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Poetry Chapbooks

Just released: July 3rd

The News Today by George Held Červená Barva Press, 2008: The News Today is George Held's second chapbook from Červená Barva Press, the first being W Is for War (2006). His other poetry books include Beyond Renewal (2001) and the chapbooks Winged (1995), Salamander Love and Others (1998), Open & Shut (1999), Grounded (2005), The Art of Writing and Others (2007), and Phased (2008). Other books include the e-book American Poetry (2004), the art book Absolut Death & Others (2000) (with paintings by Roz Dimon), Martial Artist (2005) (translations of Martial's epigrams), and the anthology Touched by Eros (2002), which he edited. Held's poetry has appeared in more than a dozen anthologies, received five Pushcart Prize nominations, and been read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac (NPR). He has co-edited The Ledge Poetry and Fiction Magazine since 1991. In addition, he served as a Fulbright lecturer in Czechoslovakia, 1973-76, and has been on the executive board of The South Fork Natural History Society and Museum (Bridgehampton, NY) since 1991.
$7.00 | 33 Pages | In Stock: 20

Just released: June 12th

Ten Songs From Bulgaria by Linda Nemec Foster Červená Barva Press, 2008

The first lines in Linda Nemec Foster’s Ten Songs from Bulgaria, sing 'Small lives, small lives/ we are trapped inside/ small lives.' The paradox here is that Foster’s poems reveal how large and rich the worlds are in which these small lives are lived. In line after line, we encounter the depths and reach of those who live outside the zones of everyday safety. Foster makes herself vulnerable to a world 'as tangible as fog' with her own penetrating observations. She walks 'the long journey' and her poems reflect the haunting music of ode and elegy.
-Jack Ridl

These poems evoke--in their concision and clarity--intense, disturbing images of lives shredded into pieces so small all that’s left is the memory of having endured. They are caged inside the empty space of the page, which seems to want to suffocate their spare, fragile, incredible beauty. Each image speaks a world that is window and mirror of what we hide from in the fabricated assemblages we make against the truth these poems speak.
-Faye Kicknosway

$7.00 | 20 Pages | In Stock: 25

Just released: May 19th

A Cure For Suicide by Larissa Shmailo Červená Barva Press, 2008

In "A Cure for Suicide” by Larissa Shmailo, Shmailo writes (as the founder of Fulcrum Magazine Philip Nikolayev points out in his introduction) as if she is …” constitutionally predestined to sing out her lines…her eyes filled with life and love, pain and death, freedom and coercion, the real of the mind and the imagined of the heart.” In the poem “Dancing with the Devil,” the poet sings about the need to throw caution to the wind and trip the light fantastic with the Devil:

“They say if you flirt with death,
you’re going to get a date;
But I don’t mind—the music’s fine,
And I love dancing with someone who can really lead.”

Shmailo put herself in the deceptive calmness of the eye of a hurricane, asks us to tell her what makes us tic, and takes us on the Harlem River Line, like the “Duke” took us on the “A” train. In a sea of mimics this poet is an original voice.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ May 2008

$7.00 | 47 Pages | In Stock: 20

Just released: May 12th

Discarded: Poems for My Apartments by Chad Parenteau Červená Barva Press, 2008: In this new collection by Chad Parenteau, the peculiar intimacies of the shared apartment experience emerge in imaginative and startling shapes. In Parenteau's stunning tropes, the apartment, now war zone, now toxic wasteland, now party palace, at once magical and mundane, finds its excited denizens "burning their hands on bulbs to stay awake, / afraid to miss a summoning." Parenteau musters poignancy, pathos, and the pathetic from the crowded sink and the discarded vodka bottles, breeding them into his lines with an acute and ironic sensuality. If, as the author contends, "The bed now leaves its own notches/on the backs of everyone/who's slept in it alone," these poems will leave their mark on the mind of any reader who has ever stammered through a roommate interview or suffocated from the incense sneaking under the crack at the bottom of a roommate's door.
-Tom Daley, Instructor for the Online School of Poetry
$7.00 | 25 Pages | In Stock: 25

Just released: April 25th

faustinetta, gegenschein, trapunto by Diane Wald Červená Barva Press, 2008: These three poems somehow asked to be together. They are full of alive and dead people, full of genuine and created personalities, full of composite desires and fears and mockeries. They popped up out of the love of words, and the word-secrets we all hold dear. The title words brought me buckets of pleasure, and I wanted to celebrate and embellish them. One of them I made up, one of them I learned, one of them I'd forgotten I knew. I think all three are united in mystery, begging for me to believe them.
-Diane Wald
$7.00 | 20 Pages | In Stock: 25

