yavanikapress

<p>A bouquet of contemporary voices in a wide variety of styles ranging from micro poetry to Japanese short-forms to free verse to prose poetry and vignettes. Explore our dozen winning titles from this year's chapbook contest!&nbsp;</p>

“In Only Connect, Pamela Hobart Carter deconstructs semiotic imageries of London during the COVID-19 pandemic and connects those fragments, with guarded passion, to her experience in Seattle. Her heart-wrenching poems appear inspired by the strange mimesis reflected in the photography of the talented artist, Robert M. L. Raynard. This collection represents extraordinary connectivity over the digital cloud and captures hope, despair, loneliness, solitude, and melancholia. Images, allusions, allegory, and science mingle, like mythical ivy, with magical propensity in her mesmerizing poems.” — Dr Mostofa Sarwar, Professor emeritus, University of New Orleans

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Only Connect by Pamela Hobart Carter & Robert M L Raynard

“In Newsers, Terri Witek challenges conventional ideas of language and form, and in doing so makes the familiar become strange. Through vivid landscapes enriched with both images and emotion, readers find themselves in a world of disconnection and sorrow. Despite these dark moments, Terri creates hope by calling readers to rethink old assumptions, declaring ‘a hole replete? a gender reveal?’ This mini chapbook is not only masterfully crafted but it also reflects on contemporary society while offering a promising future.” — Dona Mayoora

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Newsers by Terri Witek

“Amanda Trout’s Still Life invites readers to kneel at the altar of the overlooked and encourages us to pay homage to the fragility of existence. The language is tender and visceral, transporting readers to sun-baked sidewalks, serene backyards, and even the echoes of childhood. Each word sings the fate of the unsung—goldish, cicadas, betta fish, flowers—and reveals the harrowing fate they endure when they are thought to be insignificant—or when they are not thought of at all. In a stunning display of poetic prowess, this collection holds a microphone to the tiniest of voices, paying tribute to the parts of the world we so often take for granted.” — Ashley Vogel

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Still Life by Amanda Trout

“Black Mountain Haiku sets a new standard for excellence in the realm of concrete poetry. This small collection by Lev Hart accomplishes the difficult task of balancing poetic content and form in a way that feels natural and effortless, proving that sometimes the best things come in small packages.” — Bryan Rickert, Editor of Failed Haiku

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Black Mountain Haiku by Lev Hart

“These short, luminous poems offer the world on a thumbnail, beauty crystalized into the essential. A sparkle of joy. A punch to the heart. A shot of hope. An echo of loss. A secret nod to love. Evocative and engaging, Shutt’s voice is original and inventive. animal magnetism explores the idea of what we see and what we manage to ignore, eavesdrops on people who understand each other and others who don’t. Reading this collection might be the work of a moment, but the phrases and feelings will remain with you for a long time.” — Laurie Horowitz

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animal magnetism by Buffy Shutt

“The dimes of light collection by John Pappas contains solitaria linea. This reminds me of William Wordsworth’s famous ballad ‘The Solitary Reaper,’ where we stumble to understand melancholic beauty, except it remains long after the last notes of its music fades away. Aren’t we all, as poets, looking for a profound exploration of humanity amongst the liminal? Through intent, we as readers will travel tense imagery, emotional resonance, and attempted unity. From ‘feeling leafless,’ that uneasy link with greater nature, and our ‘anxiety of alphabets,’ we clumsily fumble ‘deep in eeldark’ seeking out our ‘plainsong of wetware.’ Do we ever fully succeed?” — Alan Summers, Editor of The Pan Haiku Review & Founder of Call of the Page

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dimes of light by John Pappas

“Vidya Premkumar’s deeply felt and richly textured poems in frame story take us on a journey with bold honesty, and sometimes humor. She weaves an exquisite praise song to her family out of memory. What’s more, these poems act as a genealogy, the plat and lotus of the heart—over time and ancestral devotion. Sensory details connect us to moments of time and place. Often playing with structure, she writes, ‘monsoon pattern shift :: we move to a new land.’ Readers will be moved by her depth of caring, noticing, and talent.” — Norma Bradley, Touchstone Award Winner 2023 & Author of while the lily blooms

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frame story by Vidya Premkumar

“In this chapbook, Evgeniya Dineva explores perennial poetic themes with an adept hand. At the center of these poems is a yearning to revisit, to reinhabit, to relive moments of failed intimacy with family, with lovers, with society, with nature. Dineva’s speakers remind us always that a lack of intimacy is a certain flavor of pain, but that intimacy rebuffed or misdirected is a distinct and equal trauma. The poet requires that we question why our successful intimacies fade into memory and become nostalgia, but our failed attempts haunt and become, in so many ways, our most treasured and cloistered obsessions.” — Charles Fleming, AEIC of Passengers Journal

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This Is Not Why You Call Your Friends in the Middle of the Night by Evgeniya Dineva

“Poised between enclosures and the outdoors, Uma Gowrishankar’s finely wrought poems inhabit the threshold ‘touching the space inside the shell’ of interiority. Figures of saints, monks, and ancestors are imbued with ambivalent mystery, while that of a young tonsured widow haunts her subtly charged poetic sensorium...” — Aishwarya Iyer, Author of The Grasp of Things 

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The Principle of a Clearing Nut Tree by Uma Gowrishankar

“Elizabeth Paul’s Blue Lovers both responds to art and is artful as it spins out the story of a long relationship. Composed in concert with the carnival of Chagall’s imagination and the author’s own, the book is playful, elastic, and surreal, steeped in blues and pinks, in goats, birds, fish, and acrobats, in newness and maturity, in time and non-time, in what things are and what they are not, in dreams and in waking—not from a dream, but from unexamined reality in order to explore deeper facets of realness. Mostly, love lives here, ardent, searching, celebratory—a love that holds ‘a heart in the hand, a tractor-beam animal loyalty.’ These lyric missives assert that ‘We have always been at each other’s windows,’ and we, as readers, are lucky to share these views.” — Rebecca Hart Olander, Author of Uncertain Acrobats



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Blue Lovers by Elizabeth Paul

“Kunal Mithrill’s stories in In Through the Out Door about his growing up years in his school and hostel, which he aptly describes as a ‘dream school,’ transported me back to long-lost time. Using a conversational narrative style, his description of everyday incidents and the characters he grew up with brought a smile to my face. In many ways, the stories lessen the sting of being an adult and reminds you of the many possibilities of love and learning we were once capable of.” — Anthony Soni, Script writer and Author

CATALOGUE 2024 (India)