Here we go: The next Read America Read Project is September 30th.
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 September 30th 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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Gloria Mindock is editor of Červená Barva Press. She is an award-winning author of six poetry
collections and three chapbooks. Her
poems have been published and translated into eleven
languages. Her recent book, Ash, was translated into Serbian by Milutin Durickovic and published by Alma Press in
Belgrade in 2022. Ash,
published by Glass Lyre Press (2021), won the International Impact Award,
the NYC Big Book Award, the Firebird Speak Up Talk Radio
Award, The Pacific Book Award, the International Award - The
Princess, Noble Poetry Skills, Art Club of Ragkonik in Smederevo,
Serbia, a Distinguished Favorite for the Independent Book Award,
and a Bronze Medal from the North American Book Award.
Other awards include the Allen Ginsburg Award for Community
Service by the Newton Publishing Center, the Ibbetson Lifetime
Achievement Award, the 5th and 40th Moon Prize from Writing
in a Woman's Voice, numerous Pushcart nominations and three
citations for Červená Barva Press as an editor and community
service from the MA House of Representatives.
Gloria's work recently has appeared in Gargoyle, The James Dickey Review, 10 x 10, Ibbetson, Growth: Journal of Literature,
Culture, & Art (Macedonia), KGB Lit, and others. Gloria was the Poet Laureate in Somerville, MA in 2017 & 2018. For more
information about Gloria Mindock, visit her website at: www.gloriamindock.com
Gloria Mindock's book touches the very soul of Ukraine. The elevated stylistics and exceptional talent of the author reveal
in depth all possible dimensions of the inhuman Russian aggression. This poetic diamond is a generalized universal message to the
world, it is also the call of the Ukrainian heart, and it is a resistance against Putin's obscurantism. It is a powerful expansion
of the senses that, through the depth of feeling, shows us that even in the darkest hour the human spirit does not stop resisting,
rising, denying violence and carrying with it the eternal light of revelation and freedom. The author has achieved the perfect balance
between the senses, reality, experience and emotion, and has reached the first literary sublimation of its kind; it is a book-message,
unique in spirit, an artistic achievement woven of pain, hope, suffering, empathy and philanthropy. Gloria Mindock's genuine work is
the poetic witness on the war. It sings the song of Ukraine. It hurts. It soars. It peaks. It rises above. This is the artistic blast
that will defeat and outlive the apocalypse of Putin and his bloody regime. Grief Touched the Sky at Night is a book that will wait
for peace and victory and then be read and studied for a long time.
-Svet DiNahum, author of Escape from Crimea, Winner of Červená Barva Press Dissident Award, Honorable Member
of the Ukrainian National Writers' Association
These stark, candid, and radiant poems in Gloria Mindock's new collection give shape and space to voices lifted from the
clutter and clamor that is the matrix of war. The war is upon us now, but poets forever have sung such lamentations and haunted
us all too often throughout history. One thinks of Homer, Wilfred Owen, and Carolyn Forche. A fierce and generous tenderness and
enviable humanity ungirds these unflinching poems. Mindock's is the voice we need to hear at this very moment.
-Eric Pankey, author of Not Yet Transfigured
Gloria Mindock's poetry collection was written during the living experiences of the war, which unfortunately, continue. The
language of the poems is direct and full of metaphors, understandable, but concrete and abstract at the same time. Abstract to
the point that the words war, blood, killing, loss, Bucha, and Kyiv are now in a line synonymous with a huge tragedy,
"My body is naked// I did not remove my clothes. My dignity remains //while the dirt covers me //I love my country.
//I love my country. //I am Ukraine" In the poem Boots, as if the name is of a Ukrainian soldier or refugee, the poet
presents an opposing understanding to create the maximum effect of doom and helplessness. But at the same time an inner
resistance and stubbornness are presented in its last lines, bearing witness to resolve and hope. In Mindock's poems,
despite the depiction of a modern-day apocalypse, the understanding exists that "Everyone needs to be protected, // to be loved."