Just released: April 12th

Tara by Catherine Sasanov Červená Barva Press, 2008: In 2005, poet Catherine Sasanov made an unsettling discovery: slaveholding had been an unspoken part of her family's history. Sasanov's painstaking search to find out what happened to the men, women, and children held by her ancestors is at the heart of her new chapbook, Tara. In its pages, Sasanov conjures Missouri's Antebellum landscape out of the ravages of urban sprawl. She pieces together a portrait of slaves and freedmen in poems haunted by the question: How does one write a coherent life of a people if only bits and scraps of their existence can be found?
$7.00 | 30 Pages | In Stock: 25

Just released: April 6th

Up From The Root Cellar by Anne Harding Woodworth Červená Barva Press, 2008

If the root cellar connotes dark and damp, it also promises nourishment-and this book serves up a startling buffet. Whether imagining herself into a grave, a slaughterhouse, or a rose that holds a family memory, Anne Harding Woodworth is attentive to how "secrets rise to the surface." Her range of subject matter is startling-from famine to termites to dowsing for bodies-and she deftly works a root vegetable into nearly every poem, including one about the invention of the potato chip and another that turns the peeling of an Idaho into a sexy striptease. Up from the Root Cellar is rich with music, and brings a satisfying harvest of buried and strewn things to light.
Ellen Doré Watson, author of This Sharpening

In Up from the Root Cellar, Anne Harding Woodworth delights us with a quick and unblinking look to the cold, soupy, death-in-life world that roots our body's generation, and our ladders of art. Her poems feel through near-frozen "rhizomes / tightly wadded leaves," and wan cyclopean russet potatoes, "wide-eyed, looking for a way out," in order redefine the human form, the ways that the body seeks its "light-time" even as it must bow to physical limits, "dry-weighted, wet-weighted, scoped on dials, squeezed into ratio." Woodworth's instincts for the contrarian, and messy-microbial sources for human stories put her alongside the garden-shed bio-poetries of Roethke and Marianne Moore. Yet her sudden turns and wacky humor find their own force and presence.
David Gewanter, author of The Sleep of Reason

One of the many pleasures of poetry is that of coming into the company of an interesting mind. In Up from the Root Cellar, Anne Harding Woodworth uses her central metaphor to plumb the mysteries of preservation and renewal in ways that are fresh and surprising. Her tender, gently subversive poems, with their rich wordplay and mischievous imagery, succeed in bringing up from the darkness of the root cellar insights that delight and enlighten.
Jean Nordhaus, author of Innocence

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

$7.00 | 45 Pages | In Stock: 25

Just released: March 18th

this is where you go when you are gone by Timothy Gager Červená Barva press, 2008

This chapbook represents Timothy's best poems from 2007, a year that he had 32 accepted submissions. These poems are rich with emotion, humor, double meanings, happiness and regret. "this is where you go when you are gone" ranges of experiences, responses to social events and a poetic e-mails written to someone who felt his poems were too sad. Timothy Gager tells stories through his poetry and this collection represents a new and more mature and seasoned writer.

Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene Review

$7.00 | 43 Pages | In Stock: 25

Just released: March 18th

The Lengthening Radius For Hate by Gary Fincke Červená Barva press, 2008

The Lengthening Radius for Hate is a poem sequence that has, at its foundation, the shooting of Kent State students on May 4, 1970, by the National Guard. Gary Fincke was a student at Kent State in 1970, and he chronicles both the shooting and its residual effects over decades in a series of strongly observed narrative poems that explore disillusionment, anger, and the difficulties of reconciliation.

Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene Review:
http://dougholder.blogspot.com/search?q=gary+Fincke

$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock: 25

Isolate Flecks by Kevin Gallagher Červená Barva Press, 2008: Kevin Gallagher is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Isolate Flecks (Červená Barva Press, 2008), and Looking for Lake Texcoco (Cy Gist, 2008). His poetry and reviews have appeared in such publications as The Boston Review, Emergency Almanac, Green Mountains Review, Harvard Review, Jacket, Peacework, the Partisan Review and elsewhere. In 2004 he edited a feature on Kenneth Rexroth for Jacket, and a chapbook titled Nevertheless: Some Gloucester Writers and Artists. From 1992 to 2002 he was a publisher and editor of compost magazine. A retrospective anthology of compost, co-edited with Margaret Bezucha, is titled There's No Place on Earth Like the World (Zephyr, 2006). He lives with his wife Kelly, and son Theo, in Newton, Massachusetts.
$7.00 | 39 Pages | In Stock: 20

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

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

Adrian S. Potter is the winner the 2003 Langston Hughes Poetry Contest and the 2005 Saturday Writers Short Story Contest. He has been published in more than 60 different literary journals, magazines, and websites including Colere, City Works, Reed, Out of Line, The Binnacle, Main Channel Voices, Blue Earth Review and Poesia.

Additional propaganda about Adrian and his writing can be found at http://adrianspotter.squarespace.com/.

Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
Survival Notes by Adrian S. Potter
Somerville’s Cervena Barva Press has published a collection of very short stories or flash fiction by Adrian Potter: “Survival Notes.” Potter is the winner of the 2003 Langston Hughes Poetry Contest and has numerous publication credits. Potter’s pieces have a raw edge to them. They take place for the most part in urban settings with angry male characters in the midst of existential crises. One story that peaked my interest in this collection was “Domestic Silence.” In this story, an unfortunate neighbor to a loud and argumentative couple, tracks the jazz music the abusive male in this unfortunate coupling plays to mute the loud protests of his many domestic brawls.

“I’ve lived here for two years, long enough that I can determine the topic of their disputes by what record is playing. Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue,” means that that the husband is releasing the frustration of financial woes onto her fragile ribcage. The swinging melodies of Duke Ellington are reserved for senseless shouting matches, the type of overreaction brought on by male jealousy. Electronic jazz-funk, like Herbie Hancock and the “Head Hunters,” is synonymous with the profanities and backhanded slaps that come from drinking binges. I don’t even have to explain the subtle irony when songs from Coltrane’s “ A Love Supreme” filter from underneath their doorway.”

I would like to see Potter develop more stories like this. He may be on to something.
Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ Jan. 2008/ Somerville, Mass.

$7.00 | 42 Pages | In Stock: 20

Illegal Border Crosser by Michael Graves Červená Barva Press, 2008: Michael Graves was a student of James Wright. He is the author of a chapbook Outside St. Jude's (REM Press, 1990), which was re-issued as an ebook by Rattapallax, and is the recipient of a grant of $4,500 from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation for two thousand four. His first full-length collection of poems is Adam and Cain (Black Buzzard, 2006). He has published thirteen (13) poems in the James Joyce Quarterly and read a selection of his poems to a meeting of the James Joyce Society at the Gotham Book Mart in New York City. Professor A. Nicholas Fargnoli, President of the James Joyce Society has adopted some of his poems as required reading for his survey course in Modern American Literature. His poem "Apollo to Daphne" appears in Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths (Oxford University Press 2001). He has published widely in journals and magazines, some of which include The Classical Outlook, European Judaism, The Journal of Irish Literature, Cumberland Poetry Review, nycBigCityLit-New York Edition, Writer's Forum, Rattapallax, The Hurricane Review, The Hollins Critic, Archipelago, and Salonika.
$7.00 | 36 Pages | In Stock: 20

Among Us by Harris Gardner Červená Barva Press, 2007

It is said the angels walk among us, the invisible. Gardner drapes the invisible with language in the hopes that we can see ourselves.
–Afaa M. Weaver

Gardner's vision here mainly focuses on angels. He's right out of scripture, brings biblical (and elsewhere) visions of angels into our contemporary world so that everything surrounding us becomes supernaturalized and uplifted., And always in a language that reads the way Monet paints. "The breeze stretches pliant forms/ kinetic art, brush-stroked clouds…/ Senses soar toward the sun/ when rays sear through languid clouds/ revealing noble haloed heads…" ("Among Us"). He is Mr. Visionary, taking the Torah and all other angel-sources like Milton, Raphael, "Dictionary of Angels", etc., and filling our world with uplifting such as you've never been uplifted into before. It's a vision sorely needed today, and technically the most masterful word-working on the contemporary or any other scene.
–Hugh Fox

