Welcome to Červená Barva Press!

Here we go: The next Read America Read Project is September 27th.

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 27th 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

ČERVENÁ BARVA PRESS LITERARY SUMMIT
OCTOBER 17TH, 18TH AND 19TH, 2025

ATTENDEES WILL HAVE 2 WEEKS
TO WATCH ALL THE VIDEOS

OUR WONDERFUL LINE-UP!

Friday October 17^th
10:00AM

FAIR AND GOOD: Is it impossible for a literary translation to be both faithful and beautiful?
By J. Kates

This talk explores the difficulties and resolutions with examples and the help of a ninth-century scholar, a fourteenth-century storyteller, as well as more modern collaborators.

11:00AM

Learning from Levertov
by Mark Pawlak

Although British born (1924), Denise Levertov's became an important member of the post-war, American poetry avant-garde and is recognized as one of the most important American poets of the last half of the 20th Century. A member of the Black Mountain School, she is known for her emphasis on craft and for her lyricism, sensuality, and ecospiritual quest., but she was a life-long peace and social activist, who wrote powerful poetry in protest against the Vietnam War and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. She was an important presence in the Boston poetry community for more than a decade (1969 - 1987), teaching at MIT, Brandeis, and Tufts, and mentored many area poets as described by Mark Pawlak in his memoir My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov (MadHat Press, 2021).

Pawlak's talk will focus on different aspects of Levertov's legacy: her focus on craft and literary tradition, the influence of William Carlos Williams, Rilke, and Russian literature on her poetry, her nature inspired poetry, her social and peace activism and political poetry and her spiritual quest. Pawlak will illustrate selections from his memoir with readings of Levertov's own poems.

"'Ezuversity' was the term Ezra Pound used for the private tutoring he gave James Laughlin on the workings of poetry. Mark Pawlak enjoys a similar education at the feet of a poet who leads him from innocence to experience in the art he would master. My Deniversity is an intimate, insightful, and affectionate examination of both the process and the remarkable personality who engendered it."
—Joyce Peseroff

"Of the accounts I know of the teaching of poetry, this is the most honest and revealing."
—Lawrence Rosenwald Consequence Forum

1:00PM

Influences: An atmospheric sojourn along the river path
by Michael Foldes and Jan Novello

I grew up in Endwell, went to Ohio to college in 1964, and after wandering the country and the world as much as I could on what you can call a budget, moved back to the Triple Cities in 1982, a few years after my wife and I had our first child. We live in an old house a couple of hundred yards from the Susquehanna River on land that was once a golf course on lands of the Susquehannok Nation prior to the coming of Europeans. The area was near enough the fronts in the Revolutionary War to have a couple of markers reminding the very few who drive by them of the area's albeit minor historical significance.

As children, we took our fishing poles, bows and arrows, and b.b. guns to the trails, as they were called, to fish and shoot, mostly targets but sometimes birds. I was reminded on one of these walks of the time I shot a target arrow through a robin, pulled the arrow from under its wings and watched as it flew away, unable to rise into the air that was its home. That became a line in the poem "What Needed to be Done", in which many of the fathers were ill-fated totems.

Most houses in the neighborhood went up between the Great Wars. Several of the streets are named after European battles, including Argonne, Metz, Marne and Verdun. I have walked these streets many mornings over the past 40 years, or so, as well as the riverbank they parallel. Due to an intrusion of squatters building a tent city in the bottoms, the Town of Union in which Endwell falls, put up chain link fencing to keep them out, adding No Trespassing signs "without written permission of the Town". What was once an area where one could readily hike and see ducks, deer, foxes, skunks, birds, and a variety of vegetation, is now pretty much left to its own growth pattern. Four-wheelers and dirt bikes ripping up the low ground are now silenced, though personally I'm not terribly disturbed by that.

The film, then, will be a walk and talk along these streets and paths punctuated with readings of a few poems influenced by what I've seen, felt and heard on these (mostly) early morning excursions.

2:00PM

Transforming Poetry Into a Novel-in Verse
by Pamela Laskin

The beauty of poetry is in its language and form. It is often concise and offers a prism into the inner psyche of its narrator. In this way, it tells a story, without necessarily providing a plot, But what if a poet has a larger scope, a bigger narrative to share? The novel-in-verse functions much like a novel with all of the elements of conflict, plot, character dialogue and resolution. It is possible, in this format, to provide multiple first-person points of view, because each poem becomes a character and voice. There is playfulness in this style as well; one character, for example, can emerge through a particular form. For example, in my novel RONIT AND JAMIL, the fathers in the book spoke their grief through a series of sonnets. There are many possibilities when working this way, and this symposium will take you through the process, as well as share sections from my two novels-in-verse, one of which is soon to be published.

Saturday October 18^th
10:00AM

NEIGHBORS IN POETRY: an interactive program of poems, readings, and discussion
by Joyce Wilson and Merryn Rutledge

In this interactive program, poets Joyce Wilson and Merryn Rutledge will read poems from their emerging manuscripts. The poems will encourage exploration, for example, of the following:
proximity and/or distance in relation to neighbors; how neighbors help us reflect on connection and also broken connections; how neighbors can lead us as poets to understand ourselves; how all kinds of contexts-geography, the time we live in, etc. —influence how we see neighbors. Joyce and Merryn will ask each other questions that reflect their curiosity about each other's work.

11:00AM

WHERE DO YOU FIND GOOD WRITING IDEAS?
by Lawrence Kessenich

One of the most challenging parts of being a writer is figuring out what to write about. Flannery O'Connor claimed that "Anyone who has survived childhood has enough to write about for the rest of their life," but where in that childhood, and in the rest of your life, do you look to find those ideas, ideas strong enough to motivate you to write? Lawrence Kessenich, an experienced writer, writing teacher, and editor, helps you figure out where to look at how to look at it to spark your imagination.