Clearly the role of poetry hasn't lost its significance.
-Vasyl Makhno, author of Paper Bridge, Translated by Olena Jennings; with an introduction by Ilya Kaminsky
Cover photo: Natalia Zhurminskaya
$16.00 | ISBN: 979-8-9885737-3-9 | 71 Pages
David Radavich is the author of two narrative collections, America
Bound: An Epic for Our Time (2007) and America Abroad: An Epic
of Discovery (2019). Among his lyric volumes are Slain Species (London,
1980), By the Way: Poems over the Years (1998), Greatest Hits
(2000), and Canonicals: Love’s Hours (2009). Middle-East Mezze
(2011) focuses on a troubled yet enchanting part of our world, while
The Countries We Live In (2014) explores inner and outer geographies.
Unter der Sonne / Under the Sun (2022) features Radavich’s
German poems with English translations. Here’s Plenty celebrates the
sometimes searing yet ultimately redemptive richness of our planet
and human experience.
Radavich’s plays, both serious and comic, have been performed across
the U.S., including six Off-Off-Broadway, and in Europe. He has published
scholarly and informal essays and presented in such far-flung
locations as Canada, Egypt, England, France, Germany, Greece, and
Iceland. He has served as president of the Thomas Wolfe Society, Charlotte
Writers’ Club, and North Carolina Poetry Society and currently
administers the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet Series.
The poems in David Radavich's Here's Plenty come in seamless variations of splendor. The whole shapes a music
lyrical and beautiful as the morning rain.
—Shelby Stephenson, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina
The title of David Radavich's remarkable collection is apposite. Here’s Plenty characterizes a broad panoply of
states of mind and feeling that are in process of change, leaving alterations that may be new problems. Chaos is
held in check only by means of will power, a duty to one's own humanity. "Prometheus on the Crag" shows Everyman
as a figure whose duty is to suffer. Many poets are strong but few are tough in this necessary way. "Be generous /
in your hatred: // You never know / what you’ll become."
—Fred Chappell, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina
Sometimes when we pick up a book of poems, we want it to feel like we are calling an old friend on the phone who
understands and accepts us; Here's Plenty is that kind of book. From the opening lines of the first poem
"Sun Blanched," which turns out to be a poem about the acceptance of loss, Radavich announces:
"This is the fertile / garden I never knew." Here is a poet at peace with himself and the life
he has made in this garden. There's an honesty about family, aging, history and place that is
comforting. Rooted in the South, "A place where old water / draws back / and memory / and pain
are blended," Radavich's poems pave "the way / into the bright darkness."
—Marjory Wentworth, former Poet Laureate of South Carolina
$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-31-4 | 84 Pages
Pamela L. Laskin is a lecturer in the English Department at City College, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate Children’s
Writing, and directs the Poetry Outreach Center. Several of her children's and poetry books have been published. Ronit and Jamil,
A Palestinian/Israeli Romeo and Juliet in verse was published by Harper Collins in 2017, and was named among the 35 books to have
on your radar for 2017. Bea, a picture book, was a finalist for the Katherine Paterson Prize for Children's Fiction in 2018. She is the
winner of the 2018 International Fiction Prize from Leapfrog Press, and Why No Bhine, an epistolary novel about the Rohingya Muslims,
was published in 2019. The Operating System published a bilingual picture book, Monster Maria, which is about Hurricane Maria, and
is being used as a fundraiser for after-school programs in Puerto Rico. Linus Press published My Secret Wish about families seeking asylum,
and is also being used as a fundraiser for Immigrant Families Together.
The Lost Language of Crazy, a middle grade-novel, was published in November, 2021 (Atmosphere Press).
She is currently at work with Ukrainian author Vasyl Makhno on a
YA novel in verse, Wisteria and Weeds, whose focus is on the war in the Ukraine, and what it means for the lives of teens.