Excerpt from a review
Angels have held a fascination for many writers: Milton, Hass, Hopkins, Billy Collins, to name a few. But how does one manage to address the imperceptible, let alone the holy? Gardner’s answer is to bring angels down to earth, to imbue them with human characteristics and foibles...This collection’s central strength is its admonition to the reader to look beyond the mundane. “Seeing angels may challenge your vision. / No cost to believe in noble winged creatures.” In our bitter post-post-modern age, this is a welcome thought.
Eleanor Goodman/ Ibbetson Update/ Jan 2008
Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

$7.00 | 45 Pages | In Stock: 20

Living Proof by Mary Bonina Cervena Barva Press, 2007

These are poems concerned with the primary relationships of our lives -- family, friends, lovers, nature -- and in them, there is always the larger world rattling around. This volume of narratives, lyrics, dialogues, and found poems demonstrates Bonina's accomplishment and range. Here is an assured voice imbued with musicality, surprising us in the simple way it offers up deeper meaning, often using imagery drawn from the everyday.

"...the voice of these poems knows death, luck, the mall, the hard edges of place, New England places, the violence of the world. It runs very concretely and in many poems, past what its bearer sees as if standing still in deep attention. It is written so that "he who runs may read" but turns entirely inside out the terms and assumptions of that old insult. What a place this human world would be if we all ran at Mary Bonina's speed, what Flannery O'Connor once called the terrible speed of mercy."
--Mary Baine Campbell
author of TROUBLE (poems), Carnegie Mellon U Press and The World, The Flesh, and Angels (poems), Beacon Press

$7.00 | 46 Pages | In Stock: 20

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

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

$6.00 | 40 Pages | In Stock: 3

New Arrivals from The Feral Press

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

$8.00 | 6 Pages | In Stock: 4

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

$10.00 | 19 Pages | In Stock: 1

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

$5.00 | 9 Pages | In Stock: 4

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

$6.00 | 12 Pages | In Stock: 4

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

$10.00 | 15 Pages | In Stock: 4

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

$8.00 | 8 Pages | In Stock: 1

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

$10.00 | 14 Pages | In Stock: 4

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

$8.00 | 16 Pages | In Stock: 4

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

$12.00 | 17 Pages | In Stock: 4

Ferrovie by Anthony Russell White Červená Barva Press, 2007

The 2006 Červená Barva Press Chapbook Poetry Prize Winner

Ferrovie is Italian for trains, and seemed appropriate for a series of poems about strange encounters on Italian trains. I was introduced to the prose poem in 1993 by Robert Bly at a workshop afloat in Alaska, and have been writing them ever since. Some poems just seem to want to be in that form. Some of these ten came from my dreams, a few from actual events, the remainder from pure unleashed imagination.
Anthony Russell White

$5.00 | 20 Pages | In Stock: 15

Sister Mary Butkus by Ed McManis Červená Barva Press, 2007

Ed McManis is a teacher, writer, poet, editor, songwriter, husband and dad—not always in that order. His work has appeared in more than 40 publications.

Cover art by Joe McManis

$7.00 | 37 Pages | In Stock: 15

God of the Jellyfish by Lucille Lang Day Červená Barva Press, 2007

At once sacrilegious and reverential, the poems in God of the Jellyfish seek the divine in a natural world governed by the laws of science. In these poems, you'll find a god in the shape of a jellyfish, a prayer celebrating the color red, a man for whom music becomes the source of salvation, a vision of an earthly paradise populated by moon bears and moon rats, and a pilgrimage through 14 stations where Sisyphus, Shaker women, and howling wolves appear. Lucille Lang Day deftly couples scientific observations to the engine of imagination to take us on a magical and inspiring journey.

God of the Jellyfish shimmers in a space where "moon cacti bloom at night" and magpies can "fly over a field/of small glass bottles." The world Lucille Lang Day creates in her poetry is vivid and surreal yet always deftly anchored in the beauty and truth of the natural world. This is a small handbook of magic. When you read it, you'll find yourself transported to places you've never even dared to imagine.
—Susan Terris

There are few contemporary poets who use science in their poetry at all, let alone use it as Lucille Lang Day does here, as an element, both dreamlike and hyperreal, in her gorgeous, moving global lyric.
—Richard Silberg

$7.00 | 39 Pages | In Stock: 20

Land of the Morning Calm by Susanne Morning Červená Barva Press, 2007

South Korea, referred to as the hermit kingdom of Asia, has been the home of New Zealand author/painter Susanne Morning for the last 7 years. Fascinating and humorous, Land of the Morning Calm unearths the bizarre and unexpected elements of this ancient/modern Confucian culture. An archeological dig that will put dirt under your nails and priceless relics in your hands!