1:00PM

IT'S A MARATHON, NOT A SPRINT:
A personal view of staying the path on the road to publication
by Mary Bonina

Although Mary Bonina had been working at the craft of writing poetry, memoir, and fiction for decades, she didn't actually publish a collection of poetry or a book of prose until she was in her mid-fifties. Since then she has published three collections of poetry, a memoir, and her publisher, Červená Press will release MY WAY HOME: A Novel on October 1. Considered a late bloomer, she offers in this presentation, a view of how she kept at it, even with obstacles life puts in a writer's (or anyone's) way, and without the affirmation of publishing more than a news article or feature, or a poem here or there in a journal mostly read by other poets. Her purpose always in mind, she learned how to keep her dream alive, avoiding the kind of discouragement that might have led to her abandoning her passion. In this talk, she references Malcolm Gladwell, Ben Fountain, Sting, advice from a Chinese fortune cookie, and others, with anecdotes from her personal life.

2:00PM

Tension Devices in Poetry
by John C. Mannone

The concept of tension is explored and why it's important in creative arts, in particular, poetry. The scope expands beyond the art of line breaks in free verse to juxtaposition in prose poems, the volta in sonnets, repeated lines in formal poems, as well as the role of sensory contrasts to create tension. Some consideration for the performance poem and other applications are also included. Additional material for self-study is accessed by unhiding some slides and studying the accompanying PDF of poetry examples. {Also, the Slide Note Pages may have more links.}

Sunday October 19^th
10:00AM

Autofiction, Memoir, Tale: Writing in the Borderlands
by Irina Mashinski

You know how the Aztecs had a word—Nepantla—for that in-between space where different identities meet and mix? That same kind of space exists between essay and prose, and it's where some of the most exciting writing is happening today. In this talk, we'll dive into that messy, creative overlap between memoir, autofiction, and essay—and look at what connects writers like Anne Carson, Gloria Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera), and Jorge Luis Borges. Most of all, we'll explore what we can learn from them—about voice, form, hybridity, and how to write from the edges.

11:00AM

The importance of the tea ritual as it relates
to the poetry of classical Chinese and Japanese poetry
by George Kalamaras

Besides being a poet, George Kalamaras has studied tea and tea culture for several years and has presented poetry and tea workshops at the Rocky Mountain Tea Festival in Boulder, Colorado. In this workshop, George will talk about various teas and their effects on a person's energy or chi (black, oolong, green, and white tea). He will briefly discuss each tea type and brew one or two teas (each of which takes 3-5 minutes to brew). He will discuss the importance of the tea ritual as it relates to the poetry of classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, reading several poems by these East Asian poets in relation to tea. He will lead a brief workshop in the final fifteen minutes of the workshop in relation to drinking tea and composing poems that draw on and reflect the energy of the chi that particular tea yields on our poetic consciousness. Participants will be encouraged in advance to have a favorite tea on hand so that they can drink the tea and compose a draft of a poem (with step-by-step instructions) while savoring the soothing energy of that tea.

1:00PM

Poetry and Artificial Intelligence
by Andrey Gritsman

Topics for analysis and discussion:

- Will human poetry survive AI poetry?
- Poetry forms in AI.
- Emotions, love, despair, fear of death in AI.
- Religious aspects of poetry and in AI.
- Concepts of good, great, genius poetry in AI.

2:00PM

Copycat
by Miriam Levine

The value of originality is overrated. Let's think about the pleasure, freedom and challenge of imitating the work of others. Romans copied the Greeks; the English copied the Romans; Europeans copied the Japanese and the Chinese and vice versa; specifically, Picasso copied the art of Africa; colonial writers copied the work of colonizers, etc., etc. Here in New England, in Concord, Massachusetts, Emerson called for a true American writer. Whitman answered the call yet borrowed from Hindu sources. Together we'll think about the way copying / imitating may enrich our writing.

Presenter Bios

A native of Moscow, Andrey Gritsman emigrated to the United States in 1981. He is a physician who is also a poet and essayist. He has published eight volumes of poetry in Russian and six collections in English. He received the 2009 Pushcart Prize Honorable Mention XXIII and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize several times (2005 - 2011) and also was on the Short List for PEN American Center Biennial Osterweil Poetry Award. Gritsman's poems, essays, and short stories in English have appeared or are forthcoming in over 90 literary journals. His work has also been anthologized and translated into several languages. Andrey received the MFA in poetry from Vermont College. He runs the Intercultural Poetry Series in New York City and edits international poetry magazine in Russian INTERPOEZIA (www.interpoezia.org)

George Kalamaras, former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014-2016), is the author of twenty-seven collections of poetry—eighteen full-length books and nine chapbooks—as well as a critical study on language theory. His book Marsupial Mouth Movements appeared from Červená Barva Press in 2021. He is the recipient of several national and state prizes for his poetry, including an NEA Poetry Fellowship, two Individual Artist Grants from the Indiana Arts Commission, an Indo-U.S. Advanced Research Fellowship for several months travel and research in India in 1994, and—most recently—the 2024 Indiana Book Award in Poetry. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he taught for thirty-two years. George has embraced tea and tea culture for several years and has presented talks and workshops about poetry & tea. He and his wife, writer Mary Ann Cain, have nurtured beagles in their home for thirty years, first Barney, then Bootsie, and now Blaisie. George, Mary Ann, and Blaisie had been dividing their time between Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Livermore, Colorado, but the three have now relocated full-time to Colorado.

Irina Mashinski was born in Moscow and emigrated to the US in 1991. She is the author of The Naked World: A Tale with Verse (MadHat Press, 2022) and Giornata (Červená Barva Press, 2022), as well as thirteen volumes of poetry, prose, and essays in Russian. She is the co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015). Her work has been translated into multiple languages and has appeared in Poetry International, World Literature Today, Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere. She serves as editor-in-chief of Cardinal Points, a bilingual literary project. Website: irinamashinski.com

J. Kates is a poet and a literary translator, once expelled from the board of directors of the New Hampshire Poetry Society for allegedly threatening another member with decapitation. He has published three chapbooks of his own poems and two full books, The Briar Patch (Hobblebush Books) and Places of Permanent Shade (Accents). He has translated a dozen books of Russian and French poetry, edited two anthologies of translations, and collaborated with Stephen A. Sadow on a half dozen books of Latin American and Peninsular Spanish poetry, including Alicia Aza's Winter Journey, Červená Barva Press.

