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Poetry Chapbooks
March 7, 2013:
Microtones by Robert Vaughan
Microtones by Robert Vaughan
Červená Barva Press, 2013-
Robert Vaughan leads writing roundtables at Redbird- Redoak Writing. His writing has appeared in hundreds of journals. His short prose, “10,000 Dollar Pyramid” was a finalist in the Micro-Fiction Awards 2012. Also, “Ten Notes to the Guy Studying Jujitsu” was a finalist for the Gertrude Stein Award 2013. He is senior flash fiction editor at JMWW, and Lost in Thought magazines. His book, Flash Fiction Fridays, is at Amazon. His blog is: http://www.rgv7735.wordpress.com.
"Hip, rousing, and utterly winning, Microtones reveals Robert Vaughan as a sly master of concision, a nimble ringmaster of short-takes and X-ray-savvy mini-portraits. Buoyant, brimming with clear-eyed humor ("I have a bachelor of arts in folding laundry") and a larkish cinema verité candor, leavened with small gusts of compassion and social acumen, this is a chapbook Frank O'Hara would have loved."
—Cyrus Cassells, author of The Crossed-Out Swastika"Robert Vaughan sucks us into his luminous vortex with guts, humor and grit. Microtones is as much about transcendence as falling. Vaughan blasts through the subterfuge of the unsaid and lets us "face gravity head-on." This is a fearless, unparalleled collection reminiscent of Lydia Davis that takes us on a "free fall" of a ride we want to jump back on over and over again. Read it!"
—Meg Tuite, author of Domestic Apparition
Legacy
An observer would have
thought her unsuited
for that frame.I wondered why my
parents kept the photo on
the piano. She'd died overten years ago. Died on her
own, by her own stupidity.
A visitor would havethought her adorable,
precocious, serene.
Unable to see the contagiousrecklessness. Unable to see
the damage she inflicted.
How my family came undone.I slip her photo into
$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9883713-9-2 | 36 Pages | In Stock
the desk drawer. Underneath
a stack of report cards.
March 7, 2013:
amores gitano (gypsy loves) by Roberto Carlos Garcia
amores gitano (gypsy loves)
by Roberto Carlos Garcia
Červená Barva Press, 2013-
Roberto Carlos Garcia's work has appeared in Connotation Press- An Online Artifact, Wilderness House Literary Review, Poets & Artists Magazine, Metazen, Atticus Review, and others. His fiction is included in the anthology "The Lost Children," a book of 30 short stories to benefit children's charities PROTECT and Children 1st U.K.
"Amores Gitano (gypsy loves)" is his first chapbook.
A native New Yorker, he now lives and works in New Jersey where he is pursuing an MFA in Poetry and Poetry Translation at Drew University's Low Residency MFA Program.
You can follow Roberto Carlos Garcia on Twitter at @thespokenmind. His website is www.robertocarlosgarcia.tumblr.com
"In his chapbook, amores gitano, Roberto Carlos Garcia breathes adult passion into the craft of desire, these poems strip themselves, naked. They flirt and they want and each section a near erotic frame of determined risk ready to widen the realm of the reader's senses. Here is a poet who can dress and undress the lyric with his mind, hands and tongue."
—Thomas Sayers Ellis, Author of Skin Inc. Identity Repair Poems and The Maverick Room"Roberto Carlos Garcia gives us twenty stunning gypsy loves in amores gitano that together construct a language so wrought with desire it swaggers. This is a luminous book that marks the emergence of a new and important voice that is sure to stir up all kinds of bad."
—Sean Nevin, Author of Oblivio Gate
18.
There's a cruelty
about her
that's always hungry.When she finally takes,
finally tastes flesh
& is full,
what's left of me
is loved again,
her cruelty abates.In many ways
I'm a keeper
in a zoo.Once the lions are fed
$7.00 | 30 Pages | In Stock
I can enter the cage
but still,
I'm leaving my life
to chance.
January 25, 2012:
Except for That Poems by Rachel Goldstein
Except for That Poems by Rachel Goldstein
Červená Barva Press, 2013-
Cover Artist: Rachel Goldstein
Rachel Goldstein is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She was born in Germany in 1946 in a displaced person’s hospital. At the age of two, she moved to La Paz, Bolivia with her parents. Five years later, her family emigrated to Montreal, Canada, where she completed her education with a degree in English Literature from McGill University. Her poems have been widely published. In 2005, she won Second Prize in the Robert Penn Warren Award.
"The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Rachel Goldstein writes with a searing authenticity haunting in its evocative power. Her spare, elegant poems provide intimate and poignant insights into a harrowing time and lives lived bravely afterward."
—Barbara Wallace Grossman, Professor of Drama, Tufts University; Presidential Appointee to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2000-2005)"In this biographical collection, the author chronicles her parents' experiences before, during and after World War II. She helps the reader understand, "you were not there [when] eyes tilted toward the impossible." Each and every one of them was a "skin-thin weight [with] miles of wind in their bones." Their story will not die as long as "the willows still stand faithful in leafy gowns" and daughter-poet "sing what will not be redeemed.""
—Michal Mahgerefteh, Publisher Poetica Magazine
Reviews
Feb. 2, 2013 Doug Holder Blogspot Review:
$8.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9883713-1-6 | 33 Pages | In Stock
Review of Except For That by Rachel Goldstein
November 19, 2012:
Posture a fiction chapbook by Ateet Tuli
Posture by Ateet Tuli
Červená Barva Press, 2012-
Winner of the 2011 Červená Barva Press Fiction Contest
Judge: Catherine SasanovAteet Tuli lives and works in New York City.
Cover art by Ateet Tuli.
Fortune Teller
Perfume bomb whose silk surface protects a silver subcutaneous and is surrounded by parchment, you draw me close with evocations of mother preparing Dal for the week. The remembered architecture of you below cinnamon, against cardamom, below lime draws me so close I overlook your anger, which makes me cry.
You are capable of destruction, of warping a weft of garlic and chilies. I could cool you, put you in the fridge till you cannot overwhelm me. I could heat you, sweat you till natural sugar caramelizes and you can tell me nothing. I could hurt you also, dear onion. A mutual respect actualized as we grasp each other.
Pulled from a womb of dirt, you also have roots in ancient Asia. In eating you, I eat my relatives; their ashes fed your ancestry where they were spread. The dance of eating and burning you within my own burning body fertilizes the future, when in turn I will feed your children.
I dissect you, your rings akin to those of a tree, until I reach and consume your center. Its delicate youth lingers on my breath and is a flashlight for my tongue.
$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9883713-3-0 | 22 Pages | In Stock
August 23, 2012: A new chapbook from Teneice Durrant Delgado
Burden of Solace Poems by Teneice Durrant Delgado
Červená Barva Press, 2012-
Teneice Durrant Delgado is a co-founder and poetry editor for Blood Lotus: an online literary journal, and a proud graduate of Spalding University’s Low-Residency MFA. She is the publisher and managing editor for Winged City Press Chapbooks and also serves on the editorial board for New Sins Press.
Teneice is originally from Akron, Ohio but currently lives in Dayton, Ohio. Her poems have appeared in the Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Heartland Review, The Furnace Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Glass, Pisgah Review, Soundings East and in two chapbooks: Flame Above Flame and The Goldilocks Complex. She is currently pursuing a degree in Community Counseling at the University of Dayton.
Author’s Note
I have strived to make this chapbook as historically accurate as possible. There is not much information on the Irish Slave trade, but I found Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl by Kate McCafferty and To Hell, or Barbados: the ethnic cleansing of Ireland by Sean O’Callaghan to be particularly insightful. I’m also grateful to Dr. Natalie Zacek for meeting with me after a random email and an even more random trip to Manchester, U.K.
"In Burden of Solace, Teneice Delgado’s poems guide us through the brutality of the Irish slave trade while making a clear and poetic argument for human resilience and dignity under seemingly unendurable circumstances. This poet’s ear is clearly tuned to the past. Delgado tells a story that needs to be heard and she gives deft voice to the resigned and defiant."
—Kathleen Driskel, Associate Professor of Creative Writing, Spalding University"In Burden of Solace, Teneice Durrant Delgado boldly examines pain, fear, inevitability, and the soul’s arduous endurance. These poems yield an understanding of human captivity from new, devastating angles, and they vividly convey the ways in which hope can wither and flare."
—Marcus Jackson, Cave Canem FellowIt is ironic that theorists proclaim we may be in a post-racial society. Since poets are truth-seekers and truth-tellers, more and more books being published - and lauded - investigate race. Teneice Durrant Delgado’s latest effort, from her poems “Susan” through “Jamaica,” delve both deeply and deftly into the Irish slave trade, which has not been widely discussed. The poems in this collection, “Solace,” offer us the opposite. The Ship’s name remains one thing, while the planks rattle and the “air stood thick.” Reading work like this is what we need to do. We must remember slavery, for it is “something ancient and rage-filled,” but also current and must become forever “forbidden.”
—Glenn Sheldon author of Angels of Anarchy
Not John
I admire
the way he takes flogs
without flinching, hate him
for his strength when I cry
out. I wait, watch
his eyes. They are the color
of boiling molasses. He won’t lean
into any white womb. He spits on my
red face on his way through the field.
He doesn’t speak much
English, not many of us
slaves, white or black, do. But
he knows enough to say
I am not John. The mulatto driver
laughs with his whip. Get in line,
Not John.
Not white, he says,
not John. Not John won’t
say his real name. Barbados
isn’t big enough. He will not waste
his mothers' tongues
on rotting, sugar
sharp mouths.
Reviews
Poetry Matters: Poetry Book Reviews and Interviews
http://readwritepoetry.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-review-of-burden-of-solace-and.htmlReview by Barbara Bialick:
$7.00 | 26 Pages | In Stock
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2012/08/review-of-burden-of-solace-poems-by.html
July 9, 2012: A new chapbook from Matthew A. Hamilton
The Land of the Four Rivers
My Experience as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Armenia (2006-2008)
by Matthew A. Hamilton
Červená Barva Press, 2012-
Matthew is an MFA candidate at Fairfield University and a poetry reader for Mason’s Road and Drunken Boat. Prior to graduate school, he served as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Armenia (2006-2008) and the Philippines (2008-2010). He is also a former Legislative Assistant on Capitol Hill and a Benedictine Monk.
A 1999 graduate of Belmont Abbey College (BA History) Matthew is currently the librarian at Benedictine College Preparatory, an all-male, Catholic military high school. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.
The Land of the Four Rivers
I crawl out of the plane and walk
through a terminal that reminds me
of a prison I once visited in Moscow.
I smell soviet uniforms pushing people
out of moldy bread lines.
I see a black and white picture of two soldiers
beating a man in the frozen gulag.
I follow the line from baggage claim
out into the diesel air packed with greetings
and logistics, firm handshakes.
I throw my bag under the bus and take my seat,
fall asleep as we pull away toward the rising sun.
I wake up and look out the window.
Mt. Ararat is protruding
from the earth like a newborn’s tooth,
searching for the lost city of Noah,
the eyes of red delicious.
I see sun shadows, blue tears
of Eden dance in fields of cognac
and gold, the crevices of echoing snow
and yellow skies nourishing the navel
of the world.
Reviews
Fairfield University Review:
http://blog.fairfield.edu/inspired/?p=912Christopher Allen interviews Matthew A. Hamilton on his blog "I Must Be Off"
$7.00 | 42 Pages | In Stock
http://www.imustbeoff.com/#!/2012/05/expat-author-interview-with-matthew.html
June 30, 2012: A new chapbook from Kris Weinrich
Between Streetlights and Stars
by Kris Weinrich, 2012-
Kris Weinrich graduated from Emerson College in 2002 with a BA in Audio Engineering and a minor in literature. He has been a regular at open mics in Southeastern Massachusetts and is one of the poetry workshop facilitators for the Brockton Public Library Poetry Series.
"Kris Weinrich's poems are in the voice of the guy who knows that no good deed goes unpunished, but won't let it stop him from trying. It's true in love as the women in the poems are moving away, imagined, unapproachable, even for sale, yet he is in there swinging away. It's true out in the world of the skyline, subway, street illuminated by either streetlight or stars, both mocking him but not discouraging him. Weinrich earns our attention, sympathy and respect through crackling language. "Your bones beckon heat,/raging to ride trolleys over cracked concrete/into the brass blare of jazz nights/down streets humming park bench blues". Weinrich doesn't waste words or our time. Every line is rich in sound and meaning and emotion. That's a pretty good definition of rock and roll, and these poems rock."
$5.00 | 35 Pages | 2 Copies in stock
—David R. Surette, author of The Immaculate Conception Mothers' Club
June 16, 2012: A new chapbook from John Elsberg & Eric Greinke
All This Dark 24 Tanka Sequences
by John Elsberg & Eric Greinke
Červená Barva Press, 2012-
This chapbook is a companion piece to Catching The Light: 12 Haiku Sequences by John Elsberg and Eric Greinke, which Červená Barva Press published in 2009.
Eric Greinke has been active on the literary scene for nearly fifty years. He has been a bookseller, a publisher, an editor, a creative writing teacher, a book reviewer and a social worker for special needs children. His published work includes poetry, fiction, translation, social criticism and poetics, and has appeared in many books and chapbooks and in journals such as The Hurricane Review, Abraxas, Chiron Review, New York Quarterly, Wilderness House Literary Review, Main St. Rag, The South Carolina Review, California Quarterly, Mad Poets Review, Home Planet News, The University of Tampa Review, and the Paterson Literary Review. He has won several prizes, most recently a 2012 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award from the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. His most recent books are Traveling Music (2011), Beyond Our Control - Two Collaborative Poems (with Hugh Fox, 2012) and Conversation Pieces - Selected Interviews (2012), all from Presa Press. He is known for his collaborations with other poets, including Ronnie Lane, Brian Adam, Mark Sonnenfeld, Harry Smith, Richard Kostelanetz, Marine Robert Warden and Hugh Fox. All This Dark is his second collaboration with John Elsberg. They are working on a third. Website: www.ericgreinke.com.
