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No One Is Safe by Susan Tepper
The Life and Death of a Literary Legend by Martin Golan
Streets Of Flowers by Martin Golan
When Annie Fell Off The Mountain by Martin Golan
Gilgamesh by Martin Burke
I Ching by Martin Burke
Near Love Stories by J. B. Hogan

Postcard Series

Postcard Series: One by Gloria Mindock

Full-length Books

New release March 2, 2016:
Fire Tongue by Zvi A. Sesling

Fire Tongue by Zvi A. Sesling Červená Barva Press, 2016

Zvi A. Sesling has published poetry in numerous magazines both in print and online in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland France, New Zealand, India, Canada, Australia and Israel. Among the publications are: Midstream, Voices Israel, Saranac Review, New Delta Review, Plainsong, Asphodel, Ibbetson St., Blue Lyre, Door Is Ajar, Scapegoat, The Chaffin Journal, Ship of Fools, Levure Litteraire, The Moth, First Literary Review—East, and Main Street Rag. He was awarded First Prize (2007) in the Reuben Rose International Poetry Competition. In 2008 he was selected to read his poetry at New England/Pen “Discovery” by Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish. He was a featured reader in the Jewish Poetry Festival in Brookline, MA. He is a regular reviewer for the Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene and is Editor of the Muddy River Poetry Review and publisher of Muddy River Books. Sesling has been a featured reader in various venues in the Boston area, San Diego, the Massachusetts Poetry Festival and the Boston Poetry Festival. Sesling has also read on local radio and cable television programs. He is author of King of the Jungle, (Ibbetson St., 2010), and a chapbook Across Stones of Bad Dreams (Červená Barva Press, 2011). He has taught at Suffolk University, Emerson College and Boston University. He lives in Chestnut Hill, MA with his wife Susan J. Dechter.

In Fire Tongue, the poems are precise and unsparing as they probe old questions of how and why the unspeakable enters our lives. In terse, suspenseful language and lines that are as light as their subjects they carry are heavy, indeed ominous, Sesling looks for hope, for what can redeem us. The poet finds the answer in our ability to listen, to feel, to own a conscience, and to value life.
-Afaa Michael Weaver

Poet Zvi Sesling is at a point in life where there is much more in his past than in his future. In "Fire Tongue" there is delicate balance of the past, present and speculation of what is to come. Sesling fearlessly faces what we all feel deep in our marrow - our own mortality. As a highly skilled poet with a gimlet eye, Sesling pulls this off with a mixture of humor and pathos. No word is wasted... life is too short for that... Sesling ,my friends, is well acquainted with the night.
-Doug Holder, Ibbetson Street Press, Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing/Endicott College

Fire Tongue takes us on a journey down Zvi Sesling's "road of sorrows." Here is madness, pain, cities of the dead, remnants of the lost, vast fields of suffering, outcroppings of cruelty, deserts of war and violence. With a dream-like clarity and precision reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch, Sesling shows us what we cannot deny about our nature, our history, our times. This is poetry as ritual incantation, a fiery tongue in its own right, teaching us how to navigate and thus perhaps begin to understand our harsh and bloody terrain.
-Fred Marchant, Author of The Looking House (Graywolf Press)

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9966894-4-1 | 87 Pages | In Stock

Release date November 2, 2015:
THE CHINTZ AGE tales of love and loss for a new new york by Ed Hamilton

THE CHINTZ AGE tales of love and loss for a new new york by Ed Hamilton Červená Barva Press, 2015

Ed Hamilton is the author of Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with the Artists and Outlaws of New York's Rebel Mecca (Da Capo, 2007). His fiction has appeared in dozens of small journals, including Limestone, The Journal of Kentucky Studies, SoMa Literary Review, Exquisite Corpse, Bohemia, Omphalos, and in translation in the Czech Republic's Host. His non-fiction has appeared in The Villager, Chelsea Now, The Huffington Post, and Living With Legends: Hotel Chelsea Blog. Ed lives in New York City. Visit his website at www.edhamilton.nyc

Just as Soylent Green is people, so The Chintz Age is now. Everything is cheaper and chintzier than in the past, from consumer products to culture itself. Our great cities, and, in particular, New York, are being transformed as we speak, as rising rents squeeze out the artists and bohemians who honed and burnished the city's glittering cutting edge. So should we look backward in teary-eyed nostalgia for the glorious past, or grit our teeth and move forward, accepting the inevitability of change in order to carve out a place for ourselves in this Brave New New York? This book of gritty urban fairy tales represents a heartfelt prayer for the future of the arts in New York, as well as a blueprint for a moral and spiritual resistance to the forces of cultural philistinism.

