Yavanika Press
CATALOGUE - 2018
CATALOGUE - 2018
Poetry and Japanese short-forms
Poetry and Japanese short-forms
the arithmetic of sparrows
The Best of Paper Lanterns (vol. 1) anthology comprises the top 100 haikai forms published in the tri-annual journal Sonic Boom, during the years 2014 to 2017. 57 poets from over a dozen countries lend their voices to the ongoing exploration of all that contemporary English language haiku and its allied genres have to offer.
Deer Heart
“The author’s question is 'what is holy?' When the title poem reminds me of an old tradition, around a hunter’s first deer, I know this collection will go deep. Hunters remove the heart from a still warm animal, and take a bite. Toft does so with his own deeply poignant and mysteriously mythical poetry. It’s where owls meet each other inside him and a woman braids moonlight into him, or certainly suggests it. I’ve been woven into poems and added to their body count at dusk. Toft travels a wilderness, from adding warmth to shadows with his blood, and wrestling with rainbows, as daylight wreaks havoc. Has he answered the question? Can any of us? Deer Heart holds clues.”
– Alan Summers, Co-founder of Call of the Page & President of United Haiku and Tanka Society
the anabasis of man
“Finding the eternal in the quotidian, in everyday life and its happenings, is one piece of advice that is often given to writers of haiku. With Michael O’Brien’s new collection of parallel haiku, you could say, 'find the surreal in the real, the fantastic in the ordinary' – what our minds do all the time but which we tend not listen to. O’Brien has added his own voice to the parallel haiku construct and fully exploits the possibilities of making two poems birth a third in the reader’s mind.”
– Johannes S. H. Bjerg, Editor & Creator of Parallel haiku
counting star-bones
Alegria Imperial learned of haiku from submitting pieces to an editor, who dutifully sent them back. Wondering years after finishing a Bachelor’s degree in literature in the Philippines, why she hadn’t encountered haiku, she furiously studied it; she began with a book of Basho that she found in the alcove of a library. How alien it was from the Continental and American literature into which she was steeped in school. She continued to work on her craft and, today, Alegria’s haiku and other forms of Japanese short-form poetry have since been published and have gone on to win awards.
Fiddle in the Floorboards
“One core aspect of haiku/senryu is that they trade on a collaboration with the reader. In that aspect, the best of them have an improvisational theme that is core. In this collection, Ben Moeller-Gaa has penned his work in a way that reminds me of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, or Muddy Waters. I was led immediately to humming my own tune to these fine poems, and subsequent readings took me in other unexpected directions. The fact that I felt like a participant in the pace and tone of the poems renders this collection FIVE STARS from me. A fun read and a great way to add smiles to your day.”
– Michael Rehling, Editor of Failed Haiku
Kenneth Pobo had a book of ekphrastic poems published in 2017 by Circling Rivers called Loplop in a Red City. Forthcoming from Clare Songbirds Publishing House is a book of his prose poems called The Antlantis Hit Parade. His work has appeared in: Hawaii Review, Mudfish, Nimrod, Indiana Review, Caesura, and elsewhere.
Threads
Children Imitating Cormorants
“Declare your allegiance to the republic of wind” might be the manifesto for this formally playful chapbook of poems. As in the title’s double indebtedness to the Japanese haiku poet Issa and to the American poet-translator Robert Hass, Alessandrini’s poems are as much in conversation with other poems as they are with the world, adroitly trying on such forms as the ghazal, pecha kucha, and golden shovel, and ending with the tongue-in-cheek poem, A Note on the Type. A delightful debut.”
— Sharon Dolin, author of Manual for Living and Whirlwind
Scars Are Memories Bleeding Through
Scars Are Memories Bleeding Through is a poetic offering of 'things that come without warning,' of mental poltergeists and omens of frenetic negative feelings fused with desires for softness and love and light and fire, so the red energy does not turn black and rot away forever. Ghostly glitches grow into episodes of inward delirium that writhe into inward malignancies, that shiver and shudder on and off, and are camera shuttered into poem lines. These poems capture challenging moments, thoughts, imagery of a body and mind feeling damaged like darkly beautiful dying animals in a morbid circus act that turns 'the eternal negative' into 'spitting sparks.'
— Juliet Cook, poet and Editor of Thirteen Myna Birds and Blood Pudding Press
Your Diabetes: a life’s sentence
Sue Butler is a copywriter specializing in health, especially diets and how to maintain a healthy weight, which is essential for the prevention and management of diabetes. She is Poetry Editor for Writer’s Forum magazine and is available to teach creativewriting courses, workshops, and conference or festival seminars internationally. She currently lives on the East coast of England but recently spent time writing in Korea and India (and is keen to return).
Mixed-genre
Only Whispers
Renata Solimini has been passionate about painting and drawing since her childhood. She studied the basics of traditional painting and calligraphy, with masters Yang Haocheng and Zhou Yufeng, at the Nanjing Normal University in China. During 1992-93, Renata started creating her first paintings that were inspired by ancient Chinese pictograms. Her thesis focused on ancient writings, including Chinese, Egyptian Over the past few years, besides hieroglyphic inspiration abstract artworks and asemic writing, her interest has been mainly focused on the Eye, the theme of the Fish and the Sea World (as ancient symbols of the origin of life), and the Woman. Her choices of media, often in association, are acrylics, oils, tempera, inks, markers, and collage on canvas, cardboard, and paper. Renata also enjoys exchanging Mail Art and participating in mail art shows all over the world. She has exhibited her paintings in Italy, China, Russia, and in the United States.
Eyesemics by Renata Solimini
Renata Solimini has been passionate about painting and drawing since her childhood. She studied the basics of traditional painting and calligraphy, with masters Yang Haocheng and Zhou Yufeng, at the Nanjing Normal University in China. During 1992-93, Renata started creating her first paintings that were inspired by ancient Chinese pictograms. Her thesis focused on ancient writings, including Chinese, Egyptian hieroglyphic, and Sumerian cuneiform. These studies significantly influenced Renata’s artistic inspiration.
Over the past few years, besides abstract artworks and asemic writing, her interest has been mainly focused on the Eye, the theme of the Fish and the Sea World (as ancient symbols of the origin of life), and the Woman. Her choices of media include acrylics, oils, tempera, inks, markers, and collage on canvas, cardboard, and paper. Renata also enjoys exchanging Mail Art and participating in mail art shows all over the world. She has exhibited her paintings in Italy, China, Russia, and in the United States. Website: https://renatasolimini.blogspot.com
Thirteen
Poornima Laxmeshwar resides in the garden city Bangalore and works as a copywriter for a living. She can be reached at poorni.mathad@gmail.com.