John Elsberg is a poet, reviewer, editor, and historian. He is the author of over a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, and his work has been in a number of anthologies. He was the host of open poetry readings at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, for almost twenty-five years. He also has led various writing workshops, including explorations of experimental poetry with high school students. In the late 1970’s he was the fiction editor of Gargoyle. He has since been the editor or poetry editor of several other literary magazines, ranging from Bogg to The Delmarva Review on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where he and his wife Connie now spend a good part of their time. As a young man he taught for the University of Maryland, and then he spent many years as an editor/publisher of history books. His poems have appeared in a wide range of journals, such as Hanging Loose, the New Orleans Review, Lost & Found Times, Edgz, RAW NerVZ (Canada), American Tanka, and the Lilliput Review.
boggmag@aol.com
All This Dark
all this dark
stubble in winter sun
but I know
beyond the next turn
the wheat is neon green*
cardinals
stay with us through
the winter
an oriental bush
that blooms in fall*
late geese
across a rising moon
long trumpets
playing in a royal court
they exit left on cue
Reviews
Verse Wisconsin:
http://versewisconsin.org/Issue111/reviews/elsberg_greinke.htmlReview by Dennis Daly:
$7.00 | 32 Pages | In Stock
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2012/07/all-this-dark-24-tanka-sequences-by.html
April 15, 2012: A chapbook from Rich Murphy
Hunting and Pecking
Poems by Rich Murphy
Poetry chapbook, ahadada Books, 2009-
Rich Murphy was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, and has taught writing and literature for 23 years at Bradford College, Emman College and now at VCU. Credits include a book of poems The Apple in the Monkey Tree by Codhill Press; chapbooks Great Grandfather by Pudding House Publications, and Family Secret by Finishing Line Press; poems in hundreds of journals; and essays on poetics in journals, including Reconfigurations: A Journal Poetics Poetry / Literature and Culture.
"Rich Murphy is a genuine experimentalist, a tinkerer, a risk-taker of arresting, original, mordantly hilarious poems. He never seems content to repeat an achieved effect. He is always wrestling with some new project. He will figure into zany anthologies. And be admired for "difficulties," while in fact commanding attention through the clear vigor of his inventions. Rich Murphy, American original."
$10.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9811704-4-2 | 40 Pages | 3 signed copies
—George Starbuck
March 3, 2012: Circle Straight Back by Noel Sloboda
A new Poetry chapbook from Červená Barva Press
Circle Straight Back by Noel Sloboda
Červená Barva Press, 2012-
Originally from Massachusetts, Noel Sloboda lived in Missouri while earning his Ph.D. from Washington University. He currently serves as dramaturg for the Harrisburg Shakespeare Company and teaches at Penn State York. The author of the poetry collection Shell Games (sunnyoutside, 2008), he has also published several chapbooks. Learn more here: http://www2.yk.psu.edu/sites/njs16/
“In that ghostly area between flash fiction and prose poems, you’ll find the work of Noel Sloboda. At his best, his dry humor and easy way with a sentence propel you forward from each piece into the next. Not only will Sloboda show you where you’ve been in the world, he’ll let you know a bit about the future, too. His characters, ‘hungry for redemption,’ are the real achievement in this kind of short work. Solidly real, honest and forthright, they’ll stick with you like early childhood memories recalled by chance in the day-to-day struggle of living.”
—Rusty Barnes
Of Species
A tyrannosaurus and a triceratops put their heads together and guessed what would inevitably happen to all the dinosaurs, but the two could not agree how the end would come about.
It will surely be a flood, boomed the tyrannosaurus.
I rather suspect meteors will rain down, countered the triceratops in a loud contralto.
They debated for some time, before finally agreeing to disagree, since preventative measures—they decided—were more important, ultimately, than causes. United, they resolved to construct a massive canoe with a great umbrella mounted in its middle. They called their craft The Salvation, and as soon as it was seaworthy, they eagerly launched. In their haste, they forgot to bring paddles, and so the tyrannosaurus and triceratops drifted into the deeps, then drifted and drifted some more.
“It seems,” said the triceratops with an ironic smirk, “we’ve designed our own undoing. Surely, we’ll both starve out here.”
“One of us won’t,” said the tyrannosaurus, a gleam in one of his yellow eyes, which had a center shaped like a sharp tooth.
When he had finished his meal, the tyrannosaurs sighed heavily, regretting that his arms were too little to wipe his chops. Then he took down the umbrella and waited for the meteors.
$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock
October 23, 2011:
A new chapbook by Preston H. Hood
2012 Maine Literary Awards:
The Hallelujah of Listening by Preston H. Hood won the Book Award for Poetry!
The Hallelujah of Listening by Preston H. Hood
Červená Barva Press, 2011-
The Cover Art is a photo of G. Buddy Swenson’s Elusive Liberty (August, 2001) Paint on Wood Panel (48”X”36”)
Preston Hood was born in Fall River, Massachusetts and grew up in Swansea, Mass. He served in Vietnam with SEAL TEAM 2 (1970), and was a graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Bachelor of Arts in English, Magna cum laude, the University of Southern Maine, Bachelor of Science, and the University of Maine, Orono, Master of Education. For fifteen years, he was a member of Veteran’s for Peace. He published a poetry CD, Snake Medicine (2002), which was recorded by Berred Ouellette, and produced by Master Mind Audio. Summer Home Press published his first book of poetry, A Chill I Understand (2006). The Hallelujah of Listening is his first Chapbook (2011).
A CD of Preston H. Hood reading his poems is also available for $7.00. It was recorded by Berred Ouellette and produced by Disc Makers. The cover art of the CD face is a photo of G. Buddy Swenson’s Elusive Liberty (August, 2001) Paint on Wood Panel (48”x 36”).
After attending The William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences for 9 years, he edited with Jacqueline Loring and Gary Rafferty the Summer Home Review I (2002), and II (2005).
Through the Cape Cod Writer’s Center, he was interviewed with John McHugh, Secretary of the Henrich Böll Association, County Mayo, Ireland for Books of the World Television Program in Harwich MA (2006).
With Jacqueline Loring, he co-presented an overview of the Sixties Beat Poetry for The Wrinkle in Time: San Francisco Summer of Love (1967) Conference at Osher Life Long Learning Institute at University of Southern Maine. At the same workshop, he served on a panel discussion of both Civil Rights Issues and Why We Were in Vietnam (2009).
His poetry has been published in national and international journals and anthologies. He is a retired teacher and administrator currently writing his memoir. He spends his other time bicycling, kayaking, and hiking with his spouse Barbara J. Noone. He lives in Lyman, Maine.
The Hallelujah of Listening
From Dooniver we’re lured
by angels in the sun-dappled wind. They dance
with shadows, their radiant hair,
a seascape of waves & salt sundog air.Some of us walk through Achill’s mist
anointed by the whispering surf. Or charge into a valley
of an image, rave about the lowered moon
behind Slievemore’s cloud-covered top.Like first-light finches, I dart
into the thicket, feel the cool
morning silence. I climb with pilgrims
under a salmon-coral sky, voices chant invocations.The red-bellied fuchsias lift & sway
on this steep path, bloodstones of penance. Even sheep
turn to listen. I wish I knew if Croagh Patrick could be mindful
of them, & us, rapt in our chorus of hallelujahs.
With this stunning collection, THE HALLELUJAH OF LISTENING, Preston Hood will take his place among the greatest of the poet-warriors and poet veterans of our times. Hood’s poems bear witness to how the human spirit survives that which would kill it. One speaker stitches up the opening in the sky “before the dead crawl out” (“Opening in the Sky”). Another, painting naked in the yard among the blue jays and bees, draws “a door in the sky to enter,” hoping to “find what’s lost” (“first born”). I’m awed by the poetic joining of courage and beauty in these fierce and precise poems.
—Cynthia Hogue, Professor, Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, Tempe; Or Consequence (2010).I love Preston Hood’s new poems, and I cherish the spots of time he has been able to hold still in these poems just long enough to change your life. (From the Forward)
—Bruce WeiglWith Preston Hood’s The Hallelujah of Listening, I see a newfound confidence in the expression of his art. His beautiful images are often intimate and passionate, illusive and questioning, then shocking, real and haunting. As with other veteran poets, even when Preston’s poem is not about war, it forces you to think about warring, keeps you out of your comfort zone. In this new book, Preston asks us to “enter the mist, sit down in the fire of thought” to “let go of sorrow, let sorrow go” and promises, “the spirit lives to a renewal.” The journey is worth taking.
—Jacqueline M. Loring, Poet, Playwright, and Editor, Summer Home Review Anthologies, Volumes I and IIThe poetry of Preston Hood’s The Hallelujah of Listening is indeed a “climb from the struggle into the marvelous” as he says in his poem, “Our Singing.” His new book reads almost like the scripture of Psalms such is its beauty and transcendence. Indeed, “a tongue of the sky” slipped into his mouth and our soul is awakened to the realms in which only poetry has a voice.
—Lamont B Steptoe, Publisher/founder of Whirlwind Press, Winner of the American Book Award (2005)
Reviews
Hayden's Ferry Review:
$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9831041-7-9 | 56 Pages | In Stock
http://haydensferryreview.blogspot.com/2012/03/book-review-hallelujah-of-listening.html
Buy the Book for $7.00 >
Buy the CD for $5.00 >
Buy the Book & CD for $12.00 >
May 24, 2011:
A new chapbook by Stephen Frech
A Palace of Strangers Is No City
by Stephen Frech
Červená Barva Press, 2011Cover Art: Stanislav Lahoda
Stephen Frech has earned degrees from Northwestern University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Cincinnati. He has published three volumes of poetry: Toward Evening and the Day Far Spent (Kent State University Press) won the 1995 Wick Poetry Chapbook Contest, If Not For These Wrinkles of Darkness won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize, published in 2001, and The Dark Villages of Childhood won the 2008 Mississippi Valley Poetry Chapbook Prize. He has been the recipient of the Elliston Poetry Writing Fellowship, the Milton Center Post-Graduate Writing Fellowship, and grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and the Illinois Arts Council.
He is founder and editor of Oneiros Press, publisher of limited edition, letterpress poetry broadsides. Oneiros broadsides have been purchased by special collections libraries around the world, among them the Newberry Library (Chicago), the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the University of Amsterdam Print Collection.
Stephen Frech is Associate Professor of English at Millikin University.
Stephen Frech Website: www.stephenfrech.com
Stephen Frech in his sequence of prose poems called A Palace of Strangers Is No City gives us a Kafkaesque world, signaled by the very first poem that ends with the frightening uncertainty of whether an unknown “you” is having a carrousel maker’s dream, or whether the carrousel maker is having a dream of the “you.” […] There are of course many fine works that have dealt with imaginary and oppressive landscapes, but what makes Frech’s book wonderfully creepy is that the oppression is so deeply existential. […] Another prose sequence, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities comes to mind, and with Frech’s mastery of the prose poem, it’s not an exaggeration to say A Palace of Strangers Is No City ranks with that masterpiece.
—Peter Johnson, from the IntroductionA Palace of Strangers Is No City is a one-of-a-kind experience. In just twenty-two elegant pages it contains an epic journey across an imagined city. The happenings in this city are surreal, ominous, funny and vivid. The circumstances may be dreamlike, but the longing and the wisdom are entirely real.
—John Dalton, author of Heaven Lake
1.
When the carrousel maker died, he dreamed of horses, wild horses, giraffes, zebras, deer, all running riderless but in bright carnival colors, as if every animal he'd sculpted and painted in garish and gilt colors were running wild again as they had for him very early when he was young and hardly knew the difference between wild animals and those that circled the carrousel.You dreamed that night of escaping on a carrousel. The guards fire at you every time you come around again. You crouch down low to streamline your body for speed, then ride upright around the back side to slow it down, to delay the inevitable encounter with the guards. You are having one of his dreams, or he is having one of his dreams for you.
2.
$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9831041-3-1 | 33 Pages | In Stock
Dreams of confinement and escape follow each other uninterrupted, night after night until the one looks like the other. You walk a beach sided by high cliffs and turn to climb stone steps leading up. They're covered with sand; they enter the rock cliff tunneling in, so you're climbing in darkness. But there's sunlight ahead. Finally, stepped into full light, you push open the gate of a picket fence. The spring creaks. On the gate, a sign, dusted over. You must brush off the lettering with your thumb. It says: This is not the way to the world. You must return to the beach down the steps. You look around. In the large fenced fields, grass has grown tall or the deep green of vegetable leaves spread in the sun. A woman has hiked her skirt up over her knees and she is bent over tending to a plant. A dog nearby begins to growl deep in his throat. You know you must leave and take the long, steep stairs, covered with sand, carrying the large bag of birdseed you've had with you all this time, searching for sure footing in the dark, back to the deserted beach where you find an endless line of stairwells leading up. You must try each one. Confinement. Escape. They need each other.
A Palace of Strangers Is No City by Stephen Frech
Broadside$20.00 | In Stock
May 15, 2011:
A new chapbook by Pamela Annas
MUD SEASON by Pamela Annas
Červená Barva Press, 2011-
Pamela Annas grew up in the Navy, constantly moving from country to country. She singlehandedly raised a child who’s now in college and is herself a professor and associate dean at University of Massachusetts Boston, member of the editorial collective of The Radical Teacher, author of a Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath and co-author of two textbook/anthologies, Literature and Society and Against the Current. She looks forward to taking up blues harp in her retirement and in the meantime is quite pleased to see this first chapbook appear beautifully in print from Červená Barva Press.
"What resonates most clearly and powerfully in Pam Annas’s Mud Season is her ability to assume a variety of distinctive voices, and in so doing, speak from a variety of experiences. This is made possible because of the poet’s good ear for a diction that is not present simply to announce or decorate or please, but instead to carefully lure the reader into the lives she inhabits in order to tell a fresh and illuminating story of who we are."
—Bruce Weigl
Clotheslines
Back of the Navy housing project
the women hang the laundry.
Under a thin morning sun, braced
against a keening wind, my mother lifts
wet towels out of the wicker basket
heaves them to the curving clothesline
higher than the top of her head
and a late setting sickle moon.
I hand up the wooden pegs one by one
adrift in a cotton trance.The back yards are a harbor of sails
rippling in the icy breeze.
Freezing stiff, cotton diapers
are lined up in ranks on review.
My brother and I play hide and seek
among the swaying sheets, or crouch
between two lines as in a bivouacked
tent, telling stories of heroes and feasts.
