within our somehows

within our somehows by Shloka Shankar marks Yavanika Press' eighty-ninth title and the poet's second full-length collection, featuring 50 Japanese short-forms, interspersed with collages. For international orders, please click here.
 
“Shloka Shankar’s new collection of micropoetry offers a kind of hope—not the pompommed optimism of a cheerleader, but the quiet gleam of small epiphanies. What might conventionally be seen as an ending or demise becomes, in Shankar’s hands, momentous: falling light turns into ‘chloral dark white lilies’ or ‘goldfinch brightness.’ She sees a sunset as a ‘volta,’ and death as ‘anaphora.’ However dark the brooding horizon may loom, she assures us that ‘this storm petrel too shall pass.’ This comes from a poet who has discovered that any transformation worth its salt happens only by weathering the squall.”
 
— Joseph Salvatore Aversano, Editor of Half Day Moon Journal
 
“In this collection, Shloka Shankar does something that is increasingly hard to do: say more with less. Some of these short poems may exist in the same world. Most of them are worlds unto themselves or glimpses. These are fragments shored against the ruins of the future; somehow, the future still looks good.”
 
— Seth Copeland, Editor of petrichor – an archive of text image