Here we go: The next Read America Read Project is November 26th.
Leave a book for someone to take anywhere you want. This time, ask two people you know to do this also. This way the project
will grow each month. I would like a book marker to go in every book so people know where they are
coming from. Thank you for being a part of this project.
Lets make November 26th great! Send me photos too. I have a list of names of who
participated and as this grows, keep letting me know you are doing this. Thanks a zillion.
You all rock. Lets get America reading!!!!
e-mail: gloria@read-america-read.org
Thanks so much,
Gloria
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Irina Mashinski was born and raised in Moscow. She graduated
from Moscow University, where she studied theory of landscape and
completed her PhD in paleoclimatology. In 1991, she emigrated to
the United States, where she taught high school mathematics as well as
literature, history, and meteorology at several universities. Mashinski is
the author The Naked World (MadHat Press, 2022) and of eleven books
of poetry and essays in Russian. She is co-editor, with Robert Chandler
and Boris Dralyuk, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin
Classics, 2015) and of Cardinal Points, the journal of Brown University's
Slavic Department. Her work has been translated into several languages
and has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies both in the US
and internationally. Website: www.irinamashinski.com
Irina Mashinski is a poet who has the rooting feeling for the tag game played between the inapposite and the apposite.
Accordingly, nothing is off-limit because there is no limit for a poet who can be microscopic and cosmic, offhand and adjuring,
and who, above all, is willing to descend and ascend-again, without limits. The long central poem In Absentia is a
tour de force of relentless probing of loss and the innumerable, parti-colored shards that accompany loss, the drear
yet enticing yet shattering yet sustaining landscape of memories. The translations bring a wonderfully attentive ear
to the page, one that delights in the resonances and the cadences of English. All in all, this book is a book of poems
to live with, containing the vastness and fearlessness we all hope to find in poetry.
-Baron Wormser, author of Legends of the Slow Explosion
If poetry is the language capable of shedding light on the things beyond, the things in between, then
Irina Mashinski illuminates them - to the very core of our existence.
-Lothar Quinkenstein, author of Souterrain and translator of Olga Tokarczuk
Irina Mashinski's poems in Giornata inhabit the landscape of elegy and exile, as well as the actual landscape
of rural America. She forgets nothing, asking without self-pity, "Who's left?" These translations feel wholly original,
rich in music, but mostly rich with the poet's sensibility, the tenderness with which she opens to her losses and
offers them to us, like her grandmother's "Moscow teacups" an image so simple and so arresting. Mashinski teaches
us to reckon with the past, to know the world as inherently elegiac, and yet to also be tied to the moment, to
love the moment, not missing anything, not the clouds blooming outside her window, or the detritus on the forest
floor. These are poems to return to and live with.
-Anne Marie Macari, author of Heaven Beneath
Irina Mashinski's poetic eye has such range, it seems to move above the earth and see both the changing of
landscapes and the shift between eras with equal ease. There is also an underlying cheerful quality about the
poems, which could be straight elegies for our terrible centuries and histories but somehow refuse to give in
to undiluted sadness. These new translations convey the purity and fineness of Mashinski's work, whilst
conveying its formal complexity - a rare feat.
-Alexandra Dugdale, author of Deformations and Joy
Giornata. A day's work on a fresco, on a true fresco, buon, where the pigment is permanently
fused with the plaster, where the vision, the dream, becomes one with its surface, where the day
does not just point to its mystery, it is our mystery. In these poems, Irina Mashinski migrates
between Russia and the U.S., between her past and present, between memory and memory. In
so doing, she teaches me what cannot ever be left or lost: this moment, our now. Mashinski is
a poet's poet. I am in awe.
-Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of American Purgatory and Render / An Apocalypse
$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-60-4 | 94 Pages
Michael Daley was born and raised in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He holds a
B.A. from the University of Massachusetts and an M.F.A. from the University
of Washington. His work has been awarded by Seattle Arts Commission,
Washington State Arts Commission, Massachusetts Cultural Council,
Fessenden Foundation, National Endowment of the Humanities, Fulbright,
The Skagit River Poetry Foundation, and The Poets House Trust. A retired
teacher, he lives near Deception Pass in Washington.
True Heresies is a cocktail of rage, anti-poems, and dissonant songs; this collection takes a swing or two at several revered
institutions and dogmata. Some of the topics addressed here are
exhumed from contemporary headlines, historical events often obscured by our collective distractions; at the unconscious fringe
of philosophical meddling, some of these poems voice the
suppressed terrors of today’s imminent dystopia. True Heresies calls out from necessity that shout in the street that is divine
while remaining profoundly human. In an age when taking anything
on faith is a challenge, these poems like bells peal forth their questions.