In seven stories and a novella, Ed Hamilton takes on this clash of cultures between the old and the new, as his characters are forced to confront their own obsolescence in the face of this rapidly surging capitalist juggernaut. Ranging over the whole panorama of New York neighborhoods—from the East Village to Hell's Kitchen, and from the Bowery to Washington Heights—Hamilton weaves a spellbinding web of urban mythology. Punks, hippies, beatniks, squatters, junkies, derelicts, and anarchists—the entire pantheon of urban demigods—gambol through a grungy subterranean Elysium of dive bars, cheap diners, flophouses, and shooting galleries, searching for meaning and a place to make their stand.

PRAISE FOR THE LEGENDS OF THE CHELSEA HOTEL

"There's something remarkable about the way the author manages to celebrate the Chelsea's singular atmosphere — the exuberant aspiring artists, the divorced movie stars, the disheveled blonde who may have Tourette's and who lingers in the lobby hissing like a snake — without ever forgetting how toxic the air is for many of the people who come desperate to breathe it."
—Jeff Giles, The New York Times Book Review

Reviews:

Boston Magazine: www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2015/10/02/gentriwatch-gentrification-book-somerville/

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9861111-9-8 | 284 Pages | In Stock

September 22, 2015:
Trailerville a play by John Dufresne

Trailerville by John Dufresne Červená Barva Press, 2015

John Dufresne is the author of two short story collections, The Way That Water Enters Stone and Johnny Too Bad, and the novels Louisiana Power & Light, Love Warps the Mind a Little, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year, Deep in the Shade of Paradise, and Requiem, Mass. His books on writing, The Lie That Tells a Truth and Is Life Like This? are used in many university writing programs. He’s the editor of the anthology Blue Christmas. His short stories have twice been named Best American Mystery Stories, in 2007 and 2010. He's a professor at Florida International University in Miami. He is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction. His latest novel is No Regrets, Coyote. A sequel, I Don't Like Where This Is Going will be published in April 2016.

It's Labor Day weekend at the Trailerville Mobile Home Park in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana. Merdelle Harris's husband of forty-one years is rapidly deteriorating with Alzheimer's. She is determined to care for him, to save him if she can. In saving Bobby she's saving her own life, she believes. There are days he doesn't know her, doesn't know himself. Arlis Bryant lives in the trailer next door with his daughter, her three kids, and her beer-drinking, hot-tempered boyfriend. It's awful crowded in there, and the boyfriend thinks someone needs to go. Arlis has fallen for Merdelle, and his attentions are both a comfort and a torment to her. She has to choose between the man who loved her once and the man who loves her now, between the past and the future.

Trailerville, the first play by novelist John Dufresne, is all about love, in all its flavors: first love, unrequited love, unbridled passion, doomed young love, the love of parents for an adult child they don't really understand, the love that grows over time in a marriage, love that is blind to the beloved's faults (even if no one else is), and ultimately, what it means to love yourself. This may sound like a recipe for heartwarming romantic comedy, so let me note that one of Dufresne's strengths as a novelist is his ability to undercut sentimentality with black humor; that talent is in evidence here as well. But Trailerville is also a very sad play, because it acknowledges that love is messy and complicated and often hurts as much as—or more than—it heals.
—Loren Noveck, nytheatre.com

Trailerville delivers big laughs and a bittersweet glow.
—Flavorpill

$15.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9966894-2-7 | 112 Pages | In Stock