John C. Mannone has poems in Artemis, Appalachia Bare, Songs of Eretz, New England Journal of Medicine, and others. He has numerous awards, including Emma Bell Miles and Jesse Stewart prizes (2024), the Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017) in Appalachian literature, and the celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). Author of five full-length collections (and six chapbooks), his latest, Sacred Flute (Iris Press, 2024), is a current top-8 finalist for the Tennessee Book Award (2025). He edits poetry for Abyss & Apex and other journals. A physicist, he lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Joyce Wilson taught English at Boston University and Suffolk University, ten years each, in which she led classes in composition, the research paper, and a survey course on American Literature. With a focus on headings such as multi-culturalism and then world cultures, she selected readings from anthologies based on the diversity of its authors and the ways they were represented and ignored.

While teaching for many years at Phillips Exeter Academy, Merryn Rutledge taught the literature of BIPOC people and literature from around the world. In a second career as a leadership consultant and executive coach, and after earning a doctorate in leadership, she taught management courses to undergraduates and graduate management degree students, and she co-created and guided corporate and government training programs that focused on understanding "isms" and promoting inclusive workplaces.

Lawrence Kessenich is a fiction writer, poet, playwright, essayist, and former editor at Houghton Mifflin. He also taught creative writing privately for ten years. His first novel, Cinnamon Girl, was published in 2016. His second, The Further Adventures of Daisy Miller, was just published by Pierian Springs Press. He has also published short stories and four books of poetry and won the 2010 Strokestown International Poetry Prize in Ireland. His short plays have been produced in New York, Boston, and in Colorado, where he won the People's Choice Award in a national drama competition. He has also published essays, one of which was featured on NPR's "This I Believe" and appears in the anthology This I Believe: On Love.

Mark Pawlak is the author of ten poetry collections, most recently Away Away (Arrowsmith Press, 2024), and the memoir My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov (MadHat Press, 2021). His poems have been translated into German, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish, and have been performed at Teatr Polski in Warsaw. In English, his poems and prose have appeared widely in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, and in the literary magazines New American Writing, Mother Jones, The Saint Ann's Review, among many others. He is a long-time editor of Hanging Loose magazine and press and lives in Cambridge.

Mary Bonina earned her M.F.A. at Warren Wilson College. A Červená Barva Press author of My Father's Eyes: A Memoir (2013), three collections of poetry, Living Proof, Clear Eye Tea, and Lunch in Chinatown, her novel My Way Home will be published by Červená Barva Press in October. Her collaborative art experiments with composers, visual artists, and sculptors, have expanded poetry's vocabulary and reach. Essays have appeared in Poets and Writers, Adelaide, and Ovunque Siamo. Her poetry credits include English Journal, Salamander, Hanging Loose, Mom Egg Review, many other journals, and anthologies, including from Rutgers University Center for Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience, and VCCA.

Mike Foldes is an American poet, publisher, author and businessman. He published three poetry anthologies in the '70s, three alternative tabloids in the '80s, and the "Arts, Information & Entertainment" zine Ragazine.cc from 2004-19. Foldes' books include "Sleeping Dogs: A true story of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping", "Sandy: Chronicles of a Superstorm" with artist Christie Devereaux, the chapbook "Original Sin," Červená Barva Press (2022), and two ekphrastic collections Fashions & Passions and End Game with artist Christopher Panzner. He is working with Jan Novello of F.L.A.W.E.D. Studio on diverse projects, including a video for the Červená Barva Press 2025 Summit.

Jan Novello born 1959, Binghamton, NY is an American artist and filmmaker. BFA, Film Studies Binghamton University 1984. MFA, Experimental Filmmaking San Francisco Art Institute 1987. Cinema of the Inner Eye, San Francisco Cinematheque 1984. 1985-2025 Art works, short films, music videos, in addition to documenting Haitian Vodou pilgrimages and rituals: Cap-Haitien and Limonade, Haiti 2001. Created FLAWED (Film, Language, Art Works, Experimentation, Dissent) Art Space in 2025. A private art space dedicated to facilitation and creation of forward thinking artworks in promotion of marginalized artists everywhere and anywhere.

Miriam Levine is the author of Forget about Sleep, her sixth poetry collection, winner of the 2023 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award. Another collection, The Dark Opens, won the Autumn House Poetry Prize. Other books include: Devotion, a memoir; In Paterson, a novel. Her poems have been widely published. Levine, winner of a Pushcart Prize, is a fellow of the NEA and a grantee of the Massachusetts Artists Foundation. She lives in Florida and New Hampshire. For more information about her work, please go to miriamlevine.com

Pamela L. Laskin is the former director of 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. 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. Červená Barva Press just published WORDS UNWHISPERED, her first book of ghazals and Dos Madres Press just published TRELLISES AND THORNS. Follow her: twitter@RonitandJamil and follow her blog: http://PamelaLaskin.blogspot.com/

Pre-order: My Way Home by Mary Bonina (Fiction)
shipping on or about October 1, 2025

Mary Bonina is both poet and prose writer. My Way Home is her debut novel. She is the author of My Father's Eyes: A Memoir, and three published poetry collections: Living Proof, Clear Eye Tea, and Lunch in Chinatown. Her poem "Drift," won the UrbanArts "Boston Contemporary Authors" prize, and is engraved on a granite monolith, a permanent public art installation in the City. She has been honored as a fellow and awarded several residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, including at the VCCA retreat in Auvillar, France. Her collaborative art experiments with composers, visual artists, and sculptors, have expanded poetry's vocabulary and reach. A longtime member of the Writers Room of Boston, where she served on the Board of Directors for more than a decade, Bonina is a graduate of the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

---

"Mary Bonina's captivating debut deftly explores themes we all must wrestle with during our short stay on planet Earth. How do we live meaningful lives while harboring dark secrets and gaping loss? What do we settle for when we cannot get what we want? What does family really mean? Written with great wisdom and acuity, My Way Home is a beautiful novel, full of truths about the human condition, the ways we delight and disappoint one another, the ways we save each other with our generosity and love."
—Mary E. Mitchell, author of Starting Out Sideways and Love in Complete Sentences

"—A cautionary story all too relevant to a time when a woman's right to control her body is somehow still—infuriatingly—unsettled."
—Gish Jen, author of Bad Bad Girl

"My Way Home is an often unsettling, always engaging novel full of honesty, heart, and grace. It is both seductive and disturbing, and it will remind you of why you started reading stories in the first place—to be carried away to a more vivid and compelling world."
—John Dufresne, author of My Darling Boy

"—A potent, provocative, and important novel."
—Anne Elezabeth Pluto, author of How Many Miles to Babylon?