$7.00 | 29 Pages | In Stock: 5

Of All The Meals I Had Before: Poems About Food and Eating by Doug Holder Červená Barva Press, 2007

These food poems are served up spicy like Italian cousine. Read them before dinner or after dessert, either way like Chinese food, you'll return hungry for more.
A.D. Winans

In his collection, “Of All The Meals I Had Before: Poems About Food and Eating” Doug Holder serves up a hearty fare. He fills our plate with “unapologetically greasy Egg Foo Young,” “tamed tenderloin,” “a chorus line” of “rotisserie chickens,” and “some fraction of gelatinous liver quivering.” He not only takes us out to dine with him, but he also looks around for us, makes sure we notice the “ancient waitresses…[who] bark the orders\through the swing of doors” and “old man Cardullo spit from\his cigar-studded mouth” and the undertaker beside us who “delicately wipes his mouth\… runs his well-veined hand\through the shoe polish\in his hair.” Holder offers a truly eclectic cuisine and company to match– savory, and unsavory, occasionally bitter, more often sweet. Even as we polish off dessert, he leaves us wondering, “What If We Froze with a Fork in Our Hand” and “just\took a\minute\to simply\pause.”
Mary Buchinger Bodwell, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences

A delightful and delicious collection of poems, whetting the appetite for more. These are the kinds of witty, Jewishy poems I envision Woody Allen would write, should he ever take to writing poetry.
Helen Bar-Lev, Artist, Poet
Editor-in-Chief Voices Israel Anthology
Author: Animals are Nature's Poetry
Co-author: Cyclamens and Swords and other poems about Israel

Doug Holder's All the Meals I Had Before delivers again and again. Each poem is a savory dish worthy of five stars at Loch Ober's. Holder's poetry feeds our high expectations and does not disappoint. His wit and erudite observations constantly shine with sterling results. A lot of the poetry has a certain edginess mixed with wit and humor that equally provokes to thought while it entertains. Everyone should indulge themselves in this gourmet buffet.This collection, as well as Holder's other published works, belong in every serious collectors library.
Harris Gardner
Executive Director
Tapestry of Voices

Aside from being the founder, publisher, and co-editor of the prestigious and influential Ibbetson Street Press, Doug Holder writes poetry with a passion and insight that deserves prestige and influence all its own.

Take, for instance, “Of All The Meals I Had Before: Poems About Food and Eating,” a work with an organic feel surprising for a chapbook. Among some odes to nostalgic eateries like “Last Night at the Wursthaus” and “At Benson’s Deli,” Holder ponders the silly—“Milk Duds”—and the sublime—“Portrait of My Mother During Her Solitary Meal.” His eye for the rattling image drives many of the poems, like “Eating Out” where he observes: “As the Latino/scrapes the masticated/bone and marrow/into a bloody bin/ and flashes a gold-toothed smile,/at the chef/ whose cleaver/tears through a prime cut--/then holds some/fraction of a gelatinous liver/quivering in his hands…” What makes his work so enjoyable is not only his well-described world but also the fun he has with it, as when he ends the same poem with the line,” “Meanwhile I order desert.” The book flirts with food and sex, comparing breastfeeding and sucking on a straw or rotisserie chickens and pornographic images, until it climaxes in the final poem “Cannibalism,” that begins:
“And what could be more intimate?/ To deflesh a skull/ crack a femur/ to get down/ to the very marrow/ Is there a greater/ act of love?”
--S. Craig Renfroe, Jr., Main Street Rag
Winter 2007-8 Edition

$7.00 | 23 Pages | In Stock: 10

The Pursuit of Happiness New and Selected Poems from Elizabeth, New Jersey by Joe Weil: Excerpt from the back of the book
There's beauty everywhere, we know that. But no one perceives it all. It's easy to be impressed with towering mountain ranges, but Joe's knocked out over two old women gabbing over a broken picket fence, or his Uncle Pete not killing a deer after he thought he'd wanted to all his life, or riding home in a Yellow Cab and hanging out in the cool basement with the washing machine rocking on the uneven floor ("a convulsed and bulky tap dancer") or the Cuban lady "who claims to be the first cousin of Art Linkletter twice removed." But Joe's not only about loving "little people" and "humble" things…
--Harvey Pekar
$5.00 | 80 Pages | In Stock: 1

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

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

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

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

Gothic Calligraphy Poems by Flavia Cosma Červená Barva Press, 2007

Flavia Cosma is an acclaimed Romanian-born, Canadian poet, author and translator. She is also an award winning independent television documentary producer, director and writer. To date she has published nine books of poetry, a novel, a traveling memoir and a book of Fairy Tales. Her work is represented in numerous anthologies in various countries and languages.