Mouth-filling! Mind-bending! A total trip! The images, references, and connections come so fast and furious, it's hard to
catch my breath! These poems have
some serious juice-the first one is SO intense-it seems to contain the outlines of all the rest-and from there, the poems
slow a bit, and focus more closely, as
if through squinted eyes, but never losing momentum.
-Marjorie Rommel, Poet Laureate Emerita, Auburn, Washington
I have no idea how these poems were conceived, whether in a boil after two weeks in the darkest recesses of a cave, or upon
watching disastrous election returns
on a continuous loop, or as one poem title suggests, at 35,000 feet while listening to The Odyssey, but they are bursting with
classical and backwoods tragedies,
passions, and humors (clever and ill), and they are excellent, challenging company.
-Kathleen Flenniken, former Washington State Poet Laureate
Michael Daley's poems are waiting for a world to be finished (and that is meant in both senses of the word). They are both
powerfully evocative of the nothingness
holding the living in its thrall and the dialectical affirmations of its images, whose textures confront that nothingness and
insist on overcoming its negations. A book of poems that strengthens the soul.
-Jack Hirschman, Poet Laureate Emeritus, San Francisco, California
True Heresies is an American original, filled to overflowing with a unique voice and an idiosyncratic turn of mind. Daley's words
and images can make a reader's
head spin for a long time after the book is closed. It will enlarge your perceptions of what poetry can do. He makes conventional
poems taste like sour milk. His work can fleece the reader raw.
-Louis Phillips, author of How Wide the Meadow
"Great literature," Ezra Pound famously said, "is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree."
Michael Daley's poems most certainly are
highly charged. "Language," he writes in one poem, "is tied to every atom." And that charge creates a kind of nuclear
fusion that bonds music to meaning.
In True Heresies, the music is often furious and symphonic, the meaning often a savage reflection of a fractured age, a
time of climate disruption we ourselves have
brought on and, as of now, appear to be doing very little to prevent what seems like a chain reaction. Daley's poems are
the Greek chorus, the heretics who speak the sometimes-unspeakable truths we wish we could avoid.
-Ed Harkness, author of The Law of the Unforeseen
Cover photo: © Jay Mallin/ZUMA Press
$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-63-5 | 96 Pages
Anis Shivani is a poet, fiction writer, and literary critic living in Houston, Texas. His critically acclaimed books include
Anatolia and Other Stories, The Fifth Lash and Other Stories, Karachi Raj: A Novel, My Tranquil War and Other Poems,
Whatever Speaks on Behalf of Hashish: Poems, The Moon Blooms in Occupied Hours: Poems,
Soraya: Sonnets, Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies, and Literary Writing in the Twenty-First Century: Conversations.
His work appears widely in
such journals as the Yale Review, Georgia Review, Southwest Review, Boston Review, Threepenny Review, Michigan Quarterly Review,
Antioch Review, Black Warrior Review,
Western Humanities Review, Boulevard, Pleiades, AGNI, Fence, Denver Quarterly, The Journal, Gulf Coast, Third Coast, Volt,
Subtropics, New Letters, Times Literary Supplement,
London Magazine, Cambridge Quarterly, Meanjin, Fiddlehead, Dalhousie Review, Antigonish Review, and elsewhere.
He has also written for many magazines and newspapers including Salon,
Daily Beast, AlterNet, CommonDreams, Truthout, Huffington Post, Texas Observer, In These Times, Boston Globe,
San Francisco Chronicle, Kansas City Star, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
St. Petersburg Times, Baltimore Sun, Charlotte Observer, Austin American-Statesman, and elsewhere.
He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize, and a graduate of Harvard College.
"Defiant, deft, bound to the imagination and the practice of the poet's craft,
Anis Shivani's Confessions has given us much to appreciate. This startling
work resists the easy spectacle poetry, and even confessions themselves,
often offer the heart. Instead, Shivani's lucid perceptions expose, darkly,
and incandescently, too, the aches and auguries of that which is spoken and
unspoken through language. These inseparable collisions of ecstatic and
ordinary life, the world and the word, intellect and instinct, are visceral in
discovery and intimacy. We, too, become fortunate travelers hurtling inside
the prowess of Shivani's polyphonic acts. Confessions is the voice of an
expansive mind, deeply conscious and deservedly celebratory of its own
free textures and countries."
-Rachel Eliza Griffiths, award-winning author of Mule & Pear, Lighting the Shadow, and Seeing the Body
PRAISE FOR ANIS SHIVANI'S POETRY
"Anis Shivani evidently inhabits a world in which every
moment of time in the past, present, and a humorously but
lethally prophesied future, occurs simultaneously and is
animated by a wit sometimes subtle, sometimes savagely
indignant. Its two faces join forces and somehow manage to
speak in unison of what they actually see and think. I sense
everywhere an undercurrent of compassion and
identification, a poignant humanity and sense of responsibility
underneath his torrential voice."