"—Bonina’s novel is a haunting look at first love, teen pregnancy and the dangerous secrets about to erupt in a family. Magnificent."
—Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Days of Wonder and Pictures of You

"...My Way Home delves into a world of secrets, forgiveness, and 'a new idea of family.' Beautifully written...I loved it."
—Rosie Sultan, author of Helen Keller in Love and winner of the PEN Discovery Award

Cover Artist: Teresa Lagrange

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-91-8 | 302 Pages

---

New Release: CROSSING THE LINE by Andrey Gritsman

Andrey Gritsman, came to the US from Russia in 1981. He is a physician, poet and essayist, writes in two languages. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize several times and shortlisted for PSA Poetry Prize. Poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in many journals including New Orleans Review, Notre Dame Review, and Denver Quarterly, anthologized and translated into several European languages. He authored fifteen books of poetry and prose in both languages. He edits international poetry magazine Interpoezia (www.interpoezia.org).
Previous collections from Červená Barva Press: Live Lanscape and Family Chronicles.
www.andreygritsman.com

On CROSSING THE LINE
by Andrey Gritsman

"From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached."
"A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us."
These are quotes from Franz Kafka, who is the most important poet for the author of this book. In this collection, the author tries to reach that point, to approach the line. Nobody knows where this point is and at what moment there is no turning back. The collection mostly includes poems of the last ten years or so which, in metaphorical forms approach above mentioned point. Some of the texts are prose poems that open new possibilities of language and metaphor.

"...poetics explores meanings and mysteries of human memory. But here, in Crossing the Line, I also get a sense of clarity, as if one is writing about final things as if the perspective of a foreign language gives one a distance that allows one to see things with precision that is almost eerie. Yes, there isn't just a welcome strangeness here (as is often the case with writers who work in a foreign language), there is also a kind of wisdom which comes from the experience of crossing that line..."
—Ilya Kaminsky

Cover design: Asya Dodina
The cover features the work by Asya Dodina and Slava Polishchuk Exit XVIII from the Exits and Corners series.

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-87-1 | 86 Pages

New Release: Blood Moon by Carol Dine
Edited by Jennifer Barber, Linda Cutting, Tehila Lieberman

Carol Dine was a celebrated poet, essayist, and memoirist. Art critic and author John Berger wrote of Dine's Van Gogh in Poems (Bitter Oleander Press, 2009), "Her observation of [Van Gogh's] drawings equals his observation of what he was drawing." Dine read from the book at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Her memoir, Places in the Bone (Rutgers University Press, 2005), which combines prose and poetry, deals with the redemptive power of art. Her poems appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Aesthetica Creative Arts Annual (U.K.), Bitter Oleander, Boulevard, Inkwell, Lilith, and Salamander, as well as within the anthologies After Shocks: Poetry of Recovery and Poems Against War: Bending Toward Justice.

Dine received a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Sword of Hope from the American Cancer Society. She lived in Brookline and she taught writing at Suffolk University and the Massachusetts College of Art & Design.

In addition to Van Gogh in Poems and Places in the Bone, her previous books include Naming the Sky, Trying to Understand the Lunar Eclipse, and Orange Night.

Blood Moon explores twentieth and twenty-first century history through the stories of women who acted heroically under the most extreme circumstances, at great personal danger, during wartime and times of political oppression. It also focuses on the lives of women artists who documented the violence of their times through their art. The author drew on many memoirs in the writing of this collection, and the poems are both powerful and redemptive.

Dine's poems about women in extremis are pressed and compacted like diamonds. Her ability to empathize so completely with brave women who suffered terribly, in wartime, from the never-ending human appetite for cruelty, moved me profoundly. I have read Blood Moon over and over, and in my opinion, there is true greatness here. This volume of poetry surely deserves a place in the canon.
—Michael Sandle, British sculptor and artist

Carol Dine's poetry has always engaged. Immersed in her subjects, committed to their individual lives as humans, her language had to pursue, with deep compassion and trust, a full understanding of what it means to suffer and sometimes not survive life's unexpected consequences. We can be thankful for the path she opened up for us and the work she left behind so we, too, could observe the lives portrayed in Blood Moon.
—Paul B. Roth, Editor, The Bitter Oleander Press

Cover Image: SoHyun Bae, Jasper Lake: Wings, 2011, rice paper and pure pigment on canvas, 200 x 150 cm

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-96-3 | 82 Pages

New Release: SOME DISTANT PIN OF LIGHT by Francine Witte

Francine Witte is an award-winning poet, flash fiction writer, and playwright. She is the author of 12 books of poetry and flash fiction and her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is a native New Yorker and attends and produces poetry events in the vibrant NYC scene. She is the co-host and co-curator of the online reading, The Prose Garden. She is the flash fiction editor for FLASH BOULEVARD and South Florida Poetry Journal. A former high school English teacher, she now leads writing prompt sessions on zoom. Witte holds an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Vermont College and an MA from SUNY Binghamton. Visit her website at francinewitte.com.

Francine Witte newest poetry collection Some Distant Pin of Light is an exploration of life's fleeting moments, capturing the essence of human emotion with lyrical precision. Her poems delve into themes of love, loss, and the passage of time, blending vivid imagery with evocative language. Each piece is a snapshot of everyday experiences, transformed into profound reflections on the human condition. As with her previous collections, Café Crazy and The Theory of Flesh, these pages are filled with lost lovers, nostalgic family portraits, and her deep concern for the environment. Witte's keen observational skills and masterful use of brevity create a tapestry of interconnected vignettes that resonate deeply with readers.