September 22, 2015:
Becoming an Ancestor Poems by Lucille Lang Day

Becoming an Ancestor Poems by Lucille Lang Day Červená Barva Press, 2015

Lucille Lang Day is the author of nine previous poetry collections and chapbooks, including The Curvature of Blue, The Book of Answers, and Infinities. Her first poetry collection, Self-Portrait with Hand Microscope, received the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature; her most recent chapbook, Dreaming of Sunflowers: Museum Poems, won the Blue Light Poetry Award. She has also published a children’s book, Chain Letter, and a memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story, which received a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. Day earned her M.F.A. in creative writing at San Francisco State University and her Ph.D. in science/mathematics education at the University of California at Berkeley. The founder and director of a small press, Scarlet Tanager Books, she also served for seventeen years as the director of the Hall of Health, an interactive museum in Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband, writer Richard Michael Levine. Her website is www.lucillelangday.com.

"The poems in Becoming an Ancestor begin in autobiography, move into history, and branch backward and forward through genealogy, offering instruction on the natural world along the way. Lucille Lang Day recreates her ancestors with scrupulous detail and often stunning images until her poems read like the history of anyone "born of the myths of Europe/and North America." These myths propel Day to tell us of migrations, mutations, secrets, heartbreak, disappointments, defiance, death, and resilience—in other words, of life in all its complexity as she shows us all "which way is home" in our shared fate of becoming ancestors."
—Lynne Knight, author of Again

"Soulfully thrilling, the poems in Becoming an Ancestor constitute—historically, geographically, emotionally, caringly—a mindful poet's family picture album. Following centuries of fateful migrations, Lucille Lang Day becomes the California teller of tales that wow us with her own intimate versions of how need, time and again, restores our lives to living streams of love."
—Al Young, California Poet Laureate Emeritus

"At the poetic heart of Lucille Lang Day's Becoming an Ancestor is a series of vivid historical poems starting in the early 1600s when 13-year-old Elizabeth sails to Plymouth on the Mayflower. Rowland is in the Gold Rush, Nathan in the Union Army. Old maid Angenette has an out-of-wedlock baby with a Wampanoag Indian. The ancestors tell Day, "Welcome home. The elders have been waiting for you./Listen to their drums, the beat/of your own heart." As the poet comes closer to becoming an ancestor herself, she details her losses and her fears, and she worries whether she is creating a masterpiece or an old pot. Read this old pot, and you will find the hand of a master."
—Penelope Scambly Schott, author of Lillie Was a Goddess, Lillie Was a Whore

"Becoming an Ancestor carries us from the very beginning of this great clock-universe through human migrations to the bitter end, where however a horned lark is singing beside a field of silver hairgrass in winter. When this confluence produces Lucille Lang Day, who sings the world as both a family member and a scientist, and her daughters and grandchildren, they appear in the life-lines of her poems both as the homecoming of historical pilgrimages and as intertwining swirls of DNA. Here too the endings can be bitter as family members slip away. But the music of her poetry remains."
—Emily Grosholz, Advisory Editor, The Hudson Review

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9861111-6-7 | 118 Pages | In Stock

September, 2015:
Belly by Steven Schreiner

Belly by Steven Schreiner Červená Barva Press, 2015

STEVEN SCHREINER is the author of the collection Too Soon to Leave and the chapbook Imposing Presence, and co-author with Allison Cundiff of In Short, a Memory of the Other on a Good Day. His poems have appeared in many magazines, including Poetry, Image, Colorado Review, River Styx and December, and numerous anthologies. He is the recipient of fellowships from the VCCA, Tall Rock Retreat, and The National Writer's Voice of the YMCA. He teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and is the founding editor of Natural Bridge, a journal of contemporary literature.

