Yavanika Press
CATALOGUE - 2019
Mini chapbooks
In 2019, we sold our mini-chaps as limited-edition, perfectly hand-bound books. In case you missed out, we're now offering the same titles as digital downloads! Write to us at yavanikapress@gmail.com and we will send you your copy. :)
blarney stoned
“lars palm is the master of the short poem kicked into high register as his vision roller skates across a linguistic landscape that begin and end with '& talking & talking & talking some/more.' palm’s blarney is not just stoned with wild visions but is kissed by song lyrics, and a hurt caused by a global society that is in need of some serious emergency surgery to save itself from its own excesses of injustice and horror. But rather than writing a collection of sober proscriptions to cure what ails us, the poet crafts poems of humor residing inside the pain. blarney stoned is striated with a fair share more than 'a bit about the anatomy of/nonsense.' We can’t ask for more to help us live in these mad times.”
— Richard Lopez, Poet
Systems Askew
Robin Anna Smith is the founding and chief editor for Human/Kind Journal & Press, and Associate Editor at Sonic Boom and Yavanika Press. They are more of a cats, dogs, and unicorns person than a people person.
Website: www.metagrix.com
Systems Askew is a collection of 10 haiku with accompanying original, mixed-media artwork by Robin Anna Smith and Shloka Shankar. This mini-chapbook explores the intersection of humanity and the systems we encounter, focusing on the harmony and discord that occur at these junctures.
the sky, taken away
Tim Gardiner is a children’s author, ecologist, editor, and poet from Manningtree in Essex, UK. His haiku have been published in Frogpond, Modern Haiku, and The Heron’s Nest. His first collection of haiku, On the Edge, was published in 2017, followed by The Flintknapper’s Ghost in 2018 (Alba Publishing).
the sky, taken away is a collection comprising 10 haiku inspired by the poet's trips to Japan, with original artwork by Shloka Shankar. Rooted in haikai aesthetics, these poems are refreshingly experimental. This mini-chapbook is sure to deeply resonate with readers, leaving them with their own pieces of sky etched from words.
radical artifice
Michael O’Brien is the author of As Adam (UP Literature), Big Nothing (Bones), the anabasis of man (Yavanika Press), and other poetry chapbooks. His work has been published widely in print and online, and also translated into other languages. He is the curator of weird laburnum. You can follow him on Twitter at @michaelobrien22.
radical artifice is a collection of 10 haiku with accompanying original, Rothko-esque artwork by Shloka Shankar. In this mini-chapbook, Michael continues his exploration of the complex and difficult relationship that is man's place in the world through surrealism, hyperrealism, and abstraction, affording the reader a glimpse at once to the world at hand and the one beyond cognition.
Mixed-genre
Amnesiacs of Summer
“This is a ‘pay it forward’ collection, where we can balance our own songs of remembrance alongside those acts of forgetting. Read it, devour it, dream it, and don’t lend it out!"
– Alan Summers, Co-founder of Call of the Page
Contact us at yavanikapress@gmail.com to order your copy TODAY! Price: $15 (inclusive of shipping)
VOS: Voyage Out Sonnets
“Erik Fuhrer has a distinctive ability to cull wonder, humor, ache, in a single line. Each sonnet takes us on a journey not only through the imagery and action but through the texture and rhythm that mirror the motion of water, connecting the original text and Fuhrer’s alchemical parallel world. Free of human entanglement, inanimate objects, creatures, time itself gains agency. Reality becomes fragmentary, bodies function only in parts. Yet, instead of devolving into chaos, an order surges. Surprising, searing, playful, heartbreaking—this is a realm you’ll want to continue to discover forever, ‘drawing love from hollows of days.’”
— Susanna Velarde Covarrubias
Contact us at yavanikapress@gmail.com to order your copy TODAY! Price: $12 (inclusive of shipping)
Japanese short-forms
as is
"Turning up bits of grammar, parts of speech, sharp-edged stones marking lost boundaries and structures, the ruins of an ancient city, Elmedin Kadric, ever the careful archaeologist, brushes away any and all dust concealing the poem. I’m amazed at what he discovers in us."
— John Martone, Editor of Otata
road to utopia
“When words are danger, words are knowledge, words are soothing and elusive murmurings, this deeply provoking collection of short poems will move you in a time of need. Where some roads are paved with dinosaurs, golden text will survive, and where there may be bare bulb words swinging, scratched, warped, or coffee-stained, sometimes, we can enter a secret garden as a welcome refuge. Join the figures huddled around a fire and enter the lore of words that abound in this collection.”