Rows of back doors, scuffed dirt,
a red tricycle.Family uniforms come off the line
in a fading yellow afternoon. We
slide the pegs back into their cloth bag,
stack frozen diapers in the basket.
Red chapped hands wrapped
around mugs of hot chocolate thaw
in the cramped steamy apartment.
Clean clothes relax into tenderness
throwing off a fresh cold scent,
silver notes from a Celtic harp.My mother's life, the story of a day:
$7.00 | 40 Pages | In Stock
gathering, washing, hanging, drying,
sorting and folding, putting away.
February 10, 2011:
A Story and Poetry Chapbook Collection Edited by Susan Tepper
Valentine Day Massacre Edited by Susan Tepper
Červená Barva Press, 2011-
Fictionaut Authors' Valentine Day Massacre Challenge
Because I am a fool for love, I couldn't resist starting a Valentine Day Massacre challenge at Fictionaut. The result, as you see, is a complex assortment of printed goodies (white, milk, and dark chocolate) dedicated to valentines everywhere.
—Susan TepperStories & Poems by:
Doug Bond, Angela Brett, Estelle Bruno, Sheldon Lee Compton, Sara T. Einhorn, David Erlewine, Susan Gibb, Frank Hinton, Matt Kang, Dorothee Lang, Ryan McDermott, John Minichillo, Kevin Paul Myrick, Nora Nadjarian, Ajay Nair, Gabriel Orgrease, Derek Osborne, Meg Pokrass, Sam Rasnake, Beate Sigriddaughter, Marcus Speh, Paul Steven Stone, Miles Tepper, Susan Tepper, xTxFebruary 11, 2011, Fictionaut blog:
$7.00 | 49 Pages | In Stock
http://blog.fictionaut.com/2011/02/11/valentines-day-massacres/
January 15, 2011: A new chapbook from Zvi A. Sesling
Across Stones Of Bad Dreams
Poems by Zvi A. Sesling
Červená Barva Press, 2010-
Zvi A. Sesling has published poems in Midstream, Saranac Review, New Delta Review, Voices Israel Anthology, Cyclamens & Swords, Ship of Fools, The Chaffin Journal, Poetica, Ibbetson Street, Istanbul Literary Review, Illya's Honey, Wavelength, Asphodel, Main Channel Voices and Hazmat Review, and many others. In 2004 he was awarded Third Place in the Reuben Rose International Poetry Competition and in 2007 he received First Prize in the Reuben Rose International Poetry Competition. He was selected to read his poetry at New England/Pen "Discovery" in 2008 by Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish. He is editor of the Muddy River Poetry Review.
January 17, 2010
Review: Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/This great chapbook is about the giant dumpster of memory in the realm of past loves gone dead. The image of death carries right into the end, where Sesling imagines heaven as a welcoming place with a beautiful aquamarine sky like his mother’s ring…and yet there are his mother and father and relatives still instilling guilt and criticism and where “Piles of ancestors like old newspapers in the basement/will present themselves as headlines for me to acknowledge,…the sun yellow as the stars my aunts, uncles, cousins wore.” Only “Dogs from my past will bound forward through green fields,/tails wagging a quick metronome to their happy bark…” Continued...
$7.00 | 38 Pages | In Stock
October 16th: A new chapbook from Elaine Terranova
Elegiac: Footnotes to Rilke’s Duino Elegies by Elaine Terranova
Červená Barva Press, 2010-
Elaine Terranova is the author of four collections of poems, Not To, New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 2006) which was a runner-up for the Poetry Society's William Carlos Williams Award, The Dog's Heart (Orchises Press, 2002), Damages (Copper Canyon Press, 1996), and The Cult of the Right Hand, winner of the 1990 Walt Whitman Award (Doubleday, 1991) and an earlier chapbook, Toward Morning/Swimmers (Hollow Spring Press, 1980), Her poems have appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares, Boulevard, and Pleiades, and in these and other anthologies, A Gift of Tongues, Blood to Remember: American Poets write about the Holocaust, A Cadence of Hooves, and Riffing on Strings. Her work has been part of The Poetry Society's Poetry in Motion project. Her translation of Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis appeared in the Penn Greek Drama Series (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). She has received a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a National Endowment in the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants. She won the Anna Davidson Rosenberg competition in 1992 and has been Banister Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College and a Fellow at Bread Loaf. She is a writing specialist at the Community College of Philadelphia and a faculty member of the Rutgers, Camden, MFA Program in Creative Writing.
"I've long admired Elaine Terranova's poetry and Elegiac is another first-rate collection. Taking Rilke's Duino Elegies as a starting point, these "footnotes" to the older poet's work are technically sophisticated and sonically lovely. They're also deeply moving, meditating on mortality, God, and the constantly vanishing past, retrievable only through the vagaries of memory or the creative imagination. These are beautiful, impressionistic poems distinguished especially for their shifting, subtle intelligence and their emotional force."
—Kevin Prufer, author of National AnthemNovember 6, 2010
$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock
Review by Irene Koronas: http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2010/11/elegiac-footnotes-to-rilkes-duino.html
October 16th: A new chapbook from Jendi Reiter
Winner of the 2010 Červená Barva Press Poetry Contest
Barbie at 50 by Jendi Reiter
Červená Barva Press, 2010-
Winner of the 2010 Červená Barva Press Poetry Contest: Judged by Afaa Michael Weaver
Jendi Reiter's first book, A Talent for Sadness, was published in 2003 by Turning Point Books. Her poetry chapbook Swallow won the 2008 Flip Kelly Poetry Prize and was published in 2009 by Amsterdam Press. In 2010 she received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist's Grant for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The New Criterion, Mudfish, American Fiction, The Adirondack Review, The Broome Review, FULCRUM, Juked, The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Alligator Juniper, MARGIE: The American Journal of Poetry, Phoebe, Best American Poetry 1990 and many other publications. She is the editor of Poetry Contest Insider, an online guide to over 750 literary contests, published by www.winningwriters.com.
Visit her blog at www.jendireiter.com.
Jendi Reiter's Barbie at 50 contains an inventive re-imagining of the fairytale woman as well as iconic images of women, including Barbie. The poems are replete with surprise and peppered with humor. In her poem, "The Fallen Angel Writes a Letter Home" she writes, "I never run out of language. I'm easy listening. /Background music for the long drive away /from that sunset field where they fell under / the sweep of a great and lively silence." Her poems resound with lyrical language, and are not bound for silence, but for reading.In "The Happiness Myth" she jests, "Inside me is a thin person,/ two policemen, a rhododendron, and a sheepdog /trying to get out." Inside Barbie at 50 there is much more; a collection of well-crafted and delightful, well-imagined poems.
—Lori DesrosiersBarbie at 50 is a lush collection of poems with lines embroidered with the craft of a studied life. It's Barbie outdoing herself, leaving off the accursed weight of a 1950's perfectionism to discover the truth of genuine joy. These are poems of a life more real than any doll's, as they point up the grace of having confronted the problematic entanglements that attempt to derail a woman making her way through the puzzles of maturing in the last fifty years, a time studded with all ridiculous matter. These poems show us a difficult tenderness harvested from what makes us weep and what makes us shout out in celebration, what makes us laugh.
—Afaa Michael Weaver, Simmons CollegeThroughout this collection, various poems include reference to the following brands: Barbie and Ken, trademarks of Mattel Corp.; Maybelline, a trademark of L'Oréal USA Creative Inc.; and Project Runway, a trademark of Fashion Cents, LLC. No rights in these marks are claimed nor commercial affiliation intended.
$7.00 | 28 Pages | In Stock
September 22: Two chapbooks from Stella Vinitchi Radulescu
Diving with the Whales by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu
March Street Press, 2008-
In Stella Radulescu's poems, a second veil of stars seems to settle over the earth like the ashes of the dead, and yet the streets are lit up with the light of the new moon. Her poems are rich in connotations, metaphysically profound in some great unlocatable fashion.
Surreal, etherial, some of the poems enact ghostly things, and a very powerful world view glitters and solidifies, somehow, a seeing beyond what's there, depression as a visionary state, associative and oblique.
And yet her work is also full of the things of this world—birds fluttering through the night, trees, the sea—and in the half-light her lines haunt everything...
It's a dark poetry shining with the ecstacy of the imagination let loose, a triumph of being, a war against banality.
—David Dodd Lee, poet and editor, Half Moon Bay EditingThese unpredictable and often code-defying lines give us Stella Radulescu's unwinking eye for chaos, loneliness and the metaphysically absurd when before death without afterlife our hope and reality is "the amazing grace in ugly days," "fire on top of the pines," "hills sinking in sound," and "crimson for remembrance!"
$9.00 | ISBN: 978-1596610941 | 31 Pages | 2 copies
—Professor Paul Friedrich, Anthropology & Social Thought, University of Chicago
Last Call by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu
March Street Press, 2005-
...metaphysical thought, molecules drowning in stars; these poems are strong, mysterious, cryptic, surreal, ethereal, dangerous, bursting with authority, operating at a ghostly spiritual intuitive level; narrative embedded in an abstract universe that sometimes reconfigures time.
—David Dodd Lee, poet and editor, Half Moon Bay EditingIn dark, often powerul images, Stella Radulescu offers a rich experience to those who pay attention to her poetry. Stark and intense in her performance, these poems cut to the bone and blood, yet provide release and respite. On stage, she is an insistent voice that deserves to be heard, and on the page that voice continues to resonate.
$9.00 | ISBN: 978-1596610408 | 27 Pages | 3 copies
—Dr. Richard Prince, Professor of English, Lewis University and long time resident at the Green Mill, Chicago.
September 2: A new chapbook by Hugh Fox
Where Sanity Begins by Hugh Fox
Červená Barva Press, 2010-
Hugh Fox is a 78 year old poet originally from Chicago, has spent most of his life teaching writing, American literature and film in Champaign-Urbana, Los Angeles, Caracas, Santa Catarina (Brazil), Buenos Aires, etc. He has 110 books published, his most recent being, The Collected Poetry of Hugh Fox, published last year by World Audience in New York.
CONJURING
My mind and clothes are caught
$7.00 | 57 Pages | In Stock
in March winds as
buildings and cars go flat,
whirled into remembrances
of worlds antedating ecological
suicide, when the last farmhouse
spoke and sick meant soft warm
milk, "supported," not "supporting,"
when all I had to do, after class
and homework, was to whirl and be
a paisano of yo-yo's and kites, bikes,
popsicles, chocolate bars, ice cream
and second-day doughnuts and smoke
whirled off bonfires where I was baking
potatoes underground, snow whirled
off buildings and I flew into the wind like
a comet, there were no walls between
me and my world and it all flowed through
and with me.
August 26: A new chapbook by Daniel Y. Harris and Adam Shechter
Paul Celan and the Messiah's Broken Levered Tongue: An Exponential Dyad
by Daniel Y. Harris and Adam Shechter
Červená Barva Press, 2010-
As Ron Sukenick so aptly put it in his last book "Mosaic Man," Jews are both proto and posthuman. Adam Shechter and Daniel Y. Harris are possessed of that molten globe of fiery perdition that draws the brighter children of the tribe to the flame. Add poetry and oy! What can I say? Shechter and Harris have made another journey to the hellchamber of Jewish mystery/creation/death and came out in company, a big company that includes a lot of fried geniuses, but most of all they came out, and it's good to see them.
—Andrei Codrescu (www.codrescu.com), is the author of The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess (Princeton University Press) and edits Exquisite Corpse at (www. corpse.org).I can't begin to comprehend/surround all that is transpiring here in this Harris/Shechter collaboration/fusion—I'll need other readings toward adequate bearings—but as Seine suicide Paul Celan hovers among these pages of prayerful heresies—"no Shabbos-always Shabbos"—I experience a language that wields "pen as scalpel," and I feel flayed but grateful for this awakening into wild inquiry/attack. By way of thousands of years of Jewish history & of their own lives slashed out in poems & prose pieces of mesmerizing power, even as they wonder if they've gone too far, these two visionaries/revisionists have made something powerful & new here, something of charismatic complication. Oi Vey, & mazel tov.
—William Heyen, author of Shoah Train: Poems, finalist for the National Book Award
Adam Shechter is from Un-Brooklyn, the imperceptible imperialist brownstone aesthetic of 1989 Prospect Park West benches by Garfield Street. Adam has never been published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review and this fact is likely to never change. For this reason, he started the online journal, The Blue Jew Yorker. Sadly, this quaintly anarchistic periodical has not found its reputation competitive with the above named titans of publishing. Still, Mr. Shechter receives great emotional satisfaction in publishing authors and artists in the journal. A tragic and ironic fact of Adam's life is that his neighborhood of birth and raising, Park Slope, now houses some of the most successful authors of the writing world. Roger Cohen moved in next to his parents, a house where the fabled Christiansen family once lived. In line with Freud, listening to the same song over and over is one of Adam's favorite hobbies.
Daniel Y. Harris, M.Div, holds a Master of Arts in Divinity from The University of Chicago, where he specialized in Jewish theology and comparative religion and wrote his dissertation on The Zohar. He is the author of Unio Mystica (Cross-Cultural Communications Press, 2009) and Hyperlinks of Anxiety (forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press, 2012). He is the associate editor of The Blue Jew Yorker. He is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Among his credits are: The Pedestal Magazine, Exquisite Corpse, In Posse Review, European Judaism, SoMa Literary Review, Mad Hatters' Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Wheelhouse Magazine, Moria, Ygdrasil, Wilderness House Literary Review, Poetry Magazine.com, Denver Quarterly, Convergence, Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture and The Other Voices International Among his art exhibitions credits are: The Jewish Community Library of San Francisco, Market Street Gallery, The Euphrat Museum and The Center for Visual Arts. His website is www.danielyharris.com.
Big Bridge, Jake Marmer’s review:
http://www.bigbridge.org/BB15/toc.html
Click here for PDF VersionReview in The Pedestal:
http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/gallery.php?item=16628Review in The Jewish Forward by Jake Marmer: http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/132899/
Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue was picked as one of the 5 most important poetry books of 2010 by The Jewish Daily Forward. http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/134268/
$7.00 | 58 Pages | In Stock
July 23: A recent arrival from George Held
Phased Poems, Etc. by George Held
Poets Wear Prada, 2008-
George Held's inexhaustible subject is the moon in all its phases, and he treats it with a quiet ear-pleasing lyricism and an impressive range. His moons shine on the world, and, bathed in their various lights, his imagination shines on the subjects it conjures and illuminates.
