The Lost Bookshelf Author's by last name S

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Catherine Sasanov

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

Traditions of Bread and Violence by Catherine Sasanov Four Way Books, 1996

(Excerpts from the back of the book)

Catherine Sasanov breathes spirit into flesh and blood and turns tears into our daily bread. Her poems should be said out loud like prayers. It has been years since I have read poems of such humanity.
--Elena Poniatowska

These extraordinary poems dwell on violence, dwell in the violent truth of the world - Christ's body torn, or a lover's chest cut open, and the Milagro stamped from tin into the shape of a body part...
--Gregory Orr

$12.00 | ISBN 1-884800-09-2 | 54 Pages | In Stock: 1

Lynne Savitt

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

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

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

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

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

$6.00 | 48 Pages | In Stock: 3

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.

$7.00 | 58 Pages | In Stock

Roger Sedarat

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

Don Share

UNION POEMS by Don Share Zoo Press, 2002

Excerpts:

Union presents a moving and original combination of vernacular directness, subtlety of tone and cadence, and imaginative vigor. Poems of mythologized autobiography--grief for a smashed marriage, for a lost childhood--are framed within the larger historical and political context of the poet's pained reckoning with his native Tennessee. --Rosanna Warren

Share's quest takes him back into the green heart of the country, looking down Union Avenue in Memphis where the Arkansas joins the Mississippi, flowing toward the Gulf, and where "the past still hurts, and gets sung about." Like those earlier singers, Whitman and Dickey, Don Share discovers again the distinctly American narrative, "the original catastrophe of our history," as he calls it: "We fought America in ourselves." And still fight, I might add. I delight in the precision of these chiseled poems and in the sizeable, important ambition of Share's imagination. --David Baker

But Union also sings the eternal concerns of love and time, death and longing...Few books are as lovely or profound. --Alice Fulton

$12.00 | ISBN: 0-9708177-7-0 | 67 Pages | In Stock: 5

Glenn Sheldon

Bird Scarer by Glenn Sheldon Červená Barva Press, 2008

MARTHA COLLINS-Structurally and emotionally expansive, Bird Scarer covers more territory than most first books. Beginning as a displaced Bostonian who finds himself in Chicago, where a "terrible blankness fills my eye," Sheldon next moves into a more abstract landscape, where he finds a "permanent address" that is both actual and mental. Finally, he opens his emotional eye to the variety and vibrancy of Latin America, where his travels become the metaphorical basis for a "Geography of Desire." Though often playful, the book is carefully observant and edgily serious: "I'm alert," the poet says, "like a bus rider / with a drunk driver making up / the names of the streets." Metaphors like this, usually emerging from setting, as well as less easily defined conceits ("The anarchists' picnic is / a disaster: Where? Why? When?"), turn these well-grounded poems into delightfully non-linear narratives that keep the reader as alert as the poet.

SUSAN AZAR PORTERFIELD-I am impressed by Sheldon's form. Always the stanza, always very regular, tercets or quatrains, etc., which seems to suggest a kind of control as does his use of short lines as well as short sentences. It suggests a kind of control and even terseness, but what I like is his unexpected bloom or rush of thought and/or feeling that really comes through. In other words, he gets us to ride on this seemingly tidy little train, but then the journey takes us on a wilder ride than we anticipated. I like the surprise of that. I also like what I perceive to be his tone and voice. Quiet, a bit sardonic, but also heavily emotional, Bird Scarer is lovely.

JIM DANIELS-Bird Scarer is an impressive collection of poems. The voice is wise and mature. The structure of the book both clear and sophisticated. One of the things I look for in a book of poetry is an accumulation of momentum from beginning to end, and I found that here. The book creates interesting tensions in terms of place-the links between physical places and emotional landscapes are explored in all their complexities. Sheldon has a fresh voice-quirky and disarming, frank and witty. And always precise. I was struck by the consistent use of tight, packed language, and his careful use of the poetic line. I love the understated humor in many of the poems, and how he uses form to reinforce that humor. The depth and tonal richness of the comparisons seem effortless and natural, yet carry enormous weight in these poems. They roll through these poems, one after another, creating surprise, discovery, insight, throughout. And fun.

LUIS URREA-Glen Sheldon's earlier poetry is certainly filled with promise. We find a full voice in play. Perhaps the poems are shaded by his expertise in Thomas McGrath. Still, this influence does not in any way dull the poems' brio. It is as an American poet that Glenn Sheldon will ultimately be remembered (and revered). He will have a major career as a poet, as Bird Scarer reveals his full maturity and trajectory.

$14.00 | ISBN: 9780615171678 | 60 Pages | In Stock: 20

Larissa Shmailo

Exorcism by Larissa Shmailo CD, 2008

Exorcism, Larissa Shmailo's second poetry CD, displays the remarkable range and electrifying vitality that have won her admirers worldwide. Following the release of The No-Net World, Larissa Shmailo returns to her deepest poetic origins, and from there, reveals an ascendancy that will mystify and astound.