Gothic Calligraphy, translated from the original Romanian by Flavia Cosma with Charles Siedlecki, is Flavia Cosma’s tenth poetry collection published in Somerville, Massachusetts by Červená Barva Press (2007). These poems are candid, romantic and metaphisical. What is particularly striking about the poems is their originality and the daring force of their imagery and metaphors, wonderfully rendered into English by this tantalizing, entrancing translation. The language is straightforward, spare, yet so bold in image as to seem extravagant.

Ioan Tepelea, poet and publisher, Oradea, Romania:
“The inner equilibrium and the uniqueness of voice, but most of all the interior fervor to be oneself when faced with life’s adversity, turn these poems into an existential suffrage, revealing an authentic and personal vision.”

George Elliott Clarke, Department of English, University of Toronto:
“Flavia Cosma’s vision is dark and Gothic, but also saturated with Mediterranean sun, romance and vine. Her style – imagistic, cryptic – reminds one of other powerful women writers such as America’s Emily Dickinson, Russia’s Anna Akhmatova and Canada’s Marie Uguay. Their poems are miniature fairy tales that enjoy being both sprightly and grim.”

David Mills, poet and literary critic, Toronto:
“Flavia Cosma’s poetry has been designed to waken sleeping consciousness. These poems lead the reader through the pain, suffering and loneliness of life while searching for truth’s hidden mysteries which serve to make life meaningful and beautiful, yet remain to be discovered in that continual renewal and rebirth of life.”

Irene Harasimowicz-Zarzecka, foreword to Gothic Calligraphy:
“A poet of extraordinary depth and sensitivity, combining in a permanent osmosis her state of mind and consciousness with the wealth of nature, always searching for the eternal, timeless values of our earthly sojourn. The baroque opulence of Flavia Cosma’s diction is worthy of a genuine master of the word.

Alexander Sfârlea, poet and literary critic, Oradea, Romania:
a review of Gothic Calligraphy:
“What strikes the reader in Gothic Calligraphy is an anxious and intense perception of the existential struggle, which melts irreversibly into extinction and forgetfulness, an intangible and tragic descent into the inevitable nothingness, combined with the ultimate deliverance of coming to terms with oneself.”

Fragments from Gothic Calligraphy appeared in their Romanian version—In Bratele Tatalui, Cogito Press, Oradea, Romania, 2006.

$8.00 | 41 Pages | In Stock: 10

Bilingual Poems by Richard Kostelanetz Červená Barva Press, 2007

Preface From the book:
If the principal theme of my poetry has been invention, one motive of the poems written since Wordworks (1993), my first elaborate collection, has been the clashing of languages. This reflects initially my interest in writing poems in languages I barely know--for instance, the French and German Strings reprinted there. As always, I make a move and then look for surprising results. Here one move is interweaving the letters of words in two languages; another comes from jamming two words together to form not only a larger word but an evocative intersection. Many other poetic developments should follow from these initial moves. Some depend upon understanding two languages; others, not. –Richard Kostelanetz, New York, NY

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

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

Out Of The Arcadian Ghetto A Fiction Chapbook by Ian Randall Wilson Červená Barva Press, 2007

Ian Randall Wilson is the author of Hunger and Other Stories (Hollyridge Press, 2000), and the poetry chapbook Theme of the Parabola (Hollyridge Press, 2005). His work has appeared in many journals including the North American Review, the Mid-American Review and The Gettysburg Review. He is an executive at Columbia-TriStar Marketing Group, and on the fiction faculty at the UCLA Extension.

Out of the Arcadian Ghetto is a work of great imagination. It features two previously published stories. In "He Was Known For His Nose," a specialist employed by a reclusive millionaire selects female companionship for his master by the women's smell. When his nose fails, disaster ensues. In "The Three Bears: A Retelling," this classic fairytale is reconceived as a contemporary commentary on race relations between homo sapiens and Ursus arctos.

