Discussion → Cervena Barva Press Announces A New Poetry Chapbook, " A Palace of Strangers Is No City" by Stephen Frech

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    Gloria Mindock
    Jul 12, 02:42pm

    Červená Barva Press is pleased to announce the publication of "A Palace of Strangers Is No City" by Stephen Frech.

    Stephen Frech has earned degrees from Northwestern University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Cincinnati. He has published three volumes of poetry: "Toward Evening and the Day Far Spent" (Kent State University Press) won the 1995 Wick Poetry Chapbook Contest, "If Not For These Wrinkles of Darkness" won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize, published in 2001, and "The Dark Villages of Childhood" won the 2008 Mississippi Valley Poetry Chapbook Prize. He has been the recipient of the Elliston Poetry Writing Fellowship, the Milton Center Post-Graduate Writing Fellowship, and grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and the Illinois Arts Council.

    He is founder and editor of Oneiros Press, publisher of limited edition, letterpress poetry broadsides. Oneiros broadsides have been purchased by special collections libraries around the world, among them the Newberry Library (Chicago), the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the University of Amsterdam Print Collection.

    Stephen Frech is Associate Professor of English at Millikin University.

    Stephen Frech in his sequence of prose poems called "A Palace of Strangers Is No City" gives
    us a Kafkaesque world, signaled by the very first poem that ends with the frightening uncertainty of whether an unknown “you” is having a carrousel maker’s dream, or whether the carrousel maker is having a dream of the “you.” […] There are of course many fine works that have dealt with imaginary and oppressive landscapes, but what makes Frech’s book wonderfully creepy is that the oppression is so deeply existential. […] Another prose sequence, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities comes to mind, and with Frech’s mastery of the prose poem, it’s not an exaggeration to say A Palace of Strangers Is No City ranks with that masterpiece.
    —Peter Johnson, from the Introduction
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    "A Palace of Strangers Is No City"

    ISBN: 978-0-9831041-3-1
    33 pages/ poetry
    For more information:
    www.thelostbookshelf.com



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