$12.99 | ISBN 0-935060-07-3 | In Stock: 4 copies

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

The No-Net World by Larissa Shmailo

Excerpts

FROM THE PEDESTAL MAGAZINE:
Listening to poet and translator Larissa Shmailo’s latest spoken word CD is almost like attending eighteen short plays in the span of forty minutes. Like the best plays, each poem tells a compelling story of human struggle... Like the best plays, her poems also crackle with breathtaking language, which in the true tradition of the tragedies of which she speaks almost sound as if they could be sung (indeed, in some cases they almost are). Shmailo’s expert understanding of the close relationship between poetry and drama, music and language, and the primal human need to just hear a really, really good story make The No-Net World a truly unique contribution to twenty-first century American poetry, and a CD worth listening to frequently and carefully.

FROM POETIX.NET:
“How My Family Survived the Camps,” [IS] the strongest, the most important poem here, and one which clearly is based on personal (or at least familial) experience, and one which carries great emotional power. In it she describes the combination of luck and ingenuity that enabled her family to survive the Holocaust.

FROM NEW CENTURY:
Intense and poignant.

$11.99 | Audio CD | In Stock: 2

Mary McLaughlin Slechta

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

$10.00 | 14 Pages | In Stock: 4

Judith Skillman

Heat Lightning 1986-2006 by Judith Skillman Silverfish Review Press, 2006

Judith Skillman lets us see through her to ourselves, not as through a glass darkly, but with glorious light.
--Stephen Meats, Editor, The Midwest Quarterly

Judith Skillman has already amply demonstrated her ability to document the fragile ecology of domestic relationships with the resolutely unsentimental eye of the naturalist.
--Deborah Woodward, Prairie Schooner

$15.95 | ISBN: 1-878851-23-3 | 145 Pages | In Stock: 5

Leora Skolkin-Smith

EDGES O Israel O Palestine by Leora Skolkin-Smith Glad Day Books, 2005

Edges is an elegant and moving novel. Leora Skolkin Smith has that rare gift of the writer who can convey the sensibility-the essence of place and its people-with precision and clarity. A moving and provocative debut.
Katherine Weber, author of The Little Women, The Music Lesson

Summary of the novel as written on the back of the book: EDGES is set in a pre-1967 Israel and Palestine. Liana Bialik is fourteen years old when the suicide of her American father forces her to return with her sister and mother to Jerusalem where her mother was born and grew up. Liana's family were once members of the 1940's Haganah and are now living among the complex tensions of Israel's modernalization and expansion. Liana learns about her mother's childhood in the old city, her tragic uncle. With her young lover she lives in the Palestinian world beyond Jerusalem's border. She grows away from her intense relationship with her mother into a womanhood formed by the boundary-less spaces of a lost geography and people.

$15.00 | ISBN: 1-930180-14-4 | 176 Pages | In Stock: 5

Harry Smith

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

Michael Spring

Mudsong by Michael Spring Pygmy Forest Press, 2005

In poems made of muck, time, magic and jazz, Michael Spring's Mudsong reminds us that nature, ours and the world's, is at once organic and mysterious… --Lex Runciman

…This is a stellar collection, dramatically envisioned, beautifully crafted.
--John Amen, Pedestal Magazine

$12.00 | ISBN: 0-944550-71-1 | 76 Pages | In Stock: 3

Paul Steven Stone

Or So It Seems by Paul Steven Stone Blind Elephant Press, 2008

"Or So it Seems" offers a breathtaking but comical look at one man's spiritual journey. As we meet Paul Peterson he is being dragged reluctantly toward an oversized couch by a wine-emboldened, faded beauty named Allison Pratt. As a former member of The Seekers For Truth, a school of self development, Peterson holds a mystical view of the universe through which he examines the chain of events that have brought him to this absurdly humorous personal crisis. The novel follows Peterson's Do-It-Yourself Workshop, a supernatural, self-examination that takes him back and forth in time. Along the way, he is joined by a Hindu Holy Man known as The Bapucharya. Greatly amused by Peterson's life challenges, the irrepressible Bapucharya plays both Greek Chorus and Sancho Panza to Mr. Peterson's comically tragic hero. It is Peterson's search for answers to the mysteries of his life that this fantastic tale speeds us through, with a conclusion as startling as it is supremely fitting. You have never before read a novel like this!

One of the few incompetent managers not appointed to a position of high responsibility in American government, Paul Steven Stone has contented himself with being a creative director in advertising, a columnist, an environmental and human rights activist and a dime store philosopher. He presently works as Director of Advertising for W.B. Mason (Who But W.B. Mason!) and lives in Cambridge, Mass. with his lovely companion and wife, Amy. For the record, it took him 11 years to write “Or So It Seems.”

$20.00 | ISBN: 978-1438207698 | 434 Pages | 2 in stock

How To Train A Rock Short insights and Fiction Flights by Paul Steven Stone Blind Elephant Press, 2009

A collection of 'short insights and fiction flights' culled from over 20 years of the author's newspaper columns. Each one a highly polished gem. These short pieces are often funny, occasionally profound, generally insightful and always creative. Stone knows how to surprise the reader with twist endings, unexpected points of view and more narrative styles than a roomful of writers. You will be delighted.

Author of the innovative, comic novel, "Or So It Seems", Paul Steven Stone has contented himself with being a creative director in advertising, a newspaper columnist, an environmental and human rights activist and a dime store philosopher. He presently works as Director of Advertising for W.B. Mason (Who But W.B. Mason!) and lives in Cambridge with his lovely companion and wife, Amy. And did we mention Katie, Kristin and Jesse, Stone's three wonderful adult children...?

$15.00 | ISBN: 978-1442117211 | 189 Pages | 1 in stock

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