—Michael Graves, author of Illegal Border Crosser (Cervená Barva Press) and Adam and Cain (Black Buzzard Press)A delightful, entertaining, and attractively presented collection celebrating our sidereal companion, the moon.
—ICONOCLAST #100George Held is the author of 10 poetry collections and the editor of the anthology Touched by Eros. A five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, he has published his stories, poems, book reviews, and translations in such places as The Philadelphia Inquirer, Circumference, The Notre Dame Review, Commonweal, Connecticut Review, and Confrontation. His most recent poetry chapbook, The Art of Writing and Others, appeared in September 2007 from Finishing Line Press. In December 2007, his poem "Aftermath" was read by Garrison Keillor on the Writer's Almanac. He has co-edited The Ledge Poetry and Fiction Magazine since 1991, the same year he joined the executive board of The South Fork Natural History Society and Museum (Bridgehampton, NY). A Fulbright lecturer in Czechoslovakia 1973-76, he retired as a professor of English at Queens College in 2004. Held resides in Greenwich Village with his wife, Cheryl.
$5.00| ISBN: 978-0-9817678-0-2 |27 Pages | 3 CopiesDiscount Price: $3.00
July 1: A new chapbook by Thom Brucie
Moments Around The Campfire
With A Vietnam Vet by Thom Brucie
Červená Barva Press, 2010-
Thom Brucie earned his MA in English at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, and his PhD at Binghamton University. His short story collection, Still Waters: Five Stories was nominated for a Georgia Author of the Year award in the short fiction category. His poems and stories have appeared in a variety of journals, including DEROS, Southwestern Review, San Joaquin Review, Cappers, and others. He teaches American Literature and Creative Writing at Brewton-Parker College. He and his wife, Carol, have six children.
The poems in Moments Around The Campfire With A Vietnam Vet flow with an incredible narrative voice spoken from the recollected perspective of a ghost poet with a precise eye for detail, a poet who carries you along the beautiful waterfall of misery with your eyes wide open and your heart in your throat. Each poem commands the page, daring the reader to deny its verity and weight, forbidding the reader to dismiss the small totals of Vietnam we still don't speak about. Wow. These poems took my breath away.
~Lana Maht Wiggins, University of Louisiana; author of Notes From Refuge, Felix Voorhies Award winnerMoments Around The Campfire With A Vietnam Vet is full of poignant poems about various characters who fought in the Vietnam War. Thom Brucie's style is direct, his images clear and specific, and the poems often end on a sardonic or ironic note. He makes us feel as though we were actually invited into the camp circle to hear the stories of these people, to know their longings and aspirations and disappointments. This is one of the best books of war poems I've ever read. I promise, you won't be able to put it down.
~Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Binghamton University; American Book Award winner for All That Lies Between UsCover Photo: Members of the 3rd Bn, 12th Inf, 4th Inf Div, "take five" during bunker construction on Hill 530, Vietnam War, 1967.
$7.00 | 42 Pages | In Stock
May 27th: A new chapbook by Gulnar Ali Balata
My Soul Still A Virgin by Gulnar Ali Balata
Červená Barva Press, 2010-
Cover painting by Ghada Habib
Gulnar Ali Balata was born in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1974. She is the author of two books of poems, Luna and Twelve Months (Hawar Press, 2006) and Song of the Sad Ruins (Hawar Press, 2008) published in Duhok, Iraq. Gulnar has had work appear in a number of literary journals, websites and anthologies in Kurdish and Arabic languages which are her first and second languages. She is now busy with her first story, a novel, and a third book of poetry.
She received an associates degree in English from Duhok, Iraq. She taught English for three years before she left home in 1996. Gulnar received an associates degree from Bunker Hill Community College in 2009. She currently is working on her bachelors degree in art. Her work has been published in newspapers and magazines in Kurdish and extensively on the Internet.
She has been listed as one of the top Kurdish women's voices in modern Kurdish poetry. Her poems have a romantic power. She uses a clean and pure vocabulary.
These are poems of exile, torn from the soil of the author's native Kurdistan. They are poems of the human spirit orphaned. They demand of the reader the care and compassion any orphan requires to retain hope and nurture the promise of return.
—T. Michael Sullivan, Director William Joiner Center's Writers' WorkshopGulnar's poetry speaks in English the language of her native Kurdistan. The mountains, streams, and valleys are both harsh and sensitive barriers in the mist. The ever present partridge reminds us of the country's beauty and beyond them and before them lies its sadness. Gulnar Ali Balata is a wonderful poet whom it has been my great pleasure to work with for the past several years watching her adapt her Kurdish and Arabic poetry to English.
—Tom Hooper, Bunker Hill, Community College
My soul still a virgin
The night holds its wings
Over the side of my expecting heart,
leaving wilted roses dew
on the morning star's face
smiling for the coming morning
that follows gulls' cheers.Tears of the sky
Flow for the grief of the night
And the vanquished body
hiding in the corner of the wilderness
Picks up his broken pieces
And what's left of his tears
To seek new.Preoccupied in abhorrent life
the maiden spirit with
its portable undying thirst,
its mystery of existence
and sense of its freedom of dreams and hope
remain after the confiscation of
waking up in the dewy morning,
Overlooking from the longing window
The chirping of birds.Three-colored autumn leaves
Squeezed with tears of grief last night
Despite struggling with the wind
Despite the rain
Adhering with tears on my car window
Smile on my face
Penetrate my skin
Dancing with Nightingale's musicSorrows of the body's reeling roar;
$7.00 | 38 Pages | In Stock
and the Spirit is still a virgin
which Lies on the lips of glamour
Calling the Moon
Waiting for the morning star.
A new chapbook from Charles P. Ries
I'd Rather be Mexican by Charles P. Ries
Červená Barva Press, 2010-
Charles P. Ries lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His narrative poems, short stories, interviews, and poetry reviews have appeared in over two hundred print and electronic publications. He has received four Pushcart Prize nominations for his writing. He is the author of THE FATHERS WE FIND, a novel based on memory and five books of poetry. Most recently he was awarded the Wisconsin Regional Writers Association "Jade Ring" Award for humorous poetry. He is the former poetry editor for Word Riot (www.wordriot.org) and a former member of the board at the Woodland Pattern Book Center. Charles is Co-Chairman of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. He will have a book of poetry published in early 2010: Girl Friend & Other Mysteries of Love that will be published by Alternating Current Pre, Leah Angstman, Editor. He is a founding member of the Lake Shore Surf Club, the oldest fresh water surfing club on the Great Lakes (http://www.visitsheboygan.com/dairyland/). You may find additional samples of his work by going to: http://www.literati.net/Ries/
El Latino Blanco
(The White Latin)I woke up throughout the night
as the fleas kept biting my toes.
Just my toes – the rest of me
didn t seem to interest them."El Latino Blanco" the bartender called me as
I ordered double shots of tequila throughout the night,
one for me and one for my friend the large white rabbit
called El Conjito Blanco Grande who sat invisibly next to me,
as he has next to the other drunks who have used him as an
excuse to order doubles.My dreams that night were ones of desolation and consolation.
Always in that order. I remember because the fleas kept me
on the edge of real time. Maybe they weren't fleas at all,
but insect sized psychic miners, biting me to lucidity and
injecting me with some sort of drunken-poet-dream-sex-venom.
I'm sure I'm not the first drunken poet to be visited in this way.
I'm sure I will not be the last.As the morning came, the fleas went to sleep and I too drifted away
$7.00 | 28 Pages | In Stock
into a deep cold river, waking to a pure blue sky, a massive Mexican
hangover and the smell of black coffee served to me by a mescal worm named Little Rico.
A new chapbook from Pam Rosenblatt
On How to Read The Manual by Pam Rosenblatt
Ibbetson Street Press, 2008-
On How to Read undertakes a vital mission, the questioning of the obvious in an age where the surplus of information seems to have created a new acquiescence. Rosenblatt's investigations make play itself an integral part of the act of reading while inviting us to question our world. This is a rich little book.
-Afaa M. Weaver, Pushcart Prize Winner 2008In her collection of poems, On How to Read - THE MANUAL, poet Pam Rosenblatt raises questions about reading, calling it an active occupation, and applying it to subjects as far flung as "How to Read a Tennis Player" or "How to Read a Feral Cat." She explores perception of many things in an original, smart and enjoyable way, a kind of Dr. Seuss meets Gertrude Stein meets Kurt Vonnegut style that is new and fresh. If, as Gertrude Stein maintained, you have to go deep down and let go of sophistication to become truly sophisticated, Rosenblatt fulfills the task. These poems ask simple questions and send the reader on a journey into new territories, leading us to look at the world through her discerning eyes and enjoy her wry homor. You'll never drive the same after reading "On How to Read a Green Light." Take a journey into the ordinary world and enjoy these engaging manuals. You'll be glad you did.
$7.00 | 26 pages | 5 signed copies
-Anne Brudevold, Editor, Eden Waters Press
April 6, 2010: A new chapbook from Jack Phillips Lowe
Revolt at the Internet Café
poems by Jack Phillips Lowe
Onzo Imprints, 2010-
Jack Phillips Lowe is a lifelong Chicago resident. Like Don Quixote he went mad from reading too many books—so much so that he took to writing them.
Lowe's work has appeared in Barbaric Yawp, Pens On Fire, and Bewildering Stories, among other outlets. His previous chapbooks include So Much for Paradise (poems, MuscleHead Press, 2000) and Long Form (poems, Free Though Publications, 2004). Lowe's most recent effort is a collection of short stories, Pariah Tales (Onzo Imprints, 2007).
Among all his mentors, both personal and literary, Lowe was most influenced by his late grandmother, who never hesitated to tell him that he's nuts.
"This kid's got a lot of energy."
—Mark Spitzer, Exquisite Corpse"Mr. Lowe covers a lot of ground at a brisk pace, with craft."
—Phil Wagner, The Iconoclast"[Lowe] makes you laugh, then cringe in suspense."
$3.00 | 22 Pages | 3 Copies
—Kohn Berbrich, Barbaric Yawp
March 16, 2010: The Lines Are Not My Friends Poems by Stacia M. Fleegal
The Lines Are Not My Friends
Poems by Stacia M. Fleegal
Červená Barva Press, 2010-
Stacia M. Fleegal is the author of Anatomy of a Shape-Shifter (WordTech, forthcoming 2010) and the chapbook A Fling with the Ground (Finishing Line Press, 2007). In 2009, individual poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appeared or are forthcoming in Fourth River, The Louisville Review, Skidrow Penthouse, Pemmican, Blue Collar Review, The Kerf, Prick of the Spindle, New Verse News, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, The Heartland Review, and Babel Fruit. She received her MFA in writing from Spalding University, is co-founder and managing editor of Blood Lotus (www.bloodlotus.org), and recently co-founded Imaginary Friend Press (named after Thomas McGrath's Letter to an Imaginary Friend) with her partner, the poet Dan Nowak.
An Unknown Poet's Grandiose Call to Action
If all the living world is your canvas and
you can see where there is red earth and
you can hear where there is white noise and
you can taste orange and yellow fruits and
you can smell purple in a hard-earned spring and
you can feel blackness or rainbows andyou can hug your children and
you can joke about incompetent leaders and
you can relate to suffering and
you can feel remorse and
you can stockpile food in your basement and
you can worship your television and
you can answer your phone when it rings and
you can buy things with promises and
you can never run out of promises and
you can promise that and
you can promise nothing else of substance andyou can hear about Darfur and Burma and
Lebanon and Detroit and
St. Louis and Miami and
rape-as-a-weapon and hate crimes and
drowned polar bears and extinct butterflies and
dead uninsured babies and jobs outsourced and
everyone everywhere casting stones andyou can sleep at night and
you can hold the tool you were given at birth on this soil and
you can appreciate art when being cultured is "in" and
you can testify that pictures on menus deepen hunger and
you can see the merit of having the whole picturehow then does your brush still hang lamely at your side?
$7.00 | 28 Pages | In Stock
February 27, 2010: Commodity Fetishism by Susan Lewis
Commodity Fetishism by Susan Lewis
Červená Barva Press, 2010-
Winner of the 2009 Cervena Barva Press Poetry Contest
Susan Lewis is the author of "Animal Husbandry" (Finishing Line Press, 2008). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Atlanta Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, The New Orleans Review, Phoebe, Raritan, Seneca Review, So To Speak, Verse, and Verse Daily. Her collaborations with composer Jonathan Golove have been performed at such venues as the Kennedy Center and Carnegie's Weill Hall.
Cold ontology and normative longing have met their antidote in these derivations of bright oughts from the imperfect is – progressions as hopeful as they are rigorous. Welcome to the unknowable nursery of tomorrow’s big payoff, the source of all tantalizing hypotheticals. Here even the schism between practitioners and their actions is not mere disconnect, it’s the animating principle that gives us room to evolve. Welcome to Susan Lewis’ genesis in the retort, lush with secret memes of closed door intimacy.
–Brendan Lorber, Editor/Publisher, Lungfull! MagazineCommodity Fetishism is at once a verbal collage of the mental rigamarole of daily living and a compendium of irony and sentiment. These poems are terse yet opaque, jokey yet unapologetically consequential. This chapbook is off-beat, perfectly tuned, and compulsively readable.
–Wayne Thomas, Editor, The Tusculum Review
COMMODITY FETISHISM
Because he abhorred the notion of work, the young man turned his home into a museum, offering his life as the sole exhibit. Although at first there were few visitors, the curious were given to repetitive, even compulsive, attendance. Soon their devotion became contagious, and the museum's patrons grew in number, especially as the exhibits explored themes such as Restless Yearning, Acceptance, and Doubt. By the time Reexamination was put up, scores of disappointed viewers had to be turned away. When Resignation made way for Peaceful Detachment, the public rioted, insisting that the museum never close. Tearful strangers mobbed the old man with their grief and unreasonable need, forcing him to retreat the only way he could.