-Franz Wright
"When I first plunged into Anis Shivani's work, I had the
impression two of my most admired dead poet friends were
one-upping each other in the afterlife-Tom Disch with his
straight-faced drop-dead virtuoso satire of literary and
political pretension and Aga Shahid Ali with his eloquent,
global, polyglot formal legerdemain-both of them knowing
more about history and about literature than ninety-nine
percent of their readers. But Shivani's poems are no
phantoms, they are vibrant, new, knowledgeable, daring, and
welcome."
-Marilyn Hacker
"Anis Shivani's poetry is remarkable for its continuing
preoccupation with literature, culture, and language, and a
discourse that incorporates the written word, the oral
tradition, and the imagery of art and film. His cerebral poems
often border on the obscure, but constantly challenge the
reader to unravel deeply embedded references, suggestions,
and innuendoes. The innovative use of words and sounds
that draw on myriad languages and cultures adds to the rich
texture of each poem."
-Muneeza Shamsie
$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-29-1 | 102 Pages
Michael Foldes (b 1946) is an American poet, publisher, author
and businessman. Born in Baltimore, MD, he grew up in Endwell,
New York, later graduating from The Ohio State University in
anthropology. In 2004, Foldes founded Ragazine.cc, a free, global,
online magazine of art, information and entertainment. The bimonthly
zine ceased publication in December 2019. Partial archives
remain online at www.ragazine.cc.
Foldes's publications and projects include the anthologies "Stopped
Dead: The End of Poetry," "In an Early Hour," and "Sand and
Snow"; Sleeping Dogs: A true story of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping"
(Split Oak Press, Ithaca, NY, 2012), and Sandy: Chronicles of a
Superstorm in collaboration with artist Christie Devereaux. In 2017,
he completed "Fashions & Passions" a series of ekphrastic poems in
collaboration with artist Christopher Panzner. Panzner and Foldes
recently completed a second collection titled "End Game," 75
poems with images created by Panzner in response to the poems.
His poetry collection Some Stuff is available as a Kindle edition on
Amazon.
Foldes's articles, editorials, poems, reviews, interviews and stories
have appeared in publications worldwide, some in translation in
Romanian, Hungarian, Japanese, French and Spanish. Publishing
credits include l'Oeil de la Photographie, Where is the Jazz Festival,
Mobius, Southern Literary Review, the Village Voice, High Times, The
Seventh Quarry, Paterson Literary Review, CLH/Romania, We Are You
Poetry anthology, From the Finger Lakes, Folazil (France), and Rosebud,
among others. An interview with Foldes by Carol Smallwood
appeared in the Scarlet Leaf Review, and in Wilderness House Literary
Review.
His jobs have included lifeguard, grocery store bagger, potato
peeler, construction worker, magazine editor, newspaper editor,
social worker, electronic component sales rep, and medical video
products sales engineer. One of his favorite gigs was bartending at
the National Poetry Society in Earl’s Court Square, London, where
the Guinness was warm and the patrons amazing.
He and his wife have three children and two grandchildren. They
live in New York's Southern Tier a few hundred yards from the
Susquehanna River.
Don't expect to find a bouquet of poems neatly tied together by a common theme or style; if anything
brings these highly divergent poems together, it is probably the date of their creation as the fruits of
the same harvest season, a recent one. Mike Foldes always tends to be very eclectic, open to any style, any
theme, but in each of his poems, no matter how unique, his voice sounds authentic whether he speaks of personal
experiences or editorializes on current political events. None of the poems are made to order; they all just seem
to have burst out from the creative nook of the poet's mind and dictated their own style. Some readers-whether
they be critics or just lovers of poetry-may find themselves at a loss faced with such wide range of eclecticism,
but I applaud it and the poet's unhesitating answer to an inner call; however, my favorites are the short spiffy
ones that say more by telling less, such as the footballer and gravity: "...when gravity / takes me where / all things go,
/ pray / what's there / will make me / the believer / you said / i would become."
-Paul Sohar, a fellow poet and occasional critic; author of "In Sun's Shadow"
Mike Foldes's chapbook, "Original Sin," weaves a fine-spun and well-designed American "poetic" carpet knit together with vibrant words,
which are not mild incantations, but rather words that allow readers to confront their greatest fears (i.e., aging, illness, impotence, war,
loveless love, betrayal, darkness, or the current global rise of right-wing totalitarian fascism). For instance, in precise "clear-cut" language,
in the poem "The Sedition Edition," Foldes captures the full anti-American treasonous horror of January 6, 2021's U.S. Capitol insurrection.
