The May 2008 Newsletter has posted!

Interview with Lisa Beatman

Announcing the publication of "faustinetta, gegenschein, trapunto"
by Diane Wald

faustinetta, gegenschein, trapunto
by Diane Wald

These three poems somehow asked to be together. They are full of alive and dead people, full of genuine and created personalities, full of composite desires and fears and mockeries. They popped up out of the love of words, and the word-secrets we all hold dear. The title words brought me buckets of pleasure, and I wanted to celebrate and embellish them. One of them I made up, one of them I learned, one of them I'd forgotten I knew. I think all three are united in mystery, begging for me to believe them.
-Diane Wald

Price: $7.00

Announcing the publication of "Tara" by Catherine Sasanov

Tara
by Catherine Sasanov

In 2005, poet Catherine Sasanov made an unsettling discovery: slaveholding had been an unspoken part of her family's history. Sasanov's painstaking search to find out what happened to the men, women, and children held by her ancestors is at the heart of her new chapbook, Tara. In its pages, Sasanov conjures Missouri's Antebellum landscape out of the ravages of urban sprawl. She pieces together a portrait of slaves and freedmen in poems haunted by the question: How does one write a coherent life of a people if only bits and scraps of their existence can be found?

Price: $7.00

Announcing the publication of "Up From The Root Cellar"
by Anne Harding Woodworth

Up From The Root Cellar
by Anne Harding Woodworth

If the root cellar connotes dark and damp, it also promises nourishment-and this book serves up a startling buffet. Whether imagining herself into a grave, a slaughterhouse, or a rose that holds a family memory, Anne Harding Woodworth is attentive to how "secrets rise to the surface." Her range of subject matter is startling-from famine to termites to dowsing for bodies-and she deftly works a root vegetable into nearly every poem, including one about the invention of the potato chip and another that turns the peeling of an Idaho into a sexy striptease. Up from the Root Cellar is rich with music, and brings a satisfying harvest of buried and strewn things to light.
-Ellen Doré Watson, author of This Sharpening

In Up from the Root Cellar, Anne Harding Woodworth delights us with a quick and unblinking look to the cold, soupy, death-in-life world that roots our body's generation, and our ladders of art. Her poems feel through near-frozen "rhizomes / tightly wadded leaves," and wan cyclopean russet potatoes, "wide-eyed, looking for a way out," in order redefine the human form, the ways that the body seeks its "light-time" even as it must bow to physical limits, "dry-weighted, wet-weighted, scoped on dials, squeezed into ratio." Woodworth's instincts for the contrarian, and messy-microbial sources for human stories put her alongside the garden-shed bio-poetries of Roethke and Marianne Moore. Yet her sudden turns and wacky humor find their own force and presence.
-David Gewanter, author of The Sleep of Reason

One of the many pleasures of poetry is that of coming into the company of an interesting mind. In Up from the Root Cellar, Anne Harding Woodworth uses her central metaphor to plumb the mysteries of preservation and renewal in ways that are fresh and surprising. Her tender, gently subversive poems, with their rich wordplay and mischievous imagery, succeed in bringing up from the darkness of the root cellar insights that delight and enlighten.
-Jean Nordhaus, author of Innocence

Price: $7.00

Announcing the publication of "this is where you go when you are gone"
by Timothy Gager

this is where you go when you are gone
by Timothy Gager

This chapbook represents Timothy's best poems from 2007, a year that he had 32 accepted submissions. These poems are rich with emotion, humor, double meanings, happiness and regret. "this is where you go when you are gone" ranges of experiences, responses to social events and a poetic e-mails written to someone who felt his poems were too sad. Timothy Gager tells stories through his poetry and this collection represents a new and more mature and seasoned writer.

Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene Review

Price: $7.00

Announcing the publication of "The Lengthening Radius For Hate" by Gary Finke

The Lengthening Radius For Hate
by Gary Finke

The Lengthening Radius for Hate is a poem sequence that has, at its foundation, the shooting of Kent State students on May 4, 1970, by the National Guard. Gary Fincke was a student at Kent State in 1970, and he chronicles both the shooting and its residual effects over decades in a series of strongly observed narrative poems that explore disillusionment, anger, and the difficulties of reconciliation.

Price: $7.00

Announcing the publication of "Isolate Flecks" by Kevin Gallagher

Isolate Flecks by Kevin Gallagher

Kevin Gallagher is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Isolate Flecks (Červená Barva Press, 2008), and Looking for Lake Texcoco (Cy Gist, 2008). His poetry and reviews have appeared in such publications as The Boston Review, Emergency Almanac, Green Mountains Review, Harvard Review, Jacket, Peacework, the Partisan Review and elsewhere. In 2004 he edited a feature on Kenneth Rexroth for Jacket, and a chapbook titled Nevertheless: Some Gloucester Writers and Artists. From 1992 to 2002 he was a publisher and editor of compost magazine. A retrospective anthology of compost, co-edited with Margaret Bezucha, is titled There's No Place on Earth Like the World (Zephyr, 2006). He lives with his wife Kelly, and son Theo, in Newton, Massachusetts.

Price: $7.00

Announcing the publication of "Bird Scarer" by Glenn Sheldon

Bird Scarer by Glenn Sheldon

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

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

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

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

Price: $14.00

Announcing Cloudkeeper Press So many Authors have queried Červená Barva Press asking if we would print their chapbooks for a fee, that we have established Cloudkeeper Press to fill this need. We will work closely with you and make publishing your chapbook a positive experience. We do high quality work. To visit Cloudkeeper Press just click on the Logo or here!