$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-692-00642-9 | 34 Pages | In Stock
February 27, 2010: Snakes and Angels Adaptations of Indonesian Folk Tales by James Penha
Snakes and Angels Adaptations of Indonesian Folk Tales by James Penha
Červená Barva Press, 2010-
Winner of the 2009 Cervena Barva Press Fiction Contest
A native New Yorker, James Penha has lived for the past eighteen years in Indonesia. He teaches at STB-ACS (International) School in Jakarta. No Bones to Carry, the latest volume of Penha's poetry, is available from New Sins Press at www.newsinspress.com. His award-winning 1992 chapbook On the Back of the Dragon is downloadable from Frugal Fiction at www.frugalfiction.com.
Among the most recent of his many other published works are articles in NCTE's Classroom Notes Plus; fiction at East of the Web, Big Pulp, and Ignavia; and poems in THEMA, Storie, Naugatuck River Review, Waterways, and in Only the Sea Keeps: Poetry of the Tsunami (Bayeux Press), and the two Silver Boomers anthologies. Penha edits The New Verse News, a website for current-events poetry at www.newversenews.com.
Since childhood when my father told me Jewish and/or Russian folk tales and my mother would conjure old German stories, I have been fascinated by tales based on the mists of past times. Now along comes James Penha, a native New Yorker living in Indonesia, who has written down three Indonesian folk tales. Usually one thinks of a page turner as a mystery or suspense novel, but Penha’s three tidy little stories wrapped up in 34 pages keep me reading until the end. And what endings! I won’t tell you, but I will say that the first story “Dust and Stone” will be familiar to many readers from other cultures because it has universal themes found in English and Greek literature, the Old Testament, among many others. The first tale tells about a magician who is turned into a dog during day and a man at night, the woman who loves and their son who....well, that’s enough for now. Just say you will enjoy this story as much as I did.
The second story, “The Farmer and His Angel” is another well known theme of love found and lost, deceit and redemption in which a young man finds the woman of his dreams and desire in a most unusual, and deceitful way and learns that in the long run the truth will be revealed.
The final tale in this trilogy is “The Snake Boy” which incorporates the themes of the first two stories, but with a different twist and a unique route by which it gets there and Penha’s interpretation of this – as with all three tales – is well and cleanly rendered.
Snakes and Angels will hold any reader’s interest and give parents new stories to tell their children at bedtime rather than the age old Mother Goose or Aesop fables that schools tell and parents repeat. These fresh takes are wonderful stories that teach and entertain at the same time and will last a long time in your memory.
-Review by Zvi A. SeslingLike Baroque pearls on a string the narratives possess the beauty, wisdom and universality of folktales. The wonderful poetic adaptations speak to us today...
-Rochelle Owens"Snakes And Angels" is a remarkable feat of preservation of folklore through ingenious retelling by a masterful hand. The mythic lives on through the creative effort to erase the division between past and present by giving it a new voice that tells us not what was but what is and always will be.
$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock
-George Economou
December 2, 2009: Only A Mirage by Alexander G. Dryer
Only A Mirage by Alexander G. Dryer
Červená Barva Press, 2009-
Červená Barva Press starts a children's poetry chapbook series. This is by solicitation only. Any manuscript received will be returned unread. Červená Barva Press is proud to publish our first in this series by Alexander G. Dryer. He is an excellent writer way beyond his age. We are very proud to publish this chapbook but will not publish where Alexander lives or any personal information about him since he is a child.
Alexander Gregory Dryer composed the poems in this book during the eighth, ninth, and tenth years of his life. He loves writing poems, but does not force the ideas onto paper or give himself deadlines. He really loves when the ideas just flow. Alexander says that his Auntie Woo-Woo is a source of inspiration for his poems. When asked to describe the room he writes in, he said, "It is a quiet room with lots of books, organized writing supplies, and my Lego creations."
Alexander lives with his mom, dad, two cats, and dog. He enjoys school, reading, learning to play the violin and piano, and building with Legos. When he grows up, he wants to be a paleontologist and a professional violinist.
Three Desert Haiku
I. Prickly cactus grows
Very high above the ground
And resists the wind.II. Lake in the desert
Glistens brightly in the sun
Only a mirage.III. Snake slithers quickly
$5.00 | 18 Pages | In Stock
To catch a spotted lizard
That darts in the sand.
November 14, 2009: Catching The Light 12 Haiku Sequences
by John Elsberg and Eric Greinke
Catching The Light 12 Haiku Sequences
by John Elsberg and Eric Greinke
Červená Barva Press, 2009-
Eric Greinke has been active on the literary scene since the late sixties. He has studied and published with many of the major poets of the post-modern period, including Robert Bly, Ted Berrigan, Charles Reznikoff, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley and Donald Hall. He has taught creative writing in Grand Rapids City School and for the Michigan Poets In The Schools program and spent 25 years as a social worker for special needs children. He has a long history of collaborations with other poets, including Ronnie Lane, Brian Adam, Harry Smith, Mark Sonnenfeld, Richard Kostelanetz and Hugh Fox. He has published poetry, fiction, translations, creative non-fiction and essays in hundreds of books and magazines internationally, including recent American appearances in The New York Quarterly, The California Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, The Mad Poets Review, and the Home Planet News. His work has been nominated six times for a Pushcart Prize. His long poem For The Living Dead won the 2008 Muses Review Award for Best Poem of the Year. His most recent poetry collection is Wild Strawberries. He lives with wife Roseanne on a Michigan lake where they publish under the Presa Press imprint.
www.ericgreinke.com.
John Elsberg is a poet, reviewer, editor, and historian. He is the author of over a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, and his work has been in a number of anthologies. He also was the host of open poetry readings at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland, for almost twenty-five years. He has conducted various writing workshops (to include experimental poetry on the high school level) and judged numerous poetry contests. He was the fiction editor of Gargoyle in the late 1970's, and he has been the editor of Bogg: A Journal of Contemporary Writing since 1980. He also sits on the editorial board of The Delmarva Review on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where he and his wife Connie now spend a good part of their time. In terms of a "daytime job," as a young man he taught for the University of Maryland, and then he spent many years as an editor/publisher of history books. His poems have appeared in a wide range of journals, such as Hanging Loose, Blue Unicorn, the New Orleans Review, Lost & Found Times, RAW NerVZ (Canada), Modern Haiku, and the Lilliput Review.
boggmag@aol.comEngland's 2010 Purple Patch Awards have been announced. Catching The Light is on their list (#14 of 20) of Best Individual Collections of the Year.
$7.00 | 32 Pages | In Stock
Check it yourselves at www.purplepatchpoetry.co.uk
November 14, 2009: Celebrity Slumbers by Judson Hamilton
Celebrity Slumbers by Judson Hamilton
Červená Barva Press, 2009-
Judson Hamilton lives in Wroclaw, Poland. He has a chapbook entitled ‘No Rainbow' (Greying Ghost Press) forthcoming this year. More of his work can be found by plugging his name into the search engine of your choice.
He can be reached at: be_mightee@hotmail.com
Celebrity Slumber [17]
We all stood in the greeting line after the wedding, waiting to congratulate Dustin Hoffman on his upcoming role as Nolan Ryan. When it came my turn I edged forward and gave him the requisite three kisses, ducking under the bill of his Astros cap and commented briefly on his sunset-striped uniform. He seemed taller in cleats as he transfixed me with a warm gaze, holding my hand in both of his mitts.
$7.00 | 35 Pages | In Stock
November 7, 2009: The Possibility of Recovery by William Delman
The Possibility of Recovery by William Delman
Červená Barva Press, 2009-
William Delman received the Academy of American Poets Prize at Boston University in 2006. His poetry has appeared in The Literary Review, The Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, Salamander, CT Review, Rhino, and other fine publications. He is the director of The Bay State Underground reading series at Boston University, and an editor at Agni Magazine.
Praise for "The Possibility of Recovery"
"William Delman sees with the encompassing range and stringent attention of true poetry: the haunted figures of a particular family are never far from the long reach of human history in these poems. Conversely, myth and epic, with all their imaginative force, are never far from the quirks and tragedies of actual American life."
-Robert Pinsky"To make it more real' are the first words uttered in this book, and they name the impulse that is at the heart of William Delman's poetry. Here is mortal illness, the violence of war, the long-lingering effects of trauma, the way soul-wounds pass from parent to child, such things that one might naturally flinch from. But here too is finely-textured language, haunted and haunting imagery, and a sharply incised poetic line, all of which teaches us 'the art of seeing things' and with that, the possibility of recovery."
-Fred Marchant"'Home, what is not here, and what is' Willian Delman's poems are intensely focused, mostly about domestic and familial history, but these seen, as in his wonderful poem, at once pitying and unrelenting, 'My Wedding Day in Brugge,' also in the context of our wars. The austere spareness of these poems is eloquent and moving."
$7.00 | 43 Pages | In Stock
-David ferry
October 18, 2009: A Rarity by Grzegorz Wróblewski
A Rarity by Grzegorz Wróblewski
Translated from the Polish by Agnieszka Pokojska
Červená Barva Press, 2009-
Grzegorz Wróblewski, born in 1962 in Gdansk and raised in Warsaw, has been living in Copenhagen since 1985. He has published eight volumes of poetry and two collections of short prose pieces in Poland; three books of poetry, a book of poetic prose and an experimental novel (translations) in Denmark; and a book of selected poems in Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as a selection of plays. His work has been translated into five languages. The English translations of his poems and/or plays have appeared in London Magazine, Poetry London, Magma Poetry, Parameter Magazine, Poetry Wales, The Delinquent, Chicago Review, 3rd bed, Eclectica, Mississippi Review, Absinthe: New European Writing, Common Knowledge, Word Riot, Practice: New Writing + Art, The Mercurian – A Theatrical Translation Review, Lyric, Exquisite Corpse, Jacket Magazine, West Wind Review and in the following anthologies: Altered State: The New Polish Poetry (Arc Publications, Todmorden, UK 2003), Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird (Zephyr Press, Brookline, USA 2004), A Generation Defining Itself – In Our Own Words (MW Enterprises, USA 2007). A volume of his selected poems Our Flying Objects (Equipage Press, Cambridge, UK) was published in 2007. His chapbooks to date are: These Extraordinary People (erbacce-press, Liverpool, UK 2008) and Mercury Project (Toad Press, Claremont, USA 2008).
Agnieszka Pokojska is a freelance translator and editor, tutor in literary translation at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and author of a number of articles on translation. Her translations into Polish include poems by Seamus Heaney, Robert Pinsky and Derek Walcott. Her translations of Grzegorz Wróblewski's poetry appeared in the anthology Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird, in Lyric Poetry Review, West Wind Review, Eclectica Magazine, The Delinquent and Poetry Wales.
$7.00 | 32 Pages | In Stock
September 16, 2009: Unrestrained by Jennifer LeBlanc
Unrestrained by Jennifer LeBlanc
Červená Barva Press, 2009-
Jennifer LeBlanc is currently pursuing a B.A. in English from Regis College in Weston, Massachusetts. Her book Coloring the Shadows (2009) won the Mary C. Bryan Women's Studies Award for 2009, and she represented Regis College at the 2009 Greater Boston Intercollegiate Poetry Festival. She is an editor of Regis College's literary journal, Hemetera, and her poetry has been published in Bolts of Silk, Oak Bend Review, and Up the Staircase, among others.
$7.00 | 28 Pages | In Stock
September 4, 2009: Beowulf by Martin Burke
Beowulf by Martin Burke
Červená Barva Press, 2009-
"Burke is the eloquent essayist of the sublime"
Projected Letters"His style is far ahead in terms of imaginative inventiveness
This is startling, original work"
Kiosque Review
Beowulf
TO BEGIN with the hero is inaccurate
Begin with his opposite
The one he must meet
The one he will forever be named byBegin with time ripening to a specific purpose
With events entering history at a critical moment
Begin with GrendelGrendel: beast/man/beast
Grendel: purpose-driven like no other
Grendel: a law unto himselfThis is the one who names the hero for all time
The one doomed from the beginning
And yet this is not a minor roleO no
Not Grendel
Not the man-beast as he broods in his lair
Not as he plots the destruction he will bring
Not as he delights in the prospectAnd he will bring destruction
O yes
Destruction and wanton despair
To those who cannot fight himMartin Burke was born in Ireland but lives now in Brugge, Belgium
$7.00 | 52 Pages | In Stock
September 4, 2009: Waiting By Godot by Alexander Motyl
Waiting By Godot by Alexander Motyl
Červená Barva Press, 2009-
Alexander Motyl is a writer, painter, and professor. His novels include Whiskey Priest, Who Killed Andrei Warhol, and Flippancy. His art is represented by The Tori Collection. Motyl teaches at Rutgers University-Newark and lives in New York City.
His web site is: www.AlexanderMotyl.webs.com.
$1.00 | 5 Pages | In Stock
4 new arrivals from Toad Press
Fernando de Rojas Asleep on His Own Hand by Rafael Ballesteros
Translated from the Spanish by Steven J. Stewart
Toad Press-
Rafael Ballesteros (1938-) lives in the Mediterranean city of Màlaga. He was a member of Spain's national legislature and helped draft its post-Franco constitution. Ballesteros is the author of numerous works of poetry and criticism, including the collection of poems Los dominios de la emoción which was released in 2003 by Pre-textos (Valencia, Spain). He is also the founder of Editorial Veramar, a publisher of experimental literature from Spain (www.editorialveramar.com).
Steven J. Stewart was awarded a 2005 Literature Fellowship for Translation by the National Endowment for the Arts. His book of translations of Spanish poet Rafael Pérez Estrada, Devoured by the Moon, which was published by Hanging Loose in 2004, was a finalist for the 2005 PEN USA translation award.