Finally, she is this year's (2023) recipient of Judith's Room Freedom Through Literacy Board option prize for her current novel.
Follow her: twitter@RonitandJamil and follow her blog: http://PamelaLaskin.blogspot.com
Pam Laskin's WORDS UNWHISPERED: Ghazals in the Time of the Pandemic, 2021 is a stunning collection that
documents the emotions, challenges, and
fears that existed during the height of the pandemic.
No topic is taboo here; love, death, longing, politics, family and isolation all appear
in this haunting collection.
There is a subtle melody and musicality underlying this extraordinary collection; a silent force that is a gift to her
readers. Laskin herself reminds us of the gift of her poetry "the music melts my heart/in songs of
ghazals/so every day I write/the gift of ghazal."
—JP Howard, author of SAY/MIRROR
"WORDS UNWHISPERED is a reminder of the importance of the ghazal being an ancient Arabic verse that deals with grief and loss. Laskin's
accomplishments in this area of grief and loss reminds the reader of "Remembering the Fireflies," when Laskin concludes the stanza
with, "Like a hemorraged rose." I have read the ghazals by John Hollander, Adrienne Rich and Patricia Smith, but Laskin stands among the greats."
—Robert Anthony Gibbons, author of Flight and Close to the Tree
Cover Art: Elissa Cohen
$16.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-97-0 | 60 Pages
Krikor Der Hohannesian's poems have appeared in over 275 literary journals including The South Carolina Review,
Atlanta Review, Louisiana Literature,
Connecticut Review, Comstock Review and Natural Bridge. He is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and author of three books,
"Ghosts and Whispers" (Finishing Line Press, 2010), "Refuge in the Shadows" (Cervená Barva Press, 2013)
and "First Generation" (Dos Madres Press, 2020). "Ghosts and Whispers"
was a finalist for the Mass Book awards poetry category in 2011. "First Generation" was selected as a "must read" by
Mass Book Awards in 2021.
Cover art: "City Landscape" by Garabed Der Hohannesian
$16.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-20-8 | 37 Pages
Paul Beckman's last flash collection, "Kiss Kiss" was a finalist for the Best Indie Awards for short story collections 2019.
Paul had a micro-story selected for the 2018 Norton Anthology New Micro Exceptionally Short Fiction, was one of the winners in
the 2016 The Best Small Fictions and his story "Mom's Goodbye" was chosen as the winner of the 2016 Fiction Southeast Editor's
Prize. Paul was nominated for the 2019 Best Small fiction series and had a story accepted for the 2022 Best of Microfictions.
He's widely published with over 750 stories. Paul hosts the monthly Zoom FBomb global flash fiction reading series.
"Finally a Mirsky book! I’ve loved Mirksy since he first appeared in Paul Beckman's work, and in this collection Mirsky gets to
rightfully shine, coming of age with paper routes, Devil dogs, pinball, bullies, absent fathers, Jewish mothers, Kosher Soap,
and the inevitable disappointments and salvations of any survived childhood, especially one set in the big city projects of America.
In Becoming Mirsky, we traverse the full range of Beckman's talents—the ironic, the asinine, and the wonderfully ridiculous, yes,
but also the difficult, the poignant, and the downright tragic. I'm not sure if I love Beckman or Mirsky more, but I'm thrilled
to indulge both here."
—Nancy Stohlman, author of After the Rapture and Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction
"Every so often a memoir is penned that transcends a literary filigree of recollections and gives us an authentic, deeply felt,
and brilliantly written "accounting." Paul Beckman's Becoming Mirsky is such a book. In it are the quixotic and thrashing winds
of culture, of youth — of "“becoming" itself. Here, Ethos and Pathos bespeak a life in a common tongue we all can understand.
Here, buoyed by Beckman's wry wit, recollection is not a ghost, but rather a flawed, but earnest
assortment of characters on the page we wish to know about. Care to know about. What a fine and accomplished work this is."