Cover art: Ethan Shaltout and Steven Schreiner

Belly is a sequence of confessions. It is a quiet yet intense journey into the deepest wells of a maturing heart. Schreiner writes movingly about the painful transience of love and loss, the forces of memory and childhood, delineated by the revision of seasons and the symbolism of flowers as death, as remembrance. Belly reconciles the permanence of family in all its anguish and grief with the consciousness and inevitability of what supremely makes us human: forgiveness.
—Rewa Zeinati

Steven Schreiner reaches his summit in this remarkably vivid, darkly truthful, and often heartbreaking book of memories, losses and longings, the work of experience.
—Edward Hirsch

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9861111-8-1 | 80 Pages | In Stock

September, 2015:
Hamburgers and Berliners and other courses in between by Matt Potter

Hamburgers and Berliners and other courses in between by Matt Potter Červená Barva Press, 2015

Australian-born Matt Potter lives in Adelaide but keeps part of his psyche in Berlin. He is the founding editor of Pure Slush, Pure Slush Books, Truth Serum Press and Lit Bulb international writing festival. By day he has been a social worker, an English as a Second Language teacher, and oh, many other things. Find more of his work at mattcpotter.webs.com/

Matt Potter's Hamburgers and Berliners took me to Germany—with brief forays to Austria, Portugal and other European countries—without me having to shift an inch from my sofa. Potter's prose is, as always, absorbing, amusing, enlightening and engaging. If you are thinking of a trip to Europe (or Australia, where Potter originates) make sure you read Hamburgers and Berliners before you go. This intimate portrait of an Australian abroad should be nestled in your hand luggage beside your spare undies and bottled water—it's just as essential. Potter examines the differences between cultures big and small—between countries, continents or, at the other end of the scale, the microcultures that exist within a block or a street. He constantly questions the what and the why of things, observing idiosyncrasies and habits and ingrained patterns of thought in a way that makes you see your own surroundings and behaviours afresh. Never uncomfortably disrespectful (though often funny), Potter had me smirking with some of his descriptions and going “Aha!” at others.
Hamburgers and Berliners is that rare thing, a guide to humanity, forgiving in its delivery but covering every niggly aspect of living as a foreigner abroad in delicious detail, warts and all. If you want to give your brain a holiday, get it, read it, and have a ball.
—Gill Hoffs, author of The Sinking of RMS Tayleur: The Lost Story of the Victorian Titanic and Wild: a collection

Matt Potter unflinchingly allows us inside his mind and heart, sharing fears and insecurities that most of us would never dare to reveal. His book is both poignant and funny, and through Potter's eyes we get a vivid picture of Germany—its landscapes, people, customs and quirks—while also witnessing one man's struggle to make sense of his own life as well as life at large.
—Len Kuntz, author of The Dark Sunshine

Matt Potter's Hamburgers and Berliners brings back the adventures, the frustrations and the newness of moving to Germany. These honest missives made me want to do it all over again.
—Christopher Allen, author of Conversations with S. Teri O'Type

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9966894-0-3 | 273 Pages | In Stock

Release date August 12, 2015:
To Part Is to Die a Little by Claudia Serea

To Part Is to Die a Little by Claudia Serea Červená Barva Press, 2015

Claudia Serea is a Romanian-born poet who immigrated to the U.S. in 1995. Her poems and translations have appeared in Field, New Letters, 5 a.m., Meridian, Word Riot, Apple Valley Review, The Red Wheelbarrow, and many others. A four-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, she is the author of three other full-length collections: Angels & Beasts (Phoenicia Publishing, Canada, 2012), A Dirt Road Hangs From the Sky (8th House Publishing, Canada, 2013), and Nothing Important Happened Today (Broadstone Books, forthcoming, 2016). Her poem My Father’s Quiet Friends in Prison, 1958-1962 received the New Letters Readers Award in 2013. Serea co-hosts The Williams Readings poetry series in Rutherford, NJ, and she is the founding editor of the National Translation Month. More at cserea.tumblr.com.