-Jose Rodeiro, recipient of an NEA, Fulbright Fellowship, and an Oscar B. Cintas Fellowship in painting
"where do we go/ from here?/ where is the ladder?/ where are the stars?" asks the final poem in this thoughtful,
outrageous chapbook. Original Sin deftly encapsulates
the pandemic, a year like no other, filled with love lost, insurrection, aging, drugs, death, and, yes, love found
again. Foldes asks the hard questions. His answers might surprise you.
-Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of Explicit: New & Selected, poetry editor, Cultural Daily
Cover Art: Christopher Panzner
$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-73-4 | 45 Pages
Alan Catlin is retired from a long career in his unchosen profession
in the "hospitality industry."
He has published well over sixty chapbooks and full-length
books of poetry and prose. Most recently his fictional memoir/
novel Chaos Management was published by Alien Buddha and is
available on Amazon, as are many of his recent publications on a
wide variety of subjects from art, to bar wars, to self-portraits that
aren't self-portraits, to a series of book length memories which
aren't "memories" per se, among many others. He won the 2017
Slipstream Chapbook Award for Blue Velvet, the first of eleven
chapbooks channeling noir movies. Two of his books were named
Most Neglected Books of the Year by the late Marvin Malone, editor
of the legendary Wormwood Review.
Cover Photography: Susanna Lewis
$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-72-7 | 29 Pages
Michael C. Keith is the author or coauthor of more than two dozen groundbreaking books on electronic media,
including one chosen by President Clinton for his official summer reading list. Beyond that, he is the author
of an acclaimed memoir (The Next Better Place, Algonquin Books), a young adult novel, and 19 story collections-
his latest Insomnia 11 from MadHat Press and Pieces of Bones and Rags from Cabal Books. He has received accolades
for his academic and fiction writing.
In the tradition of the classic micro-fiction of renowned writer Lydia Davis, this singular collection
explores the full range of human endeavor and behavior in all their varied and discrete (and not so discrete)
manifestations. Keith's mini-stories, perhaps more appropriately called prose/poetry because of their
lyrical nature, take the reader to places only a truly vivid and original imagination could.
Often disquieting in theme and plot, the pieces within these covers invariably contain meaningful
truths and lessons while managing to accomplish this in a witty and affecting manner.
In Quiet Geography, Michael C. Keith fashions a multitude of miniature worlds, and in each one he
finds the perfect narrative distance and tone of voice to infuse the comic with the dark and the
dark with the comic. Unique, yet intentionally ambiguous, these micro-stories are shapeshifters.
Chameleon-like, Keith's creations change color and reveal different patterns so the reader may respond
differently each time he or she re-reads them. These wry, richly detailed flash fictions repay each
reading by offering gem-like, myriad angles of reflection.
-Allen Wier, author of Tehano and Late Night, Early Morning
Quiet Geography's cleverly dark humor stays lively throughout. It normalizes the strange and
estranges the normal. There are cynical vibes, but they're not overwhelming; besides, as someone (Seneca?)
said, cynics are really idealists at heart. It’s good to know Michael C. Keith is out there demonstrating
the delights of idealistic cynicism. This is one of the best reads I've had this year.
-Betsy Delmonico, editor-in-chief Golden Antelope Press
$18.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-74-1 | 194 Pages
David Cappella, Professor Emeritus of English and the 2017/2018 Poet-in-Residence at Central Connecticut State University,
has co-authored two widely used poetry textbooks, Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves and
A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day to Day.
He won the Bright Hill Press Poetry Chapbook Competition in 2006. His poems and essays have appeared in various literary journals
and anthologies in the US and Europe. His novel, Kindling, has been called "a powerful and devastating coming-of-age story."
Visit his university web site: http://webcapp.ccsu.edu/?fsdMember=249
Note to the Reader
Gobbo: A Solitaire's Opera is a "natural opera." That is, it is the emotional arc of a poet's life rendered in poetry.
The sonnet sequence is divided into three acts much like a formal opera, and it is loosely based on the life of the
Italian poet, Giacomo Leopardi. His life, fraught with emotional and physical pain, did not stop him from writing some
of the most exquisite lyrical poetry of his age, of all time. His view of human nature, of mankind in general was dark,
but this was not necessarily because he was physically misshapen, though some think that is the case. Whatever his view
of humanity or whatever his emotional and physical pain, Leopardi demonstrated great courage in the face of adversity
while his poetry transcended his life.
Though the emotional life of Gobbo follows the life of Leopardi, his voice is, most assuredly, not Leopardi's.