$5.00 | In Stock: 4 copies
The Factory of the Past poems by Mariana Marin
Translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Daniela Hurezanu
Toad Press-
$5.00 | 35 Pages | 2 copies
Mercury Project Poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski
Translated from the Polish by Adam Zdrodowski
Toad press-
$5.00 | 18 Pages | 2 copies
Of The Same Mind Poems by Jóhann Hjálmarsson
Translated from the Icelandic by Christopher Burawa
Toad Press-
$5.00 | 41 Pages | 2 copies
May 5, 2009: Opuscula Small thoughts, hardly worthy of note by Steve Glines
Opuscula Small thoughts, hardly worthy of note
by Steve Glines
Červená Barva Press, 2009-
Steve Glines, in addition to being the editor of Wilderness House Literary Review, is an essayist, journalist, storyteller, occasional poet and bon vivant. His motto is, "The best is barely good enough." Steve has published six books, only one of which might be considered even remotely "literary," a travelogue about Fiji. He has been published in Ibbetson Review, The Belmont Citizen, The Littleton Independent, Unix Review, Technology Review, The Boston Globe, The New York Times and The Hartford Current among others. He has never been published in The Paris Review, The Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, The Atlantic Monthly or The Kenyon Review. To these awesome credentials it should be added that he has never received a McArthur Award nor been nominated for a Pulitzer or Pushcart Prize. Still, for some reason, people like what he writes and, on occasion, even pay him for it.
$7.00 | 37 Pages | In Stock
April 28, 2009: Balancing on Unstable Ground by Francis Alix
Balancing on Unstable Ground by Francis Alix
Červená Barva Press, 2009-
Francis Alix's Balancing on Unstable Ground employs all the reader's senses – the poems bleed and chirp and thunder and exude odors both foul and fair. Through unstinting depictions of war and spent love, Alix chronicles what could be the end of things, but, with an alchemist's pen, transmutes them and us into a vivid way forward "on the wings of foraging birds."
-Lisa Beatman, author of Manufacturing America: Poems from the Factory FloorFrancis Alix's Balancing On Unstable Ground echoes Walt Whitman's "The Poetry of the Future," in which Whitman states, "The poetry of the future aims at the free expression of emotion… and to arouse and initiate more than to define or finish…" Alix's clear imagery and graceful short lines are concentrated in the emotions of loss, longing, and pity for the planet. They "arouse and initiate" a common feeling of sorrow in the reader as for the starving child in "Kansas" with "her bent legs grasped by her arms, /both thin as cornstalks" or the starlings in "The Journey" who are "exiled/dumped into the modern wild." His subjects are never totally defined or finished; rather they ignite the reader's own irony and melancholy. This affect is impressive in such minimalism. You can hear Alix's voice speaking them to you with a fervor for living that makes the ordinary extraordinary. Bravo on a well crafted first book whose control of language brings the poet and the reader into a tender dynamic.
-Jane Lunin Perel, Professor of Creative Writing and Women's Studies, Providence CollegeReading Alix's work, I am reminded of this line from the song, Jungleland, by Bruce Springsteen, in which the lyrics protest, "And the poets down here don't write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be," frustrated that poets have somehow abdicated their responsibility by averting their eyes, but more importantly, their words from the struggles, triumphs and drama of everyday life. Alix has been recording life as only he can see it, our world seen through poetic eyes, unafraid to see the harsh realities and capable of sparkling revelations. He has been busy down here, knee-deep in a poets work, bringing our attention to the glories and cruelties, through poetic stories only he can tell. Whatever the subject, Alix slices to the heart of it, as only a poet can do. Springsteen is wrong. There are real poets down here, refusing to let it all be. Francis Alix is one of them.
$7.00 | 36 Pages | In Stock
-Eileen D'Angelo, Editor Mad Poets Review
April, 2009: A Settlement of Words Poems by Ioan Tepelea
A Settlement of Words Poems by Ioan Tepelea
Translated from Romanian by Flavia Cosma
Červená Barva Press, 2009-
Ioan Tepelea was born in Oradea, Romania on June 3, 1949. He graduated with a PhD in History and Philosophy at the University of Cluj, Romania. Since 1989 he distinguished himself as one of the most important animators of literary and scientific activities in Romania. A University Professor, Mr. Tepelea is the president of ASLA (Arts, Literature and Sciences Academy, Oradea, Romania). He is also the Editor en Chief of prestigious literary magazines such as Unu, Aurora and Altheia. Mr. Tepelea authored fourteen poetry collections, both in Romanian and bilingual editions. His work is represented in numerous anthologies in various countries and languages. Ioan Tepelea is a member of The Writers Union of Romania.
From the introduction:
$7.00 | 24 Pages | In Stock
Ioan Tepelea's intimate connection with the surrounding reality is characterized by a fabulous openness toward the universe. In his interior poetic space the entire universe is brought forth in all its wealth, in its most insignificant details, like a miraculous fairy tale Prince Charming.
Tepelea's poetry bears witness to a prolonged practice of cohabitation between the poet and these living creatures that are the words, establishing strong chemical and alchemical ties between the creator and his work...
Ion Popescu-Bradiceni
Released April, 2009: The Book Of Colors And Painters by Korkut Onaran
The Book Of Colors And Painters by Korkut Onaran
Červená Barva Press, 2009-
The Book of Colors and Painters contains a 15 page poem (titled The Book of Colors) and 6 shorter poems that complete each other. The Book of Colors attempts to create a community of colors, each having its own personality, along with the richness of relationships one can find in a community. By means of parentheses, footnotes, and parentheses in the footnotes, the poem tries to create multiple-voices and depth. The poem is organized like a one-act play with its opening, introduction, development, and closure. The sections - 15 in number - create a rhythm through which new themes are introduced and overlapped on the previous ones.
Korkut Onaran, originally from Turkey, lives in Boulder, Colorado. He practices architecture and urban design and teaches in University of Colorado as an assistant professor adjunct. He has received the second prize in 2006 Baltimore Review Poetry Competition. His poetry has been published in journals such as Penumbra, Rhino, Peralta, Colere, Writer's Journal, Water - Stone Review, Bayou, and White Pelican Review.
Korkut Onaran, Ph.D.
$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock
Assistant Professor Adjunct
College Of Architecture And Planning
University Of Colorado At Denver
Two Chapbooks from from Angela Consolo Mankiewicz
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 | 2 in stockDiscount Price: $5.00 and get a Free copy of Cancer Poems (below)
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 | 1 in stockFree with purchase of Wired And Other Poems
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 therapistAbout the Author
$7.00 | ISBN: 978-0-615-25931-4 | 35 Pages | In Stock
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.
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 BarbaraDark Card is the winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize of 2007.
$12.95 | ISBN 9781933896144 | 36 Pages | In Stock: 5 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: 1 copy
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: 2 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: 2 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 SleuthInvestigations is a celebration of Nancy Drew novels (50 years) during the late 1950’s. she led a way for young women who wanted more than what they, may of perceived, as domestic boredom. Nancy did not have the proverbial mother to relate too. she also had an absentee father, a lawyer. this left the young investigator on her won to rife out her suspicions. unlike superman who needed superpowers to accomplish his task of riding the world of evil doers, Nancy worked closely with her friends for what seemed a more human story.
“I understand, the mysteries of the scoured pot,
clogged toilet, tolling dinner bell,
hold no appeal. but chances are you’re not
going to marry Carson Drew,
conveniently absent when the action starts,
never demanding you halt mid-case to listen
to his tale of triumph at the office…”Nancy Drew’s tale has been placed into the capable hands or words of Kathleen Aguero. Aguero translates, reinvents and looks for clues that relate to her present situations as in, ‘the case of the suicidal friend,’ “you didn’t leave a note, just your own body on the stairs.” and again in ‘jewel box,’ which I had the privilege of hearing the poet read Aguero shows us her mother’s delusional clarity, her mother’s love, the perception of honesty in leaving, of placing value in memory, connecting, collecting personal items, identifying their significance, “we have to do this now…” her poems are full of references, clues; the password:
“she was clever.
she found the wooden gate where they put the garbage out.
she pulled, but it was locked.
she waited, but no one came
so she joined the walkers, round and round the halls
out one door, in the other…this is a clear case. this chapbook will leave you wanting more of Kathleen Aguero’s writing.
Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor
Ibbetson Street Press
www.ibbetsonpress.com
Fiddler Crab reviews chapbook "Investigations" by poet Kathleen Aguero: www.fiddlercrabreview.com
$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock
Brothers by Eric Wasserman
Červená Barva Press, 2008-
Advance Praise for Brothers:
Take Faulkner's dicturn that "the past is never dead, it's not even past" and transpose it to late Forties L.A. In the grand tradition of John Gregory Dunne's True Confessions, Wasserman's taut little tale finds a mismatched pair of brothers clashing. explosively, at the dawn of the Blacklist era.
-Wesley Strick, screenwriter and author of Out There in the DarkEric Wasserman is the author of a collection of short fiction, The Temporary Life. His short story, "He's No Sandy Koufax," won first prize in the 13th Annual David Dornstein Creative Writing Contest. Brothers is the first chapter from his recently completed first novel, Celluloid Strangers. Eric is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Akron, wher he also teaches in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program (NEOMFA).
Visit him at www.ericwasserman.com
$7.00 | 19 Pages | In Stock
The Conquest of Somalia by Gary Beck
Červená Barva Press, 2008-
Gary Beck has spent most of his adult life as a theater director and worked as an art dealer when he couldn't earn a living in the theater. He has also been a tennis pro, a ditch digger and a salvage diver. His original plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes and Sophocles have been produced Off Broadway and toured colleges and outdoor performance venues. He currently lives in New York City, where he's busy writing fiction and his short stories have recently appeared in numerous literary magazines.
$7.00 | 36 Pages | In Stock
Stunted Inner-child Shot the TV by Mike Amado
Červená Barva Press, 2008-
"Crossing the intersections between media, militarization, and post-9/11 consciousness, Amado's Stunted Inner-child Shot the TV, gives us a view of the complicated relationship between society and self, consumerism and identity."
-Edward J. Carvalho (Doctoral Candidate, Indiana University of Pennsylvania and author of solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short)"Take Mike Amado's red Morpheus pill and follow him down the rabbit hole of America's mad matrix of warped dreams, tabloid icons, chrome-eyed military men and infopreachers....His writing is elastic, vivid and wise. With a heart for an undetermined and undetermining God, Amado's revolution cannot be downloaded. It's amazing any of us make it out alive."
-Lo GalluccioMike Amado is a performance poet, percussionst and drummer painfully in touch with the real-everyday and his work is filled with the real-time force of tough, hard-core lyrics and life that drags you into the midst of contemporary real reality: “There is a dealer/that sells lives/like pre-owed cars./I’m gonna trade in Angelina Jolie./Like a rusted up Chevy Sloper/she needs her soul rebuilt...//born to a fifteen year old,/a doomed kid/on the block/dodging bullets and rocks/and a life of Government checks.” (“Angelina Jolie Reincarnated,” p.20). Amado is especially relevant today because of his total immersion in the working-class/middle-class sense of downturning lifestyles and ways of coping. He’s like radical news-reports stripping off the overlays and lies and getting to the hard-cores: “Blessed be the bartenders and poker table dealers,/They are the certifiable psychos./They attach themselves to people who have/Knuckle-dragging tantrums and sing/the same, old song.../ “My money’s all gone, free-drink me!”No sprites or sun-gods, romantic landscapes, gods in the underbrush. Welcome to the whole of contemporary reality, as far as you can get out of the suburbs into the everydayness that most Americans are soaked in.
$7.00 | 41 Pages | In Stock
-Hugh Fox
The News Today by George Held
Červená Barva Press, 2008-
The News Today is George Held's second chapbook from Červená Barva Press, the first being W Is for War (2006). His other poetry books include Beyond Renewal (2001) and the chapbooks Winged (1995), Salamander Love and Others (1998), Open & Shut (1999), Grounded (2005), The Art of Writing and Others (2007), and Phased (2008). Other books include the e-book American Poetry (2004), the art book Absolut Death & Others (2000) (with paintings by Roz Dimon), Martial Artist (2005) (translations of Martial's epigrams), and the anthology Touched by Eros (2002), which he edited. Held's poetry has appeared in more than a dozen anthologies, received five Pushcart Prize nominations, and been read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac (NPR). He has co-edited The Ledge Poetry and Fiction Magazine since 1991. In addition, he served as a Fulbright lecturer in Czechoslovakia, 1973-76, and has been on the executive board of The South Fork Natural History Society and Museum (Bridgehampton, NY) since 1991.
Mark Lamoureux on four Červená Barva Press Chapbooks,
$7.00 | 33 Pages | In Stock
Gently Read Literature Review:
http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/mark-lamoureux-on-four-cervena-barva-press-chapbooks/
Ten Songs From Bulgaria by Linda Nemec Foster
Červená Barva Press, 2008-
The first lines in Linda Nemec Foster’s Ten Songs from Bulgaria, sing 'Small lives, small lives/ we are trapped inside/ small lives.' The paradox here is that Foster’s poems reveal how large and rich the worlds are in which these small lives are lived. In line after line, we encounter the depths and reach of those who live outside the zones of everyday safety. Foster makes herself vulnerable to a world 'as tangible as fog' with her own penetrating observations. She walks 'the long journey' and her poems reflect the haunting music of ode and elegy.
-Jack RidlThese poems evoke--in their concision and clarity--intense, disturbing images of lives shredded into pieces so small all that’s left is the memory of having endured. They are caged inside the empty space of the page, which seems to want to suffocate their spare, fragile, incredible beauty. Each image speaks a world that is window and mirror of what we hide from in the fabricated assemblages we make against the truth these poems speak.
-Faye Kicknosway
Reviews
Linda Nemec Foster Interview: Michigan Public Radio (an affiliate of NPR) for their Stateside program, hosted by Cynthia Canty. http://www.michiganradio.org/post/bulgarian-photography-and-michigan-poetry-inspire-album
Mark Lamoureux on four Červená Barva Press Chapbooks,
$7.00 | 20 Pages | In Stock
Gently Read Literature Review:
http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/mark-lamoureux-on-four-cervena-barva-press-chapbooks/
A Cure For Suicide by Larissa Shmailo
Červená Barva Press, 2008-
In "A Cure for Suicide” by Larissa Shmailo, Shmailo writes (as the founder of Fulcrum Magazine Philip Nikolayev points out in his introduction) as if she is …” constitutionally predestined to sing out her lines…her eyes filled with life and love, pain and death, freedom and coercion, the real of the mind and the imagined of the heart.” In the poem “Dancing with the Devil,” the poet sings about the need to throw caution to the wind and trip the light fantastic with the Devil:
“They say if you flirt with death,
you’re going to get a date;
But I don’t mind—the music’s fine,
And I love dancing with someone who can really lead.”Shmailo put herself in the deceptive calmness of the eye of a hurricane, asks us to tell her what makes us tic, and takes us on the Harlem River Line, like the “Duke” took us on the “A” train. In a sea of mimics this poet is an original voice.
~Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ May 2008
Mark Lamoureux on four Červená Barva Press Chapbooks,
$7.00 | 47 Pages | In Stock
Gently Read Literature Review:
http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/mark-lamoureux-on-four-cervena-barva-press-chapbooks/
Discarded: Poems for My Apartments by Chad Parenteau
Červená Barva Press, 2008-
In this new collection by Chad Parenteau, the peculiar intimacies of the shared apartment experience emerge in imaginative and startling shapes. In Parenteau's stunning tropes, the apartment, now war zone, now toxic wasteland, now party palace, at once magical and mundane, finds its excited denizens "burning their hands on bulbs to stay awake, / afraid to miss a summoning." Parenteau musters poignancy, pathos, and the pathetic from the crowded sink and the discarded vodka bottles, breeding them into his lines with an acute and ironic sensuality. If, as the author contends, "The bed now leaves its own notches/on the backs of everyone/who's slept in it alone," these poems will leave their mark on the mind of any reader who has ever stammered through a roommate interview or suffocated from the incense sneaking under the crack at the bottom of a roommate's door.
$7.00 | 25 Pages | In Stock
-Tom Daley, Instructor for the Online School of Poetry
faustinetta, gegenschein, trapunto by Diane Wald
Červená Barva Press, 2008-
These three poems somehow asked to be together. They are full of alive and dead people, full of genuine and created personalities, full of composite desires and fears and mockeries. They popped up out of the love of words, and the word-secrets we all hold dear. The title words brought me buckets of pleasure, and I wanted to celebrate and embellish them. One of them I made up, one of them I learned, one of them I'd forgotten I knew. I think all three are united in mystery, begging for me to believe them.
$7.00 | 20 Pages | In Stock
-Diane Wald
Tara by Catherine Sasanov
Červená Barva Press, 2008-
In 2005, poet Catherine Sasanov made an unsettling discovery: slaveholding had been an unspoken part of her family's history. Sasanov's painstaking search to find out what happened to the men, women, and children held by her ancestors is at the heart of her new chapbook, Tara. In its pages, Sasanov conjures Missouri's Antebellum landscape out of the ravages of urban sprawl. She pieces together a portrait of slaves and freedmen in poems haunted by the question: How does one write a coherent life of a people if only bits and scraps of their existence can be found?
$7.00 | 30 Pages | In Stock
Up From The Root Cellar by Anne Harding Woodworth
Červená Barva Press, 2008-
If the root cellar connotes dark and damp, it also promises nourishment-and this book serves up a startling buffet. Whether imagining herself into a grave, a slaughterhouse, or a rose that holds a family memory, Anne Harding Woodworth is attentive to how "secrets rise to the surface." Her range of subject matter is startling-from famine to termites to dowsing for bodies-and she deftly works a root vegetable into nearly every poem, including one about the invention of the potato chip and another that turns the peeling of an Idaho into a sexy striptease. Up from the Root Cellar is rich with music, and brings a satisfying harvest of buried and strewn things to light.
Ellen Doré Watson, author of This SharpeningIn Up from the Root Cellar, Anne Harding Woodworth delights us with a quick and unblinking look to the cold, soupy, death-in-life world that roots our body's generation, and our ladders of art. Her poems feel through near-frozen "rhizomes / tightly wadded leaves," and wan cyclopean russet potatoes, "wide-eyed, looking for a way out," in order redefine the human form, the ways that the body seeks its "light-time" even as it must bow to physical limits, "dry-weighted, wet-weighted, scoped on dials, squeezed into ratio." Woodworth's instincts for the contrarian, and messy-microbial sources for human stories put her alongside the garden-shed bio-poetries of Roethke and Marianne Moore. Yet her sudden turns and wacky humor find their own force and presence.
David Gewanter, author of The Sleep of ReasonOne of the many pleasures of poetry is that of coming into the company of an interesting mind. In Up from the Root Cellar, Anne Harding Woodworth uses her central metaphor to plumb the mysteries of preservation and renewal in ways that are fresh and surprising. Her tender, gently subversive poems, with their rich wordplay and mischievous imagery, succeed in bringing up from the darkness of the root cellar insights that delight and enlighten.
Jean Nordhaus, author of InnocenceBoston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene review:
$7.00 | 45 Pages | In Stock
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/search?q=anne+harding+woodworth
this is where you go when you are gone
by Timothy Gager
Červená Barva press, 2008-
This chapbook represents Timothy's best poems from 2007, a year that he had 32 accepted submissions. These poems are rich with emotion, humor, double meanings, happiness and regret. "this is where you go when you are gone" ranges of experiences, responses to social events and a poetic e-mails written to someone who felt his poems were too sad. Timothy Gager tells stories through his poetry and this collection represents a new and more mature and seasoned writer.
$7.00 | 43 Pages | In Stock
The Lengthening Radius For Hate
by Gary Fincke
Červená Barva press, 2008-
The Lengthening Radius for Hate is a poem sequence that has, at its foundation, the shooting of Kent State students on May 4, 1970, by the National Guard. Gary Fincke was a student at Kent State in 1970, and he chronicles both the shooting and its residual effects over decades in a series of strongly observed narrative poems that explore disillusionment, anger, and the difficulties of reconciliation.
Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene Review:
$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/search?q=gary+Fincke
Isolate Flecks by Kevin Gallagher
Červená Barva Press, 2008-
Kevin Gallagher is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Isolate Flecks (Červená Barva Press, 2008), and Looking for Lake Texcoco (Cy Gist, 2008). His poetry and reviews have appeared in such publications as The Boston Review, Emergency Almanac, Green Mountains Review, Harvard Review, Jacket, Peacework, the Partisan Review and elsewhere. In 2004 he edited a feature on Kenneth Rexroth for Jacket, and a chapbook titled Nevertheless: Some Gloucester Writers and Artists. From 1992 to 2002 he was a publisher and editor of compost magazine. A retrospective anthology of compost, co-edited with Margaret Bezucha, is titled There's No Place on Earth Like the World (Zephyr, 2006). He lives with his wife Kelly, and son Theo, in Newton, Massachusetts.
Mark Lamoureux on four Červená Barva Press Chapbooks,
$7.00 | 39 Pages | In Stock
Gently Read Literature Review:
http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/mark-lamoureux-on-four-cervena-barva-press-chapbooks/
Survival Notes by Adrian S. Potter
Červená Barva Press, 2008-
Winner of the 2006 Cervena Barva Press Fiction Chapbook Prize
Judge: Dorothy FreudenthalAdrian S. Potter is the winner the 2003 Langston Hughes Poetry Contest and the 2005 Saturday Writers Short Story Contest. He has been published in more than 60 different literary journals, magazines, and websites including Colere, City Works, Reed, Out of Line, The Binnacle, Main Channel Voices, Blue Earth Review and Poesia.
Additional propaganda about Adrian and his writing can be found at http://adrianspotter.squarespace.com/.
Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
Survival Notes by Adrian S. Potter
Somerville’s Cervena Barva Press has published a collection of very short stories or flash fiction by Adrian Potter: “Survival Notes.” Potter is the winner of the 2003 Langston Hughes Poetry Contest and has numerous publication credits. Potter’s pieces have a raw edge to them. They take place for the most part in urban settings with angry male characters in the midst of existential crises. One story that peaked my interest in this collection was “Domestic Silence.” In this story, an unfortunate neighbor to a loud and argumentative couple, tracks the jazz music the abusive male in this unfortunate coupling plays to mute the loud protests of his many domestic brawls.“I’ve lived here for two years, long enough that I can determine the topic of their disputes by what record is playing. Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue,” means that that the husband is releasing the frustration of financial woes onto her fragile ribcage. The swinging melodies of Duke Ellington are reserved for senseless shouting matches, the type of overreaction brought on by male jealousy. Electronic jazz-funk, like Herbie Hancock and the “Head Hunters,” is synonymous with the profanities and backhanded slaps that come from drinking binges. I don’t even have to explain the subtle irony when songs from Coltrane’s “ A Love Supreme” filter from underneath their doorway.”
I would like to see Potter develop more stories like this. He may be on to something.
$7.00 | 42 Pages | In Stock
Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ Jan. 2008/ Somerville, Mass.
Illegal Border Crosser by Michael Graves
Červená Barva Press, 2008-
Michael Graves was a student of James Wright. He is the author of a chapbook Outside St. Jude's (REM Press, 1990), which was re-issued as an ebook by Rattapallax, and is the recipient of a grant of $4,500 from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation for two thousand four. His first full-length collection of poems is Adam and Cain (Black Buzzard, 2006). He has published thirteen (13) poems in the James Joyce Quarterly and read a selection of his poems to a meeting of the James Joyce Society at the Gotham Book Mart in New York City. Professor A. Nicholas Fargnoli, President of the James Joyce Society has adopted some of his poems as required reading for his survey course in Modern American Literature. His poem "Apollo to Daphne" appears in Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths (Oxford University Press 2001). He has published widely in journals and magazines, some of which include The Classical Outlook, European Judaism, The Journal of Irish Literature, Cumberland Poetry Review, nycBigCityLit-New York Edition, Writer's Forum, Rattapallax, The Hurricane Review, The Hollins Critic, Archipelago, and Salonika.
$7.00 | 36 Pages | In Stock
Among Us by Harris Gardner
Červená Barva Press, 2007-
It is said the angels walk among us, the invisible. Gardner drapes the invisible with language in the hopes that we can see ourselves.
–Afaa M. WeaverGardner's vision here mainly focuses on angels. He's right out of scripture, brings biblical (and elsewhere) visions of angels into our contemporary world so that everything surrounding us becomes supernaturalized and uplifted., And always in a language that reads the way Monet paints. "The breeze stretches pliant forms/ kinetic art, brush-stroked clouds…/ Senses soar toward the sun/ when rays sear through languid clouds/ revealing noble haloed heads…" ("Among Us"). He is Mr. Visionary, taking the Torah and all other angel-sources like Milton, Raphael, "Dictionary of Angels", etc., and filling our world with uplifting such as you've never been uplifted into before. It's a vision sorely needed today, and technically the most masterful word-working on the contemporary or any other scene.
–Hugh FoxExcerpt from a review
$7.00 | 45 Pages | In Stock
Angels have held a fascination for many writers: Milton, Hass, Hopkins, Billy Collins, to name a few. But how does one manage to address the imperceptible, let alone the holy? Gardner’s answer is to bring angels down to earth, to imbue them with human characteristics and foibles...This collection’s central strength is its admonition to the reader to look beyond the mundane. “Seeing angels may challenge your vision. / No cost to believe in noble winged creatures.” In our bitter post-post-modern age, this is a welcome thought.
Eleanor Goodman/ Ibbetson Update/ Jan 2008
Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
Living Proof by Mary Bonina
Cervena Barva Press, 2007-
Review excerpt from: Prick of the spindle,
"Mary Bonina’s Living Proof is a hefty 45 pages and worth every drop of ink Červená Barva Press shelled out to bring it into the world. Each poem reads like a miniature story, stabbing at the heart of memory and nostalgia, capturing lifetimes in a single moment or turn of phrase..."
--Jen Garfield, editor
Prick of the SpindleTo read the whole review:
http://www.prickofthespindle.com/reviews/These are poems concerned with the primary relationships of our lives -- family, friends, lovers, nature -- and in them, there is always the larger world rattling around. This volume of narratives, lyrics, dialogues, and found poems demonstrates Bonina's accomplishment and range. Here is an assured voice imbued with musicality, surprising us in the simple way it offers up deeper meaning, often using imagery drawn from the everyday.
"...the voice of these poems knows death, luck, the mall, the hard edges of place, New England places, the violence of the world. It runs very concretely and in many poems, past what its bearer sees as if standing still in deep attention. It is written so that "he who runs may read" but turns entirely inside out the terms and assumptions of that old insult. What a place this human world would be if we all ran at Mary Bonina's speed, what Flannery O'Connor once called the terrible speed of mercy."
$7.00 | 46 Pages | In Stock
--Mary Baine Campbell
author of TROUBLE (poems), Carnegie Mellon U Press and The World, The Flesh, and Angels (poems), Beacon Press
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: 3
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.
$5.00 | 20 Pages | In Stock
Anthony Russell White
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Sister Mary Butkus
by Ed McManis
Červená Barva Press, 2007 -
Ed McManis is a teacher, writer, poet, editor, songwriter, husband and dad—not always in that order. His work has appeared in more than 40 publications.
Cover art by Joe McManis
$7.00 | 37 Pages | In Stock: 15
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God of the Jellyfish
by Lucille Lang Day
Červená Barva Press, 2007 -
At once sacrilegious and reverential, the poems in God of the Jellyfish seek the divine in a natural world governed by the laws of science. In these poems, you'll find a god in the shape of a jellyfish, a prayer celebrating the color red, a man for whom music becomes the source of salvation, a vision of an earthly paradise populated by moon bears and moon rats, and a pilgrimage through 14 stations where Sisyphus, Shaker women, and howling wolves appear. Lucille Lang Day deftly couples scientific observations to the engine of imagination to take us on a magical and inspiring journey.
God of the Jellyfish shimmers in a space where "moon cacti bloom at night" and magpies can "fly over a field/of small glass bottles." The world Lucille Lang Day creates in her poetry is vivid and surreal yet always deftly anchored in the beauty and truth of the natural world. This is a small handbook of magic. When you read it, you'll find yourself transported to places you've never even dared to imagine.
—Susan TerrisThere are few contemporary poets who use science in their poetry at all, let alone use it as Lucille Lang Day does here, as an element, both dreamlike and hyperreal, in her gorgeous, moving global lyric.
$7.00 | 39 Pages | In Stock: 20
—Richard Silberg
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Land of the Morning Calm
by Susanne Morning
Červená Barva Press, 2007 -
South Korea, referred to as the hermit kingdom of Asia, has been the home of New Zealand author/painter Susanne Morning for the last 7 years. Fascinating and humorous, Land of the Morning Calm unearths the bizarre and unexpected elements of this ancient/modern Confucian culture. An archeological dig that will put dirt under your nails and priceless relics in your hands!
