has a great interest for Eastern Europe. Denis Emorine is part of the editing team at La Nouvelle Tour de Feu (France) and colllaborates with various other reviews and literary websites in the U. S., Denmark, France, Germany and Japan. In 2004, he won first prize for his poetry at the Feile Filiochta International competition.
--Foothill Publishing

$8.00 | ISBN: 0-941053-87-3 | 30 Pages | In Stock: 2

Slow as a Poem by Linda Haviland Conte
Coverart: Jane Goldman
Ibbetson Street Press

Excerpts from the back of the book:
Slow as a Poem offers the reader a rich diversity of subject matter ranging from family life to the world at large...
--Robert K. Johnson, Professor Emeritus
Suffolk University, author of Sudden Turnings

Slow as a Poem is a whole book. Indeed, it's a song cycle, cued to the turnings of the seasons...In poem after poem, Contes work is lucid, serious, yet deliciously surreptitious in giving out its wisdoms.
--Luther Tyler, Department of English, Wellesley College

$8.00 | ISBN 0-9724601-1-x | 35 Pages | In Stock: 2

The Circle and the Line by Victoria Bouroncle
Pygmy Forest Press, 1994

Victoria Bouroncle has taught English in South America and worked as a freelance writer in Cairo, Egypt. In 1991, she received a Donald Barthelme Memorial Fellowship.

 

$8.00 | ISBN: 944550-34-7 | 57 Pages | In Stock: 3

THE COMING OF FASCISM TO AMERICA
by Norman MacAfee (signed copies)
The Bowery Poetry Club, 2006

"The information we are receiving is all false. Our country has betrayed us." Thus begins Norman MacAfees major new poem, "The Coming of Fascism to America," written in February and March 2005, as Bush's insane destruction of Iraq, and America, entered its third year. --The Bowery Poetry Club

$5.00 | ISBN: | 22 Pages | In Stock: 4

the deployment of love in pineapple twilight by Lynne Savitt
PRESA :S: PRESS, 2005

…Lynne Savitt is the Janis Joplin of poetry.
--Charles Plymell

These poems are heart-breaking, funny, introspective, angry, and masterfully-crafted.
--Dan Crocker

No one writes lust and life and our secrets, fantasy and actual, like this. If you are breathing, Lynne Savitt's poems are a must.
--Leo Connellan, poet laureate of Connecticut

Ambulance sirens ring through her words with the same burning intensity for life…
--Linda Lerner

$6.00 | 48 Pages | In Stock: 3

THE DRUNKEN BOAT & Other Poems From The French of Arthur Rimbaud
American Version by Eric Greinke
PRESA :S: PRESS, 2005

Greinke's renderings come across with such a remarkably contemporary feel, that he easily gets away with the occasional use of words like 'car' and 'suburbia'. This little collection boasts many fine poems. The Drunken Boat is wild and lovely and perhaps the poet's most vivid expression of his desire to find a life of total freedom.
--Edward J. Hogan in Aspect

$7.00 | 46 Pages | In Stock: 3

The Ladder of Desire by Roger Weaver
Pygmy Forest Press, 2006

Roger Weaver's poems have been published widely in periodicals including The Massachusetts Review, The Greenfield Review, Nimrod, The North American Review, Manzanita Quarterly, and Hubbub. Founding editor of To Topos.

 

$12.00 | ISBN: 0-944550-74-6 | 33 Pages | In Stock: 3

the music we are by Alan King
Publisher, year

Alan King is a freelance writer for the Prince George's County Gazette and Capital Community News. His publications include Wapland: A Journal of Black Literature & Ideas, When Words Become Flesh: An Anthology of New Generation Poetry, Taboo Haiku, and The Hurricane Haiku Anthology among others. He is also the author of his self-published book, "transfer."

$5.00 | 41 Pages | In Stock: 5

THE REBEL Poems by Charles Baudelaire
American Versions by Leslie H. Whitten Jr.
PRESA :S: PRESS, 2005

Whitten has not just captured the recurrent symbols and images that express Baudelaire's deep thematics, but he has found the rare and fragile metric and lyric devices to orchestrate and give nuance to the extraordinarily varied Fluers.
--Maurice A. O'Meara, Ph.D., Poet Laureate of France

 

$7.00 | 48 Pages | In Stock: 2

The Strain of Healing by Ben Wilensky
Pygmy Forest Press, 2000

Ben Wilensky's poems about Vietnam are gruesome, vicious, and alive.
--Leonard J. Cirino

 

 

$8.00 | ISBN: 0-944550-57-6 | 23 Pages | In Stock: 3

The Stream by Don Moyer
Moon Pie Press, 2006

…These poems are direct, challenging, smart and often thoroughly beautiful: dogs, kids, Chinese food, disability, poverty, what thrives, what fails-all indicate the worlds more alive than we may believe.
--Pamela Stewart

 

$8.00 | ISBN: 0-9769929-7-3 | 32 Pages | In Stock: 5

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.

$7.00 | 48 Pages | In Stock: 30

THIS LAND IS NOT MY LAND by A.D. Winans
PRESA :S: PRESS, 2005

His poems are heartfelt expressions of a wise observer, powerfully honest & uncompromised by literary fashion. One of our best poets.
--Eric Greinke

These poems will sear you with their honesty about the cruelty, greed, and rapaciousness at the heart of the American soul…
--Gerald Necosia

A.D. Winans is practically an incarnation of San Francisco…Stylistically and Philosophically he's a continuation of Beat Truth, telling it the way it is. No theory, just the smack of everyday (mainly street) reality.
--Hugh Fox

$6.00 | 44 Pages | In Stock: 3

TIME & Other Poems by Hugh Fox
PRESA :S: PRESS, 2005

He (Fox) examines the meaning of his existence continually, & never settles for easy answers. His personal relationships, his memories, his perceptions are all fodder for his well-aimed cannon. These poems are intimate & true. They occupy a space somewhere between autobiographical journalism, & Jungian dreamwork. Fox transfers so much of himself into these poems, that he defies time & mortality.
--From the Introduction by Eric Greinke

$6.00 | 43 Pages | In Stock: 3

transfer by Alan King
2006

Alan King is a freelance writer for the Prince George's County Gazette. His publications include The Warpland: A Journal of Black Literature & Ideas, When Words Become Flesh, and Inkstains.

"Talk about global warming...Desire moves through these pages like a heat wave...Seriously, you feel this book like the first really hot day after a long, long winter."
--Tim Seibles (http://www.cavecanempoets.org/pages/faculty.html#seibles)

$5.00 | 31 Pages | In Stock: 5

Up North by Harry Smith and Eric Greinke
PRESA :S: PRESS, 2006

(From the back cover) The 30 short poems in Up North evoke "that Northern feeling" & the universal mystery of time & space. Going up North is like traveling to another time. The radical special differences between urban & rural places encourage one to appreciate the relationships between people & nature from a fresh perspective.

$6.00 | 40 Pages | In Stock: 3

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 #94

W 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

$6.00 | 29 Pages | In Stock: 20

---

Home | Červená Barva Press Books | Poetry Chapbooks | Poetry Books | Anthologies | Fiction | Flash Fiction | Literary Journals | Non-fiction | Plays | Memoirs | Used Books | Audio CD's

---