Small Press Review/ Mar-Apr Picks, 2007

$7.00 | 33 Pages | In Stock: 9

Absolut ® Death and Others Art by Roz Dimon and Poems by George Held Dimon Studios, 2000: Absolut Death & Others pairs Roz Dimon’s satiric “ads” for brand name products with George Held’s satiric verse about them. For instance, the title drawing shows a stylized vodka bottle, and the facing page bears the lines “Absolut’s the perfect ablution / For those in need of absolution.” Printed in full color on glossy 100-pound 10 x 7” paper.
$10.00 | ISBN: | 28 Pages | In Stock: 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bits and Pieces by David Robert Boyce Copyright 2006 by David Robert Boyce: David is a member of the Arizona, Utah, and New Jersey Poetry Societies, and is affiliated with NORAZ Poets. His work has appeared in many journals including Utah Sings Volume VII, The Collared Peccary, A String of Colored Beads, and The Noise.
$1.00 | 8 Pages | In Stock: 5

Blue Edge by Susan Tepper Červená Barva Press-2006

Susan Tepper's poetry is honest, filled with original insights that enrich the reader. Her lyrics are taut and moving, a joy to read. She is to be welcomed among the most accomplished poets writing today.
Simon Perchik

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

Susan Tepper is a poet of quiet grace yet insistent power, who steals your mind's focus in odd moments long after you've laid down her book.
Don Williams, Editor, New Millennium Writings & Syndicated Columnist

Susan Tepper...on the page, shimmers through everyday thoughts, bringing life to streams and smoke and snow. Her gentle vision beautifully informs her well-crafted poems in "Blue Edge."
Suzi Winson, Fish Drum

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

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

$6.00 | 30 Pages | In Stock: 6

Canticles & Inventories by Tom Daley Wyngaerts Hoeck Press, 2005: About Tom Daley's poetry:
"His panoramic scope is elegantly matched with a sensitive attention to nuance. Daley’s images leave us with a sense of beauty in things mundane, and of life emerging from a decaying world.”
Regie Gibson
$10.00 | ISBN: | 32 Pages | In Stock: 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

$6.00 | 46 Pages | In Stock: 2

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

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

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

$5.00 | 16 Pages | In Stock: 3

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

(Excerpts of blurbs)

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

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

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

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

Judy Ray

Fishing in Green Waters by Judy Ray Červená Barva Press-2006; Second Printing-2007

"Sometimes, fishing in green waters, we draw up words in a fine net," says poet Judy Ray in her poem, "Sometimes." This "fine net" could easily describe her chapbook, Fishing in Green Waters, recently published by Červená Barva Press. In poems that take the reader from Tiananmen Square, to the Midwest flatlands, to the emotional landscape of Frida Kahlo, Fishing in Green Waters makes for a remarkable read. Ranging in tone from whispered quiet ("Let us lullaby to sleep the weary unseeing eyes") to breathless, imagistic cross-cuts ("[The poem] looks for the flash of the pileated woodpecker, finds the splash of blood in a schoolyard"), Ray reels in the political, the personal, and the historical in her tightly woven poems.
Gloria Mindock, Editor, Červená Barva Press

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

$6.00 | 35 Pages | In Stock: 10

Grounded by George Held Finishing Line Press, 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

$7.00 | 40 Pages | In Stock: 3

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

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

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

Intersections by Gaynell Gavin Main Street Rag: Gaynell Gavin's poetry, fiction, and essays have been published in numerous journals including Praire Schooner, Fourth Genre, Natural Bridge, Viet Nam War Generation Journal, The Comstock Review, and others. She was the winner of the 2001 Audre Lorde Creative Writing Award.
$7.00 | ISBN: 1-930907-96-6 | 41 Pages | In Stock: 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

$6.00 | 52 Pages | In Stock: 3

Luminal Wait by Anne Brudevold Eden River Press, 2006

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

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

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

Lunch at the Table of Opposites by Roger W. Hecht Red Dancefloor Press, 1997: These poems impress for the ease and unexpectedness of their phrasing, the balance that is struck in them between reticence and revelation. Every word, every line counts. The effect is not of meaness, but of energy; the poet living up to the rigors of his imagination with equal parts wit and gravity.
--JoEllen Kwiatek
Author, Eleven Days Before Spring
$5.00 | ISBN 1-881168-44-1 | 31 Pages | In Stock: 5