The voice of Gobbo is the consciousness of a poet living his life. He is the artist navigating the world.
Gobbo: A Solitaire's Opera is not an historical or a biographical document.
"David Cappella's Gobbo is truly operatic as it makes us feel the heart and soul of a tortured yet remarkable poet.
Through the deft use of form, Cappella maintains a constant window on a changeable man. Each aria-like poem
articulates an aspect of Gobbo’s experience while creating, as in opera, a powerful emotional skein.
This is a life of a poet in poems. As such, its relevance is timeless."
-Baron Wormser
"It is difficult for us who live in an anti-romantic age to grasp the consciousness of the romantic poet without
the aura of the decorative, or the merely forlorn, obstructing our appreciation. We may sense a great reduction
has come to pass regarding the ways of being available to a poet in today’s world. In these poems, from the first
act of David Cappella’s Gobbo: A Solitaire’s Opera, we are given, again, what poets in western societies have lost,
the exquisitely articulated desires and claims of the young poet who has “no loves, no friends, nothing, just [his]
studies” and yet, through the exercise of an intense imagination, finds comfort and confirmation in nature, books,
language itself, and encounters with the beautiful and the infinite. It is high, grand stuff, true art, when a poet
can embody the dance that transpires between the imagination and life lived in response to perceptions and
circumstances. This is what David Cappella has created with delicacy and balance."
-Gray Jacobik
Cover art: "One / Leopardi" by Britta Winkels
$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-15-4 | 106 Pages
Doug Mathewson writes short, and even shorter fiction. His work has appeared here and there, now and then due to the kindness
and forgiving nature of numerous editors to whom he is most sincerely grateful. He is the editor of Blink-Ink www.blink-ink.org
Also he sweeps up and does odd chores for The Mambo Academy of Kitty Wang.
More of his work can be found at Little 2 Say www.little2say.org
Nomad Moon is a collection of twenty four short stories by Doug Mathewson. They have been described as
"True stories from imaginary lives." Every one is true except for the pretend and made up parts. Some
stories are sad, and some humorous, but all showing the authors love of life and human kind.
$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-56-7 | 27 Pages
Nina Rubinstein Alonso's poetry and stories have appeared in Ploughshares, The New Yorker, U. Mass. Review,
Writing in a Woman's Voice, Nixes Mate, Ibbetson Street, Broadkill Review, Southern Women's Review, Peacock Journal,
Sumac, Wilderness House, The New Boston Review, Pensive Journal, Taj Mahal Review, etc.
Her book This Body was published by David Godine Press, her story collection A Dancer's Notebook
and a novel Balancing on One Leg are in the works. She's the editor of
Constellations: a Journal of Poetry and Fiction and has published the 11th issue. She taught
at Boston Ballet for eleven years and continues as director and teacher of Fresh Pond Ballet.
"Do you ever feel a "wow moment" when reading a poet's work? It might be an idea, poetic lines or a usage of
words that say this poet is unique. Nina R. Alonso's Riot Wake is full with such lines as: "seeing women in black veils/
wrapped like moths at night." Alonso's observations of people and places is like walking the Earth with a magnifying glass.
Her poetry is intriguing, inspired and insightful. It is a book not soon forgotten."
-Zvi A. Sesling
Riot Wake is outstanding. The poems are intelligent, lyrical and so precisely observed. The collection as a whole is
carefully organized to give us the arc of the story: beauty and repression. Nina Alonso speaks to us personally and
frankly out of each one of these perfect poems. These poems will echo in your heart forever. The collection is timely
and will be a classic for years to come.
-Kathleen Spivack, author of Unspeakable Things
"The word "unique" may be used till the devil take it, but here it applies appropriately to Nina Alonso's "Riot Wake"
which portrays an inner journey through sites as disparate as El Camino in Spain and a Harvard Square reduced to rubble
by rioters. There's psychic pain and suffering as these poems ride their course, while in greater measure there's
delight in how they honor the eye and ear, line by line, with masterly performance. This is a goddam good chapbook."
-Tomas O'Leary
"Nina Alonso is a dancer. And in the case of her poetry there seems to be a slow motion, wandering sensibility to
her work. And indeed as she traveled through Morocco and Spain with her late husband her wanderlust brings the reader
to the face of intriguing and beautiful imagery. In Tangiers, she sees "women in black veils/ wrapped like moths at
night." She resurrects an acid trip in a fluorescent diner that dances with light and distortion. There is a sense
of mystery throughout this collection...of seeing the unseen...the past with all its pain and allure."
-Doug Holder
$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-34-5 | 50 Pages
Oriana Ivy was born and raised in Poland. She came to the United States when she was 17.