—Robert Scotellaro, author of What Are the Chances? and Ways to Read the World
"No one does it like Beckman — raw, raucous, poignant, vulnerable— headlong into the underbelly of Jewish family mishugas;
a confabulation of stories too embarrassing to own or identify with. Beckman's razor—sharp insight splays out before us,
leaving the reader with nowhere to hide and forever changed. Mirsky oozes originality, warmth, humour, and pathos. Brilliant!"
—Karen Schauber, editor/author of "The Group of Seven Reimagined: Contemporary Stories Inspired By Historic Canadian Paintings"
(Published by Heritage House, 2019)
"From the brilliant and prolific pen of Paul Beckman comes the compelling, funny, heartbreaking novella-in-flash,
Becoming Mirsky. This collection of short stories follows the life of Reuven Mirsky from his Jewish boyhood in the
projects of the Bridgeport. CT, to his service in the Air Force, and on to a new life in New Haven Connecticut suburbs.
This is a layered story of place and family, of tradition and loss and survival. The child of a broken home, Mirsky
is perennially misunderstood and emotionally neglected. Yet he faces the world with resilience, rebelliousness, and
a sarcastic tongue that gets him into no end of trouble. The writing all through is deft and beautifully distilled.
In these pages, Beckman has given us an unforgettable story of disarming courage and wit and sensitivity."
—Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works
In Paul Beckman's unmistakable voice, a comfortable cup of coffee with a stiff shot of scotch, we meet (or better, examine)
his recurring character, Reuven Mirsky, with all of the kid-of-the-fifties memories, so vividly drawn – lemon ices and
paper routes - and the characters that inhabit Mirsky's world, a Bar-Mitzvah ruining Rabbi, Mirsky's kosher soap mother,
and the father who only made guest appearances from time to time.
A poignant, heart-tugging, witty, and ultimately triumphant story. A wonderful and memorable read.
—Francine Witte, author of Just Outside the Tunnel of Love
When master flash fiction writer Paul Beckman put pen to paper for Becoming Mirsky, he demonstrated why he's been selected for
a Norton Anthology, a winner for Best Small Fictions, and a winner of Fiction Southeast's prize. Becoming Mirsky is as
good as it gets, following the
life of Mirsly, a Jewish boy growing up in poverty in the projects of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and experiencing a rough,
yet incredibly realistic, life,
even among his closest family members. Becoming Mirsky illustrates how we rise above, move on, and become more.
—Niles Reddick, author of Drifting too far from the Shore, Reading the Coffee Grounds,
& Road Kill and Other Oddities
Beckman hits it out of the park, again. In Becoming Mirsky, a sidesplitting flash fiction bildungsroman that traces the
trials of a young man growing up in Marina Village, a public housing project, Beckman sketches with his signature hilarity
and warmth, the fraught path to adulthood for Mirsky. Sometimes innocently, and sometimes not-so-naively, Mirsky navigates
his way among hardscrabble family, neighbors, and schoolmates. In adventures that range from delivering groceries past a dead man's
body in a funeral parlor, to relishing the thought of one day becoming a successful shoe salesman so that he can smell the
tantalizing scent of new shoe leather, Mirsky gradually learns the ways of the world. And as he recounts his hilarious
adventures, readers learn that Mirsky’s world, while uniquely
colorful, if at times hardboiled, is not so terribly different from their own.
—Brad Rose, author of Lucky Animals and No. Wait. I Can Explain.
$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-78-9 | 74 Pages
Lo's first published release is Hot Rain, a poetry collection on Ibbetson
Street Press, followed by Sarasota VII a prose poem memoir on Červená
Barva Press. In 2010, Alternating Current Press released Terrible Baubles
which was also made into spoken word CD with music. She's been
nominated for four Pushcart Prizes in poetry. Her other two CDs as a
vocalist are Being Visited on the Knitting Factory label and Spell on You,
a self-release. They can be heard on Bandcamp, Spotify and Amazon
Prime. Lo served as Poet Populist of Cambridge between 2013-2015.