Gregor Samsa woke up as a huge insect in a bourgeois bed, struggling to make sense of what has happened to him and what he can do about it. Among her many story-telling bursts of brilliance, Francine Witte contemporizes the Kafkaesque shock of being slapped in the existential face, offering up modern perplexities that are familiar as they are strange. A woman finds herself among many middle-aged women in a grocery shop, 'wheeling their girliness around in a shopping carts... (to the) burst of corn pops and leprechauns winking.' A man finds himself trapped in an oceanic human wave, aching to break past his 'beach-locked future' and make connection to the 'distant pin of light' from which he came. There's humor and metaphorical pathos aplenty in this fine collection — from men who can play themselves backwards, to prove that Paul is dead, to a self-declared 'map of me' that would drive you into a lake if you tried to navigate by it. This is smart stuff, New York City smart, memorably smart. Tales told to the tune of the underground thrum which goes beyond the play of good story-telling to a place of reawakening. These are poems to match the beat of a reader's heart — the heart which is 'the acorn inside the tree you have turned into.'
—George Wallace, Walt Whitman Birthplace

The poems in Some Distant Pin of Light consider how to exist, even thrive, in a world where "the news gets worse/each day." Witte's speakers contemplate the past even as they look forward, look up and consider the sun, the titular "distant pin of light," imagine finally that "billions of miles/away, maybe someone is wishing on it,/wishing for a last desperate chance at love." With her trademark, vivid imagery, Witte captures both the intimate details of everyday life and the cosmic scale of existence, grounding ontological questions in concrete experiences. This is one stellar collection by a writer at the height of her powers.
—Sarah Freligh, author of Sad Math

The book starts out with a Map of Me, "Let’s start by saying this isn’t//A map you'd fold up in a glove box//or pull up on a GPS" guiding the reader into a room of observant wit, which takes center stage... These poems bring the reader wandering through a hushed room of the past: each poem is a relic of art that stands still in time. To observe them in their resting places, a past we cannot change, ends with hope: the last piece, turns our attention to the future in Our Star, where a billion mile lover, which doubles for a wave, "aching to break past his own beach-locked//future, finally able to get whatever he could//wish for on some distant pin of light." This collection of poetry is a true joy to explore.
—Jennifer Juneau, author of More Than Moon

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-90-1 | 71 Pages

New Release: The Many Lives of Cathouse Farm: Tales of a Rural Brothel by bg Thurston

bg Thurston lives with her husband on a sheep farm in Warwick, Massachusetts. After a career in computers and finance, she received her MFA in Poetry from Vermont College in 2002. She has taught poetry courses at Lasell Village, online for Vermont College, and conducts poetry workshops. Her first book, Saving the Lamb, by Finishing Line Press was a Massachusetts Book Awards highly recommended reading choice. Her second book, Nightwalking, was released by Haleys in 2011. Her third book, The Many Lives of Cathouse Farm/Tales of a Rural Brothel, is the culmination of a decade of historical research about her 1770's farmhouse.

The Many Lives of Cathouse Farm/Tales of a Rural Brothel is the culmination of a decade of research into the 250-year history about the farm where the author has lived since 2000. The book contains historical facts and poetic musings about many of the inhabitants who have lived on the farm from 1770 to present. The small farmhouse is the original cape dwelling built in 1770 by two Revolutionary War soldiers from the Weeks Family and farmed by four subsequent generations. During the Prohibition era, the farmhouse was maintained as part of a rural brothel that continued to operate until the late 1940's. Presently Cathouse Farm is also home to sheep, chickens, dogs, and of course, many cats.

The Many Lives of Cathouse Farm — Tales of a Rural Brothel, a finely-crafted collection of poems giving voice to a 255-year-old farmhouse and its surprising history—and to the people and animals who have lived there since before the American Revolution. "We search all our days / for a place called home," Thurston observes, charting in meditative and musical tones the universal human need for rootedness and connection. In tracing the loves and losses of those who came before us—and our own part in the great drama—she reminds us that even if our name be recorded at the Registry of Deeds, we are really no more than caretakers, tenants, and that love grows in the soil and souls of those who paint clapboards and trim, plant flowers and water them, wander the pastures and woods of the world.
—David Thoreen, Assumption University

This compelling and singular collection is an expert weaving of history and poetry. The story of Cathouse Farm begins when poet bg Thurston spies "a small red farmhouse nestled behind tall sugar maples" which beckons her with its For Sale sign. Images presented throughout these pages elucidate Thurston's narrative of dwelling and landscape. We listen as the very house itself speaks in "Sister Houses, 1771" and "The Ruined House" and hear occupants, such as Sarah Weeks, who "labored long for all / these years on this forlorn farm, / birthed and buried our babies- / once within the same week." Section 3 links us to Prohibition-era owner George F. Rivers, who "set the property up as a speakeasy and rural brothel" and inspired persona poems that do not look away from these women's struggles. This book is a significant and fascinating accomplishment, full of curiosity, empathy and respect for the ghostly inhabitants of Cathouse Farm.
—Judith Ferrara, A Feast of Losses: Yetta Dine and Her Son, Stanley Kunitz

The 1700's house speaks in tongues. Laths, horsehair plaster, hand-forged nails, wide pine boards; it holds hardscrabble lives filled with sounds of sweeping, smells of bread and woodsmoke, cries of children. bg Thurston, in The Many Lives of Cathouse Farm — Tales of a Rural Brothel, listens and gives voice to those who have lived and died in this house, her home. As Winfield Scott Weeks, of the poem "The Lost Boy," knows: "Some souls stay tethered to a place." bg understands that "Loss / is a language all its own." but life continues and, in this life, we are joined with those who have died before us, like Billie, "the last lady." In "Gardening with Billie," Thurston writes: "We are joined by what we plant, hands / dug deep in this soil that grew crops / and cows for two hundred years." Their lives restored through careful research, those who opened the doors to Cathouse Farm welcome us home.
—Susan Roney O’Brien, Thira and Bone Circle

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-33-8 | 66 Pages

New Release: WordinEdgeWise by Brad Rose

Brad Rose was born and raised in Los Angeles, and lives in Boston. He is the author of five collections of poetry and flash fiction: Lucky Animals, No. Wait. I Can Explain, Pink X-Ray, de/tonations, and Momentary Turbulence. Seven times nominated for a Pushcart Prize and three times nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology, Brad's poetry and fiction have appeared in Los Angeles Times, The American Journal of Poetry, New York Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Clockhouse, Folio, Cloudbank, Baltimore Review, 45th Parallel, Best Microfiction 2019, Lunch Ticket, Sequestrum, Unbroken, Right Hand Pointing, and other publications. Brad is also the author of seven poetry chapbooks, among them Democracy of Secrets, Collateral, An Evil Twin is Always in Good Company, and Funny You Should Ask. His website and blog can be found at bradrosepoetry.com.