Her poems, essays, book reviews, and translations have been published in Poetry, Ploughshares,
Best American Poetry, Nimrod, Spoon River Review, The Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review,
Los Angeles Review of Books and many others. She’s the prize winning author of the chapbooks
April Snow (Finishing Line Press) and From a New World (Paper Nautilus). A former journalist and
community college instructor, she leads an online Poetry Salon. Her poetry-and-culture blog,
oriana-poetry.blogspot.com, has gained an international audience.
She lives in Southern California.
How to Jump from a Moving Train offers an interweave of immigrant experience with a complex mother-daughter
relationship, with a secondary interweave of history and myth. The speaker was born and raised in Poland, and came
to this country when she was seventeen. Her poems often address the "doubleness" of being an immigrant,
the deep cultural divide that the experience tends to produce.
I love these poems. Each one is astounding, a whole treasured world unto
itself, rendered in language that's been honed and polished until it shines.
There's an intimacy in this work that keeps opening out - from the deeply
personal into something enormous, not grandiose but so human that it
hurts, it blesses, it heals.
-Cecilia Woloch, author of Tzigan, Sacrifice, Carpathia, Earth and Late
Amongst the tens of thousands of poets at work in the United States in the
twenty-first century, there are still a handful who began writing well before
the Berlin Wall came down. How long ago that seems! Though Oriana Ivy's
poems are embedded in the playing out of European history after World
War II, they speak to the crisis that is at the heart of the "ghetto of time."
With a poet as reticent as Oriana Ivy to be visible within the horde of
contemporary working poets, it's hard to know exactly how many poems
she has written that are as fine as the ones in this collection. Several dozen
more? Two hundred more? No matter. These poems alone would serve to
preserve any poet's name on the reading list of every astute lover of poetry.
-William Mohr, author of The Headwaters of Nirvana: Reassembled
Poems and Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992
$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-65-9 | 30 Pages
This collection of poems from the Somerville High School's poetry club, edited by Lloyd Schwartz,
the poet laureate of Somerville, is a book worth digging into. 47 students wrote poetry for this anthology.
The poetry club is run by teachers Theresa Dietrich and Amanda Doughty.
It was an honor to publish this anthology and write a blurb for it along with Simon Perchik,
who is 98 years old. He still writes daily!
When Lloyd Schwartz approached me about publishing this anthology, I was so excited about it.
I loved this project, and it is an honor to be a part of bringing it into publication. Thank you Lloyd!
Gloria Mindock, editor of Červená Barva Press, Somerville Poet Laureate 2017 and 2018
Lloyd Schwartz is Somerville's third poet laureate, serving from 2019-2022, following Nicole Terez Dutton and
Gloria Mindock. He was one of twenty-three poets to be awarded the 2021 Academy of American Poets Poets Laureate
Fellowships, which helped fund this anthology. His poetry has also been honored by the National Endowment for
the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and has been selected for the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Poetry,
and The Best of the Best American Poetry. His poems and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair,
The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, Salmagundi, Ploughshares, and Plume, among numerous
other journals. He has published five books of poetry, most recently Who's on First?-New and Selected Poems
(University of Chicago Press, 2021).
For thirty-seven years, he taught English and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Boston,
where for much of that time he was the director of the undergraduate creative writing program.
He is now Frederick S. Troy Professor of English Emeritus. His scholarly work has centered on the
American poet Elizabeth Bishop, his close friend, about whom he wrote his Ph.D. thesis and edited
three major books of, or about, her work, including the Library of
America's Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters and the centennial edition of
her complete Prose (FSG). He writes and speaks about music and the arts
for NPR's Fresh Air and WBUR's the ARTery, and for his reviews in the
Boston Phoenix he was awarded the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. He has lived in East Somerville since 1984.
"As one student-poet wrote, "Home is everything." Blue houses, white ones, large and small,
full of cooking smells, siblings, and beloved pets,
warm beds, parents, windows to look out at the leaves changing. Somerville is the heartbeat here,
embraced within these pages of wildly eclectic writing.
The Somerville for all seasons."
-Gloria Mindock, editor of Červená Barva Press, Somerville Poet Laureate 2017 and 2018.
"THE VIEW FROM SOMERVILLE is a much needed book. It is often said that the difference between the right
word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
This book is important because it makes the reader revisit that old adage."
-Simon Perchik, author of The Family Of Man
Cover Photo: "Winter Hill Post Office Mural, by Elizabeth Carter, 1982" by Melissa Glenn Haber
$14.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-70-3 | 54 Pages
David O'Connell's chapbook, A Better Way to Fall, was awarded the Philbrick Poetry Award from the Providence Athenaeum.