Serea's poems instantiate with startling clarity and empathy what it means to be at once deeply rooted in the world and permanently dislocated, a cultural curator and translator, a juggler of conflicting desires. Her pendulum-like sway between her homeland, Romania, and the adopted/adoptive one, America, creates a fluid space of in-betweenness that allows her transnational speakers to choose not to choose, and to articulate, instead, what it means to live attuned to the distinct textures of these two worlds' beauty and grit, to their flute songs and "half-lit solitude[s]." Her incisive eye gives us the "Plexiglass politeness" of America alongside the de-humanizing deprivations of life in (post-) communist Romania, the guarded emotions of New World suburbia alongside the odyssean waiting that has become her parents' life in the village house with a "wasps' nest in its bosom" and chickens ready "to scratch the road for coins and worms."

To Part Is to Die a Little is a spare yet rapturous chant about an unending emigration and the continuous return to the soul of one culture in the language of another.
—Mihaela Moscaliuc, author of Father Dirt (Alice James Books, 2010)

Readers of To Part Is to Die a Little should prepare for an emotional journey, as they witness dramatic changes in the speaker's character and her surroundings. Deeply moving poems chronicle poignant milestones spanning from the speaker’s decision to leave her country of birth to settling into her country of choice, adopting her new life and seemingly making peace with an inherent duality voiced as "Let me be the pendulum/between my two lives." We meet and sympathize with poignant and vivid characters such as a Thai busboy, a Russian grocery bagger, Danny-the-butcher and other "Stars of the Underground." Congratulations to Claudia Serea for a well-crafted and brilliantly structured book!
—Katerina Stoykova-Klemer, author of The Porcupine of Mind

$17.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9861111-5-0 | 96 Pages | In Stock

Release date June 4, 2015:
Span of Thread by David Giannini

Span of Thread by David Giannini Červená Barva Press, 2015

David Giannini's most recently published collections of poetry include AZ TWO (Adastra Press), a "Featured Book" in the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival; RIM/WAVE in 2012;, and 10 chapbooks in 2013-15 including INVERSE MIRROR, a collaboration with artist, Judith Koppel;. His work appears in national and international literary magazines and anthologies. Awards include: Massachusetts Artists Fellowship Awards; The Osa and Lee Mays Award For Poetry; an award for prosepoetry from the University of Florida; and a 2009 Finalist Award from the Naugatuck Review. He has been a gravedigger; beekeeper; taught at Williams College, The University of Massachusetts, and Berkshire Community College, as well as preschoolers and high school students, among others. Giannini was the Lead Rehabilitation Counselor for Compass Center, which he co-founded as the first rehabilitation clubhouse for severely and chronically mentally ill adults in the northwest corner of Connecticut. He lives among trees in Becket, Massachusetts with his wife, Pam.

On OTHERS' LINES

…I don’t see how any close reader won't come away learning a great deal about the potential in quotation, the distinctness of first lines & the possibilities of form. That's a lot for a project of this scope to accomplish.
—Ron Silliman

Yes, it’s very deftly done, and

Červená Barva Press Books, Chapbooks and Postcards

Full-length Books

Chapbooks

Plays

E-books

Postcard Series

Full-length Books

New release March 2, 2016: Fire Tongue by Zvi A. Sesling

Release date November 2, 2015: THE CHINTZ AGE tales of love and loss for a new new york by Ed Hamilton

September 22, 2015: Trailerville a play by John Dufresne

September 22, 2015: Becoming an Ancestor Poems by Lucille Lang Day

September, 2015: Belly by Steven Schreiner

September, 2015: Hamburgers and Berliners and other courses in between by Matt Potter

Release date August 12, 2015: To Part Is to Die a Little by Claudia Serea

Release date June 4, 2015: Span of Thread by David Giannini

Červená Barva Press
Books, Chapbooks and Postcards

New release March 2, 2016:
Fire Tongue by Zvi A. Sesling

Release date November 2, 2015:
THE CHINTZ AGE tales of love and loss for a new new york by Ed Hamilton

September 22, 2015:
Trailerville a play by John Dufresne

September 22, 2015:
Becoming an Ancestor Poems by Lucille Lang Day

September, 2015:
Belly by Steven Schreiner

September, 2015:
Hamburgers and Berliners and other courses in between by Matt Potter

Release date August 12, 2015:
To Part Is to Die a Little by Claudia Serea

Release date June 4, 2015:
Span of Thread by David Giannini