$7.00 | 29 Pages | In Stock: 5
Of All The Meals I Had Before: Poems About Food and Eating
by Doug Holder
Červená Barva Press, 2007-
These food poems are served up spicy like Italian cousine. Read them before dinner or after dessert, either way like Chinese food, you'll return hungry for more.
A.D. WinansIn his collection, “Of All The Meals I Had Before: Poems About Food and Eating” Doug Holder serves up a hearty fare. He fills our plate with “unapologetically greasy Egg Foo Young,” “tamed tenderloin,” “a chorus line” of “rotisserie chickens,” and “some fraction of gelatinous liver quivering.” He not only takes us out to dine with him, but he also looks around for us, makes sure we notice the “ancient waitresses…[who] bark the orders\through the swing of doors” and “old man Cardullo spit from\his cigar-studded mouth” and the undertaker beside us who “delicately wipes his mouth\… runs his well-veined hand\through the shoe polish\in his hair.” Holder offers a truly eclectic cuisine and company to match– savory, and unsavory, occasionally bitter, more often sweet. Even as we polish off dessert, he leaves us wondering, “What If We Froze with a Fork in Our Hand” and “just\took a\minute\to simply\pause.”
Mary Buchinger Bodwell, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health SciencesA delightful and delicious collection of poems, whetting the appetite for more. These are the kinds of witty, Jewishy poems I envision Woody Allen would write, should he ever take to writing poetry.
Helen Bar-Lev, Artist, Poet
Editor-in-Chief Voices Israel Anthology
Author: Animals are Nature's Poetry
Co-author: Cyclamens and Swords and other poems about IsraelDoug Holder's All the Meals I Had Before delivers again and again. Each poem is a savory dish worthy of five stars at Loch Ober's. Holder's poetry feeds our high expectations and does not disappoint. His wit and erudite observations constantly shine with sterling results. A lot of the poetry has a certain edginess mixed with wit and humor that equally provokes to thought while it entertains. Everyone should indulge themselves in this gourmet buffet.This collection, as well as Holder's other published works, belong in every serious collectors library.
Harris Gardner
Executive Director
Tapestry of VoicesAside from being the founder, publisher, and co-editor of the prestigious and influential Ibbetson Street Press, Doug Holder writes poetry with a passion and insight that deserves prestige and influence all its own.
Take, for instance, “Of All The Meals I Had Before: Poems About Food and Eating,” a work with an organic feel surprising for a chapbook. Among some odes to nostalgic eateries like “Last Night at the Wursthaus” and “At Benson’s Deli,” Holder ponders the silly—“Milk Duds”—and the sublime—“Portrait of My Mother During Her Solitary Meal.” His eye for the rattling image drives many of the poems, like “Eating Out” where he observes: “As the Latino/scrapes the masticated/bone and marrow/into a bloody bin/ and flashes a gold-toothed smile,/at the chef/ whose cleaver/tears through a prime cut--/then holds some/fraction of a gelatinous liver/quivering in his hands…” What makes his work so enjoyable is not only his well-described world but also the fun he has with it, as when he ends the same poem with the line,” “Meanwhile I order desert.” The book flirts with food and sex, comparing breastfeeding and sucking on a straw or rotisserie chickens and pornographic images, until it climaxes in the final poem “Cannibalism,” that begins:
$7.00 | 23 Pages | In Stock: 10
“And what could be more intimate?/ To deflesh a skull/ crack a femur/ to get down/ to the very marrow/ Is there a greater/ act of love?”
--S. Craig Renfroe, Jr., Main Street Rag
Winter 2007-8 Edition
The Pursuit of Happiness
New and Selected Poems from Elizabeth, New Jersey
by Joe Weil-
Excerpt from the back of the book
$5.00 | 80 Pages | In Stock: 1
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
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. JohnIn 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.
$12.00 | ISBN 1-59924-089-0 | 24 Pages | In Stock: 1
--Susan Gubernat
Gothic Calligraphy Poems by Flavia Cosma
Červená Barva Press, 2007-
Flavia Cosma is an acclaimed Romanian-born, Canadian poet, author and translator. She is also an award winning independent television documentary producer, director and writer. To date she has published nine books of poetry, a novel, a traveling memoir and a book of Fairy Tales. Her work is represented in numerous anthologies in various countries and languages.
Gothic Calligraphy, translated from the original Romanian by Flavia Cosma with Charles Siedlecki, is Flavia Cosma’s tenth poetry collection published in Somerville, Massachusetts by Červená Barva Press (2007). These poems are candid, romantic and metaphisical. What is particularly striking about the poems is their originality and the daring force of their imagery and metaphors, wonderfully rendered into English by this tantalizing, entrancing translation. The language is straightforward, spare, yet so bold in image as to seem extravagant.
Ioan Tepelea, poet and publisher, Oradea, Romania:
“The inner equilibrium and the uniqueness of voice, but most of all the interior fervor to be oneself when faced with life’s adversity, turn these poems into an existential suffrage, revealing an authentic and personal vision.”George Elliott Clarke, Department of English, University of Toronto:
“Flavia Cosma’s vision is dark and Gothic, but also saturated with Mediterranean sun, romance and vine. Her style – imagistic, cryptic – reminds one of other powerful women writers such as America’s Emily Dickinson, Russia’s Anna Akhmatova and Canada’s Marie Uguay. Their poems are miniature fairy tales that enjoy being both sprightly and grim.”David Mills, poet and literary critic, Toronto:
“Flavia Cosma’s poetry has been designed to waken sleeping consciousness. These poems lead the reader through the pain, suffering and loneliness of life while searching for truth’s hidden mysteries which serve to make life meaningful and beautiful, yet remain to be discovered in that continual renewal and rebirth of life.”Irene Harasimowicz-Zarzecka, foreword to Gothic Calligraphy:
“A poet of extraordinary depth and sensitivity, combining in a permanent osmosis her state of mind and consciousness with the wealth of nature, always searching for the eternal, timeless values of our earthly sojourn. The baroque opulence of Flavia Cosma’s diction is worthy of a genuine master of the word.Alexander Sfârlea, poet and literary critic, Oradea, Romania:
a review of Gothic Calligraphy:
“What strikes the reader in Gothic Calligraphy is an anxious and intense perception of the existential struggle, which melts irreversibly into extinction and forgetfulness, an intangible and tragic descent into the inevitable nothingness, combined with the ultimate deliverance of coming to terms with oneself.”Fragments from Gothic Calligraphy appeared in their Romanian version—In Bratele Tatalui, Cogito Press, Oradea, Romania, 2006.
$8.00 | 41 Pages | In Stock: 10
Bilingual Poems by Richard Kostelanetz
Červená Barva Press, 2007-
Preface From the book:
If the principal theme of my poetry has been invention, one motive of the poems written since Wordworks (1993), my first elaborate collection, has been the clashing of languages. This reflects initially my interest in writing poems in languages I barely know--for instance, the French and German Strings reprinted there. As always, I make a move and then look for surprising results. Here one move is interweaving the letters of words in two languages; another comes from jamming two words together to form not only a larger word but an evocative intersection. Many other poetic developments should follow from these initial moves. Some depend upon understanding two languages; others, not. –Richard Kostelanetz, New York, NYReview from Doug Holder's Authors Den:
$7.00 | 17 Pages | In Stock: Out of stock
http://authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?AuthorID=3792
Out Of The Arcadian Ghetto
A Fiction Chapbook by Ian Randall Wilson
Červená Barva Press, 2007-
Ian Randall Wilson is the author of Hunger and Other Stories (Hollyridge Press, 2000), and the poetry chapbook Theme of the Parabola (Hollyridge Press, 2005). His work has appeared in many journals including the North American Review, the Mid-American Review and The Gettysburg Review. He is an executive at Columbia-TriStar Marketing Group, and on the fiction faculty at the UCLA Extension.
Out of the Arcadian Ghetto is a work of great imagination. It features two previously published stories. In "He Was Known For His Nose," a specialist employed by a reclusive millionaire selects female companionship for his master by the women's smell. When his nose fails, disaster ensues. In "The Three Bears: A Retelling," this classic fairytale is reconceived as a contemporary commentary on race relations between homo sapiens and Ursus arctos.
Small Press Review/ Mar-Apr Picks, 2007
$7.00 | 33 Pages | In Stock: 9
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: 4Discount Price: $3.00
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 PerchikThe collection has an elegant focus and hush around it...
Timothy Donnelly, Boston ReviewSusan Tepper is a poet of quiet grace yet insistent power, who steals your mind's focus in odd moments long after you've laid down her book.
Don Williams, Editor, New Millennium Writings & Syndicated ColumnistSusan Tepper...on the page, shimmers through everyday thoughts, bringing life to streams and smoke and snow. Her gentle vision beautifully informs her well-crafted poems in "Blue Edge."
Suzi Winson, Fish DrumReaders of Grasslimb will be familiar with Susan Tepper's fine poetry... We can enthusiastically recommend this fine further exploration of her work.
Valerie Polichar, GrasslimbSusan's poetry is in touch with the human race... reaps with the knowledge of a poet well versed.
$6.00 | 30 Pages | In Stock: 6
Shirley Gerald Ware, Fresh! Literary Magazine
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
Dreams at the Au Bon Pain
by Doug Holder
Ibbetson Street Press, 2000-
"a delightful chapbook of poetry."
Diana Der-hoveanessian, NEPC PresidentDoug 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 GontarekIn this collection, Alison Hicks explores desire and domesticity, shedding light on the "bare-knuckled teeth/of the familar."
--Moira EganHers is a brushwork deeply physical, intelligent, sensual, and precise.
$12.00 | ISBN 1-59924-098-x | 26 Pages | In Stock: 5
--Jane Hirshfield
Judy Ray
Fishing in Green Waters by Judy Ray
Červená Barva Press-2006; Second Printing-2007-
"Sometimes, fishing in green waters, we draw up words in a fine net," says poet Judy Ray in her poem, "Sometimes." This "fine net" could easily describe her chapbook, Fishing in Green Waters, recently published by Červená Barva Press. In poems that take the reader from Tiananmen Square, to the Midwest flatlands, to the emotional landscape of Frida Kahlo, Fishing in Green Waters makes for a remarkable read. Ranging in tone from whispered quiet ("Let us lullaby to sleep the weary unseeing eyes") to breathless, imagistic cross-cuts ("[The poem] looks for the flash of the pileated woodpecker, finds the splash of blood in a schoolyard"), Ray reels in the political, the personal, and the historical in her tightly woven poems.
Gloria Mindock, Editor, Červená Barva Press(Excerpt of Review)
$6.00 | 35 Pages | In Stock: 10
The beauty of this poetry chapbook was the surprises I witnessed each time I turned the page. The author was quite adept in addressing different themes and different places. This rendered a kaleidoscope of writing and filled me with anticipation. --Francis Alix
Small Press Review, July-August, 2006
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: 3Discount Price: $3.00
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 PublishersLo 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."
$7.00 | 40 Pages | In Stock: 3
-Carolyn Gregory, Poet
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 RothschildAs 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.
$6.00 | 26 Pages | In Stock: 3 (signed copies)
--Mary Lawrence
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.
$5.00 | ISBN 1-881168-44-1 | 31 Pages | In Stock: 5
--JoEllen Kwiatek
Author, Eleven Days Before Spring
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: 1Discount Price: $3.00
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 PressThis collection is enchanting and inviting from the beginning, connecting the human spirit to nature in ways that challenge my imagination. A pleasure.
$10.00 | ISBN: 0-9724528-0-x | 48 Pages | In Stock: 4
Cynthia Brackett-Vincent, Publisher, The Aurorean
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 NinPublishers note (excerpt)
$6.00 | 39 Pages | In Stock: 3
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
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.
$7.00 | ISBN: 0-944550-56-8 | 30 Pages | In Stock: 3
--Leonard J. Cirino
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)
$8.00 | ISBN: 0-941053-87-3 | 30 Pages | In Stock: 2
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
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 TurningsSlow 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.
$8.00 | ISBN 0-9724601-1-x | 35 Pages | In Stock: 2
--Luther Tyler, Department of English, Wellesley College
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: 4Discount Price: $3.00
the deployment of love in pineapple twilight by Lynne Savitt
PRESA :S: PRESS, 2005-
…Lynne Savitt is the Janis Joplin of poetry.
--Charles PlymellThese poems are heart-breaking, funny, introspective, angry, and masterfully-crafted.
--Dan CrockerNo 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 ConnecticutAmbulance sirens ring through her words with the same burning intensity for life…
$6.00 | 48 Pages | In Stock: 2 copies
--Linda Lerner
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.
$7.00 | 46 Pages | In Stock: 3
--Edward J. Hogan in Aspect
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.
$6.00 | 48 Pages | In Stock
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 GreinkeThese poems will sear you with their honesty about the cruelty, greed, and rapaciousness at the heart of the American soul…
--Gerald NecosiaA.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.
$6.00 | 44 Pages | In Stock: 3
--Hugh Fox
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.
$6.00 | 43 Pages | In Stock: 3
--From the Introduction by Eric Greinke
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."
$5.00 | 31 Pages | In Stock: 5
--Tim Seibles (http://www.cavecanempoets.org/pages/faculty.html#seibles)
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 #94W Is for War, a new poetry chapbook by political activist George Held. In this collection of poems, his ninth, George expresses his protest against the war in Iraq. "Because he supports our men and women in arms, he resists sending them into battle without compelling, legitimate reasons."
The whole collection hangs together very well. I admire your guts in publishing the volume, and I'm glad I own a copy as it's a little piece of history. --Gretchen Fletcher
WIFW gives precise and true voice to what many patriots think. It's courageous and passionate. --Michael Graves
Some of your best work is in this book. They say no one in love ever wrote a good love poem, the point being that passion gets in the way of craftsmanship. But it hasn't in your case. --James McGowan
This chapbook is wonderfully cohesive, and I admire the way you move through the war by moving through all the players: President, populations on both sides, a Vietnam vet, poets writing on the war, a mother and child, a single Everyman speaker, and by invoking the government of ancient Rome. This endows the collection with variety, a quality I prize highly in any collection. --Margot Farrington
Small Press Review /September-October Picks, 2006
$7.00 | 29 Pages | In Stock
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