The poems and microfiction of WordinEdgeWise, are predominately surreal and playful. Many are unified by the quirky voices of hardscrabble speakers who have experienced social and economic turmoil, and a resulting psychic instability. Via interior monologues and uncanny dialogues, speakers take liberties with standard colloquial speech, invent unusual similes, and employ unconventional variants of American idioms. They also offer startling insights and unexpected moments of wisdom. Both in spite of, and because of, speakers' peculiarities, the poems and microfiction of No. Wait. I Can Explain. seek to offer keen, if unsettling, glimpses into the darker—and often darkly humorous—underlying dimensions of contemporary American life.

Brad Rose's WordinEdgewise displays the madcap features that readers have come to relish in his work—fast-talking, unreliable narrators and surreal situations depicted with brittle sympathy and manic humor. When it comes to prose poetry, Brad Rose plays, to borrow his own phrase, "first violin in the orchestra of the absurd."
—Howie Good, author of Famous Long Ago and The Bad News First

WordinEdgewise, poet Brad Rose's most recent collection, is as high energy as the title advertises. This language-driven tour de force leaves the reader breathless, from line to line and poem to poem, as the speaker explicates on everything from blind dates to mobile homes, from lightning to ghosts. In this world, blind dates are lightning and mobile homes and ghosts, as the author makes expert use of such literary devices as chiasmus and zeugma to bring it all together. Each poem is a glittering tautology, each line disparate in its sameness. The pace of this book is addicting, and you will pick it up over and over again to the delight of your senses.
—Ralph Pennel, author of A World Less Perfect for Dying In, and fiction editor of Midway Journal

Brad Rose: master of the synaptic leap. He unearths suppressed premises (hidden in stark sight thanks to our jones for consensus reality), leading us to the inevitable across no matter how many unexpected ceiling tiles. Multiple vectors are at subcutaneous work here, clause by clause. These paragraphs are like incognito erasure poems, extended family trees with insoluble fan charts. "When I was counting backward in dog years, the judge sentenced my jury to another week of hard labor." Yes, ordinary life is exactly like this. We just need reminders.
—David P. Miller, author of Bend in the Stair and Sprawled Asleep

Cover: Hannah Rose

$19.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-69-7 | 108 Pages

New Release: In the Absence of Birds by Ruth C. Chad

Ruth C. Chad is a psychologist who lives and works in the Boston area. Her poems have appeared in the Aurorean, Connection, Psychoanalytic Couple and Family Institute of New England, Constellations, Ibbetson Street, Montreal Poems, Muddy River Poetry Review, Lily Poetry Review, Amethyst Poetry Review, Writing in a Woman's Voice, and others. Her chapbook, "The Sound of Angels," was published by Červená Barva Press in 2017. Ruth was nominated for a Pushcart prize in 2021.

The lyrical and powerful poetry in this book addresses the complexity of family life, grief, loneliness and communion. Many of the poems convey the poet’s urgency to notice and appreciate the richness of nature and the sadness of watching its demise. "In the Absence of Birds" brims with personal and universal poetry, offering insight and solace.

Ruth Chad's In The Absence of Birds relates on many levels. It cuts to the chase. She is fragile yet blunt, as she draws us into her world with poetry that exudes emotion and expresses her lamentations. With the keen sensitivity of a psychologist she delves beneath the surface of family life, death and nature. She opens herself to the reader in the manner of other fine women poets: Plath, Oliver and Dove. Ruth Chad is a poet worth careful reading.
—Zvi A. Sesling, Author of War Zones and the Lynching of Leo Frank

In the Absence of Birds is a breakthrough work, imbued with a relevance far beyond the usual audience for 21st century poetry. The poet's commitment to authenticity shines through in her creative approach to grief; her persistent theme of nature-as-solace; and a gentle, dark wit that finds something enviable in wildness. If there is an opposite of "overwrought," that is Ruth Chad's style: her beautiful, clean syntax and simple lines create a welcoming space, inviting the reader to linger, and fill in the spaces with feeling.
—Eric Hyett, Poet and Translator

Ruth Chad chooses her words with great care to create gem-like poems—although gems are cool and hard, her poems are warm and full of heart. They are also full of sensual detail, ranging across life experiences from peeling a ripe plum to watching her mother fade away in a nursing home. Whatever the situation, simple or profound, Ruth draws us right into it with her, generously sharing what she sees, hears, smells, tastes and feels, compelling us to experience it with her. In the Absence of Birds is a feast.
—Lawrence Kessenich, Winner of Ireland's Strokestown International Poetry Prize

Cover Image: Ruth Chad

$19.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-98-7 | 102 Pages

New Release: WINDOW OF BABEL by Borche Panov
Translated from the Macedonian by Daniela Andonovska-Trajkovska