His poetry has appeared in New Ohio Review, The Cincinnati Review, Poet Lore, Copper Nickel, and North American Review,
among other journals. He has received fellowships in poetry from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and earned
his MFA at Ohio State University. David lives in Providence, Rhode Island with his wife, the poet Julie Danho, and
their daughter. More of his work is available at davidoconnellpoet.com.
These wonderful poems combine intellect and feeling, family life and history and are the "best defense" against the sleep of
contemporary life in which people live vicariously through the famous, refuse to acknowledge the lessons of history, and persist
in denying our finitude. They enact the scrutiny and self-awareness that Robert Lowell called for, that "agonizing reappraisal,"
and do so with great tenderness and with a wry sense of how our lives are interwoven with myth and history and with work memos
and The Weather Channel. Our Best Defense arms us with humor, fearlessness, and wonder.
-Robert Cording
David O'Connell leads readers through a modern family life with tenderness, skepticism, and wonder. It's a life he
knows-though that life is not everyone's. How much is lost when he passes on time with his wife to deliver a promised
memo to Legal instead? When his toddler daughter sobs to a Christmas tune? These poems know better than to feel at ease
with the timbre of Bing Crosby or the rhyme scheme of Edwin Arlington Robinson. These poems expose the mirage of
perfect life outside day spas and inside sheltered schoolrooms. "Why do we learn / what we learn in this order?"
is a persistent question-of this book and of the times. "What are you doing with your life?" O'Connell asks.
The weather's unseasonably off. And there's no way to ignore the historical record skipping.
-Yona Harvey
Every poem in David O'Connell's fine debut embodies Robert Frost's definition of poetry: "A momentary stay against confusion."
Poems celebrating work well done, the blues of Robert Johnson, and the deep nourishment of domesticity keep company with poems
lamenting heroism's blindness and the wasteland homo sapiens seem determined to make of our planet. Formally various,
the poems share a deceptively calm, patient voice, the sound of a writer who knows how ineffably fragile and sublime
existence is. "Marriage," a three-line lyric that arrives late in the book, puts the matter best: "Evening, winter,
fresh/from the bath, she leaves a trail./I take off my socks."
-John Repp
$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-48-2 | 92 Pages
A Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions nominee, Renuka Raghavan, is an Indian-American author who writes short-form prose
and poetry. She is the author of Out of the Blue (Big Table Publishing, 2017) and The Face I Desire (Nixes Mate, 2019).
Her work has been featured in The American Journal of Poetry, Boston Literary Magazine, Bending Genres, and the South
Florida Poetry Journal, among others. For a complete list of all her previous publications visit her
at www.renukaraghavan.com. She writes and lives with her family and two Chihuahuas in Massachusetts.
"With the precision of a scalpel in the hands of a skilled surgeon, Raghavan cuts to
the heart of the human experience, revealing characters at their most vulnerable. Raw
and edgy, these stories bleed with emotional resonance. A powerful collection."
-Jayne Martin, author of Tender Cuts and The Daddy Chronicles-Memoir of a Fatherless Daughter
"In this literary braid of tragedy, irony, and humor, Renuka Raghavan delivers
masterfully crafted stories that make you smile or break your heart. All of life’s
messiest, saddest, weirdest, and most chaotic scenarios are here: from a soul
deadening one night stand with a disc jockey and a calm stegosaurus skeleton who's
not bothered by much, to the devastating consequences of a mother's criticism, no
emotion is left unturned. Nothing Resplendent Lives Here is our choice for best
short story collection of the year."
-Robin Stratton, editor Boston Literary Magazine
"Nothing Resplendent Lives Here is a beautiful swirl of tight, inventive stories that
introduce us to invisible mothers who show up at a poetry reading, lovers who have
died but continue to live in every corner of the house, and so many others. A mix
of returning library books, fishing toys out of claw machines, and giant flowers that
smell of decay, acts of ordinary life turned upside down. The stories are set in
varying locales from Las Vegas to New Orleans to Delhi and, of course, the happiest
place on earth. Skillfully crafted with charged language, poignancy, and unforgettable
characterization, these stories will delight you and weave themselves into your heart."
-Francine Witte, author of Dressed All Wrong for This and The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon
$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-71-0 | 60 Pages
Ash by Gloria Mindock from Glass Lyre Press
Gloria Mindock is the author of I Wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me (Nixes Mate Books), Whiteness of Bone
(Glass Lyre Press), La Portile Raiului (Ars Longa Press, Romania) translated into the Romanian by Flavia
Cosma, Nothing Divine Here, (U Šoku Štampa), and Blood Soaked Dresses (Ibbetson).