She completed her MFA in creative writing from Stonecoast in July 2019.
Her work has appeared in Litkicks.com, www.strangeroad.com, The Heat
City Literary Review, The Solstice Literary Review, Night magazine, Home
Anthology, Eden Waters Press, Lungfull magazine!, Constellations Journal,
Wilderness House Literary Review, Ibbetson Street, The Oddball Review,
Muddy River Review, among others. She's performed at the Boston Poetry
Festival and the New York City New Year's Day Poetry Marathon for the
Poetry Project. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA with her cat Lucy,
an aloof tabby, but has drawn most of her inspiration from New York
City where she lived between 1991 and 2001 on the Lower East Side.
Lo Galluccio is the bad girl tearaway from the furnished souls of Cambridge ladies, and found
refuge in the haunted spirits of Sexton and Plath. Now she's knocking on your door with her box
of angry candy — fifteen poems leap out and bite before you've had a chance to taste them.
Sweet with venom that cures, brutal and bruised into beauty, you'd be wise to flee from her
offering — but at what cost? She has been to bedlam and comes all the way back. NOT FOR
AMNESIA is not so much a collection of poems but the major arcana of her personal tarot
offering guidance; a set of branding irons so you will never forget.
—Richard Cambridge, author of Pulsa: A Book of Books
Once again Ms. Galluccio with her heady images and songlike poems, marches into your psyche Her latest offering
of poems, small sacrifices on the altar of memories and forgetting, does not disappoint. Her poems blend into a crooning
song about lust, love, remorse, and sometimes anguish – "My desire/comes before /the world wars." Reading Galluccio
is like discovering a modern-day Goth poetess and wondering why it took you so long to find her.
—Julia Carlson, author of Little Creatures
To crave blankness, to paint desire orange, pain yellow or to find grounding in going "home a waiter/from a
bad shift, grotesque,/no good tips," Galluccio's language attests to spontaneity and unusual responsiveness to
the unexpected. She heeds an essential call to poets: Take language, which makes and keeps us familiar, and
deliver it rather strangely, singingly ("Because she may break he waits,/and the and the trees stiffen in all
directions"), to open the eye asleep in its everyday gaze. To waken the eye.
—Michael Todd Steffen, author of On Earth As It Is
$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-81-9 | 30 Pages
Thad DeVassie is a poet and writer who pivots between traditional
line breaks of poetry and a linear love of prose poetry, flash fiction, and
creative nonfiction. In 2020 he was named a winner of the James Tate
Poetry Prize for his manuscript Splendid Irrationalities (SurVision Books).
In 2021, his project Year Of Static, containing 11 original paintings with
accompanying micro prose, was published by Ghost City Press. It evolved
into the art exhibition Love Your Neighbor in 2022. A lifelong Ohioan,
Thad writes and paints from the outskirts of Columbus.
This Side of Utopia straddles a fine line between how we think things should go and how they ultimately play out. With equal parts heartfelt
longing and comic absurdity, these poems move effortlessly from the mundane to the magical, toggling between lined and prose poems. With a voice
all his own, Thad DeVassie taps the haunting playfulness of Charles Simic, the otherworldly surprises of Russell Edson, showing this collection
to be one continuous balancing act. Utopia might be an untenable idea, but subtle comforts and a few silver linings still
exist in the here and now.
Cover art: "Before the Fall" by Thad DeVassie
$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-67-3 | 31 Pages
Marc Vincenz is a poet, fiction writer, translator, editor,
musician and artist. He has published over 30 books of
poetry, fiction and translation. His more recent poetry
collections, include A Brief Conversation with Consciousness,
The Little Book of Earthly Delights, There Might Be a Moon or
a Dog, 39 Wonders and Other Management Issues, The Pearl
Diver of Irunmani, A Splash of Cave Paint, and The King of
Prussia is Drunk on Stars.