Republic of North Macedonia
Borche Panov was born on September 27, 1961 in Radovish, Republic of North Macedonia. He graduated from the "Sts. Cyril and Methodius" University of Skopje, Faculty of Filology in the filed of Macedonian and South Slavic Languages in 1986. Panov has been a member of the Macedonian Writers' Association since 1998. He published 15 poetry books and 8 plays in Macedonian language. He has also published poetry books in other languages: "Hematite particles" (2016 - in Macedonian and Bulgarian and "Photostiheza" 2019, Bulgaria), "Vdah" in Slovenian (2017, Slovenia), "Shaving balloon" in Serbian (2018, Serbia), "Blood that juggles 8000 poetic thoughts" in Croatian (2021, Croatia), "Underground Apple" in Arabic language (United Arab Emirates, 2021), "Underground apple" in English (Netherlands, 2021), "Dandelion Cadence" in English (co-author, India, 2021), "Sculpture of Breathing" in Italian and English (2022, Italy), "The Morning Line" in Romanian (2023, Romania). His poetry has been translated into 40 languages and published all around the world. He received many literary awards such as the following: Premio Mondiale "Tulliola-Renato Filippelli" in Italy for his book "Shaving the Balloon" (2021), "City of Galateo- Antonio De Ferraris" (Italy, Rome, 2021), Premio "Le Occasioni" in Italy, the Sahito World Literary Award in 2021, Predrag Matvejevic in Croatia for his book "Shaving Balloon," Naji Niman Award in 2022. He has edited many poetry books and poetry anthologies and has launched many authors and books published in Macedonia. He also translates poetry from Macedonian into Serbian and Croatian language and vice versa. Panov works as a Counselor for Culture and Education at the Municipality of Radovish, and he is also a president of the program board of the "International Karamanov's Poetry Festival" for more than 20 years.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Daniela Andonovska-Trajkovska (1979, Bitola, Republic of North Macedonia) is a poetess, author, scientist, editor in chief of two literary magazines in North Macedonia, literary critic, doctor of pedagogy, university professor at the University "Kliment Ohridski" Bitola (Faculty of Education), a member of the Macedonian Writers' Association; Macedonian Science Society - Bitola; Slavic Academy for Literature and Art in Varna - Bulgaria, and Bitola Literary Circle. She was president of the Macedonian Science Society Editorial Council and now - a head of the Linguistics and Literature Department at the Macedonian Science Society - Bitola. She has published two books of stories, 9 poetry books, one book for children, a book of literary criticism in Macedonian and 3 academic and scientific books that are part of the curriculum at the university where she works, and over 100 scientific articles. She has also 6 poetry books published in English, Italian, Arabic and Romanian language in India, United Arab Emirates, Italy, and Romania. She has also published her translations from English into Macedonian and vice versa in North Macedonia, Italy and Netherland (7 poetry books and many articles). She has won several important awards for literature: "Krste Chachanski" (2018); "Karamanov' for "Electronic Blood" (2019); Macedonian Literary Avant-garde for "House of Contrasts" (2020); "Abduvali Qutbiddin" (2020, Uzbekistan); Premio Mondiale "Tulliola-Renato Filippelli" in Italy for "Electronic Blood" (2021); Award of excellence "City of Galateo - Antonio De Ferrariis" (Italy); Award for Literary Criticism in 2022, Poetry Award "Dritero Agioli" (Albania, 2023); Poetry Award "Mihai Eminescu," a Golden Medal and a recognition as ambassador of culture in Romania by the Mihai Eminescu Academy (2023) and "Aco Shopov" for poetry (the most important national poetry prize by Macedonian Writers' Association in 2021). Her poetry has been translated and published into more than 40 world languages.

Cover Art: "Tower of Babel" by Witold Zakrzewski

$21.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-83-3 | 118 Pages

New Release: HOUSE OF CONTRASTS by Daniela Andonovska-Trajkovska

Daniela Andonovska-Trajkovska (1979, Bitola, North Macedonia) holds PhD in Education. She is an awarded poetess, writer, scientist, literary critic, translator, editor, full professor at the University "St. Kliment Ohridski" in Bitola, co-founder of the Center for Literature, Art, Culture, Rhetoric and Language at the Faculty of Education in Bitola, a member of the Macedonian Writers' Association, Slavic Academy for Literature and Art in Varna, and a head of the Literature and Linguistic Department (Macedonian Science Society in Bitola). She has authored 16 books in Macedonian (poetry, prose, literary criticism, scientific books), 6 poetry books in English, Arabic, Italian, and 9 poetry books of renowned world poets in her translation. Her poetry is translated into 40 languages.

DESCRIPTION BY BORCHE PANOV, literary critic, poet, editor:
"In the poetry book "House of Contrasts" by Daniela Andonovska-Trajkovska somewhere at the beginning we can read that "a tear without metaphysics has no aesthetics." This discourse completely determines the poetics of this very well-known and notorious Macedonian poetess. She is awake in each word and in this book, she creates her poetic alphabet by freezing the moment and by claiming that her alphabet was born on the knife with which the umbilical cord was cut. Although, she writes about things that are not so perfect or beautiful, such as the pain and the loss, she is always on the bright side by using the poem as the most subtle defense of life. At the same time, she stands in front of the vertical mirror of love and she confronts us with the naked truth by showing us the finest lines on our faces from which time rises like a wall between us and the world. She makes us to be aware that we live in a room of the autistic time, and even when insomnia speaks loudly, no one can hear the fractures of the day that assembles in us piece by piece like in an X-ray image, and no one can see our nakedness and our vulnerability. We hide behind the image that we show to the world wanting to be accepted and appreciated. In the poetry book "House of Contrasts" we see for a moment the world in which every night, humans made of paper return to the keyhole of their houses cursing the day that does not last long enough so they could find themselves. But that is precisely why the day in this book lasts long enough to see how the poetess Daniela Andonovska-Trajkovska shows us that the paramecium of the meaning develops into a multicellular organism breathing with human lungs in the chest of the readers."

DESCRIPTION BY SLAVICA GADZOVA SVIDERSKA, PhD, literary critic, poetess, editor, publisher:
"The poetry of Daniela Andonovska-Trajkovska is powerful and striking example of Écriture feminine, which is essentially atypical and non-classical, because the prism of this author goes beyond the classical framework of the so-called writing from the womb. Searching for the perfect and most appropriate way of expressing her view and thinking about the world, the author playfully moves between the forms and ways of poetic expression: from short elliptical poems reduced to simple but semantically layered poetic images, through lyrical poems that are thought provoking, to poems where the verse hybridizes with the narrative tone. At the beginning, the lyrical subject searches for itself (in the world, through the Other and in the Other, in the rational and the irrational, in the real and the oneiric), and the most appropriate form to express this search is the paradox. Furthermore, the search is an endless attempt to find harmony and balance amidst the noise of a world that is becoming increasingly chaotic, illogical, and sometimes nightmarishly phantasmagoric. At the end the search for the metaphysical vertical takes place, a search for the eternal, for the Absolute, for God. The decadence, the downward movement and the erosion of the values are constantly semantically emphasized: the images are broken, the words are crashed, the breathing is trapped, the woman is a doll with winded up steps, the face is a salt mosaic, ethics is "Cain-ethics," that is, the world is "on red alert." Nevertheless, the lyrical subject knows how to find meaning even in the era of meaninglessness, living its search for itself, for a perfect understanding with the Other, for a home without contrasts and for the Absolute. Andonovska-Trajkovska's poetry brings fresh and original voice that carries the archetypal one, thick semantics, explosions of meanings, feminine wisdom and aesthetics that ennoble the "collapsing world" so that it does not collapse. For that reason, the poetry book "House of Contrasts" deserves a special place in the contemporary world literature."