Widely published in the USA and abroad, her poetry has been translated and published into the Romanian,
Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Spanish, Estonian, Albanian, bulgarian, Turkish, and French. Gloria has been published in
numerous literary journals including Gargoyle, Web Del Sol, spoKe, Constellations: A Journal of Poetry and Fiction,
Ibbetson, The Rye Whiskey Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Unlikely Stories, Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary
Writing and Nixes Mate Review and anthology. Gloria has been awarded the Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime
Achievement Award and was the recipient of the Allen Ginsberg Award for Community Service by the
Newton Writing and Publishing Center. She received the fifth and fortieth Moon Prize from Writing in a
Woman's Voice. Gloria was the Poet Laureate in Somerville, MA in 2017 & 2018.
In Gloria Mindock's powerful new book, the flames of love die out and the ashes linger until they dissolve into air.
The body is hostage, in charred relics of failed intimacies—The burnt-out ends of smoky days (T.S. Eliot).
There's beauty in the truth of Mindock's words and images: Things got smokier, battling the embers with//false waters.
And there's hope: Not everyone believes in destruction.// All the heart wants is to beat. Above all,
these poems radiate feeling, compassionately aware, attuned to a world of broken love that is burned beyond
recognition, the ashes drifting and settling: how much sorrow can this heart take?// There is never an answer.
Ash sears and sings.
—Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Bad Harvest
In Ash, Gloria Mindock writes a gritty, beautifully haunting collection of poetry. Ash is what remains behind after
destruction, ruin, death, and burning. Similarly, the poems in this collection are what will remain. Fight the shadows
and wade through the darkness on a path paved by Mindock's vivid imagery, stark language, and dynamic voice, all of which,
make for a most memorable experience. Now more than ever, we need these poems. With the utmost economy of words, skillful
syntax, and emotional connections, each poem reverberates into the depths of your consciousness. Dark, intense, and wholly
unique, Ash, by Gloria Mindock is what you've been waiting for—a collection of poetry that consumes and smolders.
Are you ready?
—Renuka Raghavan, author of Out of the Blue and The Face I Desire
Gloria Mindock is a poet with singular vision: in Ash, a human heart is rolled out, then baked, then thrown to the birds;
broken crucifixes are shoved into junk drawers and gather dust; a spurned/murdered woman turns into a beautiful plant
that gives her ex-lover a rash. With mordant, Pinter-esque wit, Mindock explores just how far love, and even human
decency, can unravel—to the point of arson, to the point of war.
Ash begin with a series of poems about lethal house fires that may be literal or metaphorical ("my skin was burned by
your compulsion to be famous"), then expands to pinpoint the similar essence of human cruelty that enables soldiers to
kill. As the narrator of "Doomed by the Numbers" explains: "the fact is people will still go on brutally/killing each
other./Who will take my place and write about it?"
Ash concludes with an engaging, Rabelaisian roundelay of voices—mini-plays, summed up in just two stanzas, about
complicated relationships between two people.
Once again, with Ash, Mindock proves herself to be unafraid of the dark. She is truly a leading,
contemporary master of the edgy.
—Karen Friedland, author of Places That Are Gone and Tales from the Teacup Palace
Passionate and observant, Gloria Mindock is a tragic poet.
Her books are wounds revisited. She knows that nothing, never heals.
"With a rolling pin in my hand, I roll your heart out flat... stop it from beating.
The redness of blood turns to wax, sticky while wet." (Baked)
She senses the pain of the world in her being.
"The void looms deep, scorched like the desert blowing aimlessly." (Exit)
As her latest book Ash attests without doubt, Gloria is both a warrior and a martyr. Her words are
swords that slowly transform into tears.
Her anger at life's injustice is mighty, but mighty is her generosity and her openness towards repair, harmony and universal peace.
A must-read Ash conducts the reader through thorny labyrinths of pain and despair, allowing now and then a glimpse of ultimate
resolve and liberation in verses of a rare beauty:
"...but gravity is about to free me into space... People will look at me day and night and ask, "what is it?" There is no control
over what happens. The cathedral is high and my freckles fell on the floor as I left. Paleness now, that no one sees, but in
the universe, I will be a prism." (Gravity)
"...A hunger surrounds us, dust gathers, and is wiped off, space evading all this as songs of the wind come through the window
and we all hum." (Room)
—Flavia Cosma, author of In the Arms of the Father, Val-David, QC
$16.00 | ISBN: 978-1-941783-75-7 | 71 Pages
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ABOUT THE PRESS
ČERVENÁ BARVA PRESS was founded in April of 2005.
The press solicits poetry, fiction, and plays from various writers
around the world, and holds open contests regularly for its chapbooks,
postcards, broadsides and full-length books.
I look for work that has a strong voice, is unique, and that takes risks with language.
Please see submission guidelines for current information.
I encourage queries from Central and Eastern Europe.
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