Marc's work has been published in The Nation,
Ploughshares, Raritan, Colorado Review, Washington Square
Review, Plume, Fourteen Hills, Willow Springs, Solstice,
World Literature Today, The Notre Dame Review, The
Golden Handcuffs Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books and many other journals and
periodicals.
He is publisher and editor of MadHat Press and
publisher of New American Writing, and lives on a farm in
Western Massachusetts where there are more spiny-nosed
voles, tufted grey-buckle hares and Amoeba scintilla than
humans.
"Marc Vincenz knows how to ‘strain the essence...’ of life. His cinematic lures
are full of vim and drama. This is is an heroic epic distilled into short passages-
where wit and experience thrust and parry in a perpetual hazing rite-an utterly
innovative work of discovery. It bores into the soul drop where we find what
we’re made of. In An Alphabet of Last Rites, a mutable feast of prose poems,
Marc Vincenz grapples with those reckonings. As the title implies, he ponders
our destination while reveling in the journey, mixing the quotidian and the
quixotic with his trademark quicksilver facility. Wondrous. Wry. Incredibly
novel. An affirmation of what it means to be alive."
-Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
"‘Emboldened, empathetic, empowered, emphatic’: Marc Vincenz's An Alphabet
of Last Rites has a cast of characters ranging from Catherine the Great and Eva
Peron to minotaurs to "thieves, pirates, dastardly characters you've only seen
on the silver screen." As you sip your fourth martini, enjoy this cornucopia
of unceasing poetic imagery and relentless conceits, and be captured by the
seemingly limitless fecundity of language, which these last rites offer."
-Larissa Shmailo
"This book concerns a character, a linguistically nationless and particular
internationalist poet’s language. It’s also a prose-poetry sequence in the
form of a primer. Marc Vincenz’s An Alphabet of Last Rites is spoken by the
personification of language, while the person consistently addressed, a reader,
a listener, is actually the poet himself. Gradually, this personification goes
completely out of his head with embraced eccentricity, and you are thinking
maybe this is a job for Robert Browning. The reader wins with this alphabet
of short prose poems that are beautiful and funny and weird, all style, yet
generous and tolerant of our faults."
-David Blair
$13.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-94-9 | 42 Pages
Note on the Author | Margara Russotto
Venezuelan poet, scholar and translator born in Italy. PhD in
Comparative Literature, University of São Paulo. Professor of the
Universidad Central de Venezuela where she founded the Women's
Studies. Translator of poetry and essays by Italian, Venezuelan
and Brazilian writers, such as Antonia Palacios, Enrique Bernardo
Núñez, Oswald de Andrade, Antonio Candido, Giuseppe Ungaretti,
Claudio Magris, among others. She has received award for her poetry
and her literary research, including the Poetry Award "José Antonio
Ramos Sucre" (Venezuela, 1995), a Fulbright Scholarship (USA,
1998), and the LASA Award (USA, 2007) for editing the volume
La ansiedad autorial. In 2010 she was a writer-in-residence at the
Chateau de Lavigny International Writer's Residence. Currently,
she is a Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, where she also teaches Creative Writing in
Spanish. Recent book (selected essays): Cantabile. Celebración de la
poesía latinoamericana (Madrid, 2020).
Note on the Translator | Peter Kahn
Peter Kahn is a professional translator living in Vermont (USA).
He has translated works of fiction and nonfiction by numerous
Latin American and Spanish writers, including Tununa Mercado,
Elvira Orphée, Esther Cross, Javier Moreno, Hugo Clemente and
Gwendolyn Diaz. His fiction and poetry translations have appeared
in various publications, including Grand Street, Gastronomia, Santa
Barbara Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Massachusetts
Review, and several anthologies. In 2015, he was awarded the
Massachusetts Annual Chametzky Prize for his translation of
Margara Russotto's poem "Of Useless Knowledge."
$19.95 | ISBN 978-1-950063-22-2 | 106 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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