"Daniela Andonovska-Trajkovska's poetry brings fresh and original voice that carries the archetypal one, thick semantics, explosions of meanings, feminine wisdom and aesthetics that ennoble the "collapsing world" so that it does not collapse. For that reason, the poetry book "House of Contrasts" deserves a special place in the contemporary world literature."
—Slavica Gadzova Sviderska, PhD, literary critic, scholar, poetess, editor, publisher

"In "House of Contrasts" by Daniela Andonovska-Trajkovska the silence is not silent, but dramatical and loud. It seems that here is a compromise and an awareness that the antonymies are compatible contradictions like the day and the night, the sky and the earth, the angel and the devil, the cosmos and the chaos. Like ying and yang. Like life."
—Jordan Stojanoski, PhD, literary critic, university professor of literature

Cover art: Ljupka Galazkava-silev

$19.95 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-84-0 | 92 Pages

New Release: The Unfinished Family Poems Barbara E. Murphy

Barbara E. Murphy's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Green Mountains Review, Threepenny Review, Barrow Street, and New England Review. She is a recipient of a Vermont Arts Council Fellowship and twice-nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Murphy served as a faculty member at the New England Young Writers Conference and is a board member of Sundog Poetry. A collection of her poems, Almost Too Much was published by ČervenÁ Barva Press in 2015. Her essays and reviews have been published in several venues including The New York Times, Plume Poetry, Full Grown People, and Green Mountains Review. She lives and writes in Burlington Vermont.

Description:
Barbara E. Murphy's compelling The Unfinished Family comes to terms with the notion that families can ever be "finished.' The poems in this brave and provocative collection explore the impulses of duty and loyalty, love and fear and compulsion for perfection as the speaker comes to embrace the mistakes that are inevitable in every family. These poems are as honest as they are hopeful in their insistence that we return again and again to the messy work of being with our people and starting again.

In The Unfinished Family, Barbara Murphy offers a master class on the compressed narrative and the withheld detail. Whether she turns a discerning, critical eye on her birth-family—a troubled father, a mother born into "the wrong era, wrong marriage, wrong life"—or her own made family she brings a wealth of memorable phrases, smart insights, and emotional yearning as well as an empathetic eye and forgiving mind that "lets a little light in too."
—Neil Shepard, author of The Book of Failures

Part of our human beauty is that we live in a state of being unfinished. This is why memory is so powerful. Barbara Murphy's exquisite, beautiful poems are a series of finely etched portraits that enact how our moments accumulate into meaning as they move toward another world we will never know yet help create. Muscular, lyric language and an agile form makes these powerful poems tap us on the shoulder and awaken us from our delirium and into the transcendent. Murphy's poems show us how personal history and time intersect leaving behind a memory that never vanishes. These poems claim life and life claims these poems. This book is a treasure.
—Elizabeth A.I. Powell, author of Atomizer

Barbara Murphy's The Unfinished Family is haunted by the archetypal ghost of a perfect family against which the speaker holds memories—brilliantly precise and unequivocally rendered—and finds them wanting. Yet, the honesty, bravery and fidelity with which she acknowledges her disappointments burnish these poems with love, humor and pathos. We should read her.
—Nancy Mitchell, author of The Out of Body Shop

Photo: Karen Pike

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-92-5 | 58 Pages

New Release: Lunch in Chinatown poems by Mary Bonina

A fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Mary Bonina was finalist for the Goldfarb Fellowship and awarded several residencies, including one at the VCCA retreat, Moulin a Nef, in Auvillar, France. Previous publications include My Father's Eyes: A Memoir and two poetry collections—Living Proof and Clear Eye Tea, all from ČervenÁ Barva Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Lowell Review, Hanging Loose, Poets and Writers, Salamander, Mom Egg, Ovunque Siamo, Adelaide, and many other journals, and her work has been included in several anthologies, including Entering The Real World, VCCA Poets on Mt. San Angelo from Wavertree Press. Her completed novel, My Way Home, is on submission to publishers. Her poem "Drift" won Boston Contemporary Authors/Urban Arts prize and is carved in a granite monolith, a permanent public art installation in the City. Bonina has collaborated with composers of arts songs and new music, a sculptor, and her work has been translated into Japanese. She received a full fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. A voiceover artist, she has recorded fiction, non-fiction, and poetry for blind readers. She offers classes, workshops, conference presentation, and individual coaching for writers. Bonina has been a long-time member of the Writers Room of Boston, where she served on the Board for more than a decade. She earned her M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her website is www.marybonina.com

Description:
New from Mary Bonina—and particularly timely—LUNCH IN CHINATOWN is a poetry collection inspired by the poet's work teaching the English language to immigrants from Haiti, China, Poland and other European countries, Central, Latin American, and African nations, and others. The poems highlight, as Patrick Sylvain, Professor of Global Studies, states in his introduction, "the universal nature of human connection, understanding, and a sense of shared humanity in the face of cultural and linguistic differences" Bonina sees her classes as offering survival skills, and compares her necessarily improvised lessons to the act of writing a poem, "that familiar process of one word, one thought, leading to another, often unanticipated one, recognizing endless possibilities, and finally settling on the right one in a moment of revelation."

In this vivid, wonderfully empathetic book of poems, Lunch In Chinatown, Mary Bonina is an inquisitive seeker, not only set to teach English but also to learn about the lives of her immigrant students. There’s the student who worked with the very ill and the job did not allow wearing jewelry “without that ring on her finger/her hand felt too light, made her think/that she wasn’t in the world anymore,” another puzzled over the same abbreviation for Saint and Street, a young man recalled his young love in Port au Prince. In her masterful telling Bonina has given us glimpses of their worlds, both before and after the immigration. These poems celebrate the common human language, of disappointments and loss, aspirations and love, and also how poetry and the resolve of students and their teacher can make all the difference in the world.
—Pui Ying Wong, author of Fanling in October

In Lunch in Chinatown "Mary Bonina's eloquent verses breathe life into the seemingly mundane, turning lunchtime into an exploration of the extraordinary moments hidden within our daily routines."
          from the Introduction
          Patrick Sylvain, P.H.D., M.F.A
          Author, Unfinished Dreams/Rev San Bout (bilingual poetry)

Cover photo: Abbi Sauro
Author photo: Christopher Collyn

$16.00 | ISBN: 978-1-950063-88-8 | 27 Pages

A New Release from Glass Lyre Press:
Grief Touched the Sky at Night by Gloria Mindock

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

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