— Alan Summers, co-founder, Call of the Page
Art Is the Answer
Tim Murphy is an Irish writer living in Spain. He is the author of The Cacti Do Not Move (SurVision Books, 2019), a chapbook of surrealist poetry. He is also the author of Rethinking the War on Drugs in Ireland (Cork University Press, 1996) and the co-author, with Garrett Barden, of Law and Justice in Community (Oxford University Press, 2010).
standing room only
“The best poetry, as exemplified in the work of Pat Nelson, speaks to the heart of things, chronicling our archetypal journey from birth to death, before and beyond. As a haiku/short form poet extraordinaire, Nelson not only excels at answering the questions this approach conjures but also succinctly and lyrically reshapes the very questions themselves. Simply put, Pat Nelson’s poetry is an essential experience for poetry readers in general, and haiku lovers in particular.”
— Don Wentworth, Editor of Lilliput Review
says the rose
Tiffany Shaw-Diaz is a poet and visual artist who resides in Centerville, Ohio. You can learn more about her via: www.tiffanyshawdiaz.com.
Poetry
A Charity of Blue
“I find myself holding my breath so as not to disrupt the hushed holy in Robert J. Wilson’s poems. They are tightly woven around the natural world, exposing us to our longing, to our grief, to the most human parts of ourselves. This collection blooms mighty, brings heavy observation—each poem conjures up an Amen. I could have kept reading these over and over all day long. Kudos to an amazing collection that breaks me apart.”
— Erica Anderson-Senter
I Am the Dancing
“Whether listening to Tchaikovsky penetrate the Bombay night sky, or biting mangoes so real on the page that we taste their succulent meats, Mani G. Iyer transports his readers into his accomplished debut collection, I Am the Dancing. And like Tchaikovsky’s compositions, these beautifully rendered poems range from the blithely energetic to the breathtakingly tragic. This is a memorable book that speaks beautifully to what makes us all human.”
— Eileen Cleary, Author of Child Ward of the Commonwealth
Almost Famous
“Trish Hopkinson’s fourth chapbook brims with evocative imagery. ‘My memories have taste buds…Every moment has a different palate and lingers on my teeth,’ Hopkinson writes. Her poignant and personal poems draw the reader into a vividly rendered childhood. Set in a sometimes nomadic home-life where doors are ‘thin enough for a fist’ and ‘the kitchen wears its linoleum like a polyester suit,’ uncertainty, danger, and death seem constantly close at hand. These emotionally rich poems reveal the life of a young woman coming into her own, from an unsettling birth to traumatic teen years. In Almost Famous, Hopkinson gifts us with poem after poem that boldly speaks its truth.”
— Nancy Chen Long, Author of Light into Bodies
A Non-Grecian Non-Urn
David Capps received his PhD in philosophy from University of Connecticut and an MFA in poetry from Southern Connecticut State University. Recently his poems have been featured in Peacock Journal, Mantra Review, and Cagibi, among others. He lives in New Haven, CT with his luxurious Maine Coon.
Short Prose
turn, climb, realign
“turn, climb, realign is a journey into the inscrutable connectivity between language and consciousness (which creates which?), a connectivity that is often and unavoidably expressed in images bordering on the surreal. Samar Ghose has taken haibun/gembun to a new level with his sequences creating (if not a new form then an innovative and brilliant use of what is already there: the ultra short haibun) dense and intriguing worlds where the reader glimpses at pieces, fragments, overhears voices in conversation from the next room through a thin wall, often catching fluttering phrases that the mind cannot help but try to complete in an attempt, as it were, to fill out what’s missing. This chapbook is exemplary in its economy of words and a book that despite its brevity has just the right size for each sequence to make an impact.”
— Johannes S. H. Bjerg, Writer & Editor
The Alter Ego Handbook
"Adrian S. Potter’s The Alter Ego Handbook is full of wonderfully wrought contradictions and conflicts, a prose feast of a dialectic in an attempt to answer why 'villains seem more compelling than heroes.' And it is in this imperfect union (never becoming a true balance) that we come to appreciate caution, rationality, and even denial, as well as the 'poor decisions…the fumbling over details, the clutching onto wrong things.' Phil Openshaw’s photos of double images perfectly complement this stunning collection of the self and its love-hate relationship, with its sometimes destructive shadow side.”
— Kyle Hemmings, Writer & Photographer
No Velcro Here
“Don’t let the brevity and humor of Peter Jastermsky’s haibun mislead you. Below that is a layer of experience we can all too readily identify with. And underpinning it all is a sense of wonder—or at least a sense of amused surprise. In fact, the prose can sometimes be so diverting that it’s easy to miss how spot on the haiku and senryu are. There may be “no Velcro here,” but these haibun will stick with you for some time to come.”
— Bob Lucky, Editor of Contemporary Haibun Online