“Rochelle has the haibuneer’s gift of vivid succinctness: ‘Manojji is a curious man. His eyes and ears are always shifting.’ The author could be describing herself, who and what she is—her senses alive, feeding on each other, wanting nothing more than to capture our world in the honey-trap of words, a world that is slipping away from us: autumn whirlwind . . . / a child grabs at her / candy floss.” Gabriel Rosenstock

“There is something very unique about Paper Asylum that continues to draw you in. . . . Some of the haiku in this collection would be standouts on their own, but when combined with her fine-toned prose they just sing the haibun form. . . . A wonderful read indeed!” Michael Rehling

“Rochelle Potkar is the ideal travel companion—adaptive, incisive, witty—and in Paper Asylum she invites us to pay closer attention to our surroundings, with delightful results.” Christopher Merrill

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Author of The Arithmetic of Breasts and Other Stories and Four Degrees of Separation, Rochelle Potkar is the alumna of Iowa’s International Writing Program (2015) and the Charles Wallace writer’s fellowship, University of Stirling (2017). Her prose has been performed on stages in Iowa and Portland, Maine. She was the winner of the 2016 Open Road Review short story contest for ‘The Leaves of the Deodar’. Her poem ‘Cellular: P.O.W.’ was shortlisted for the 2017 Hungry Hill competition, Ireland, and ‘Ground Up’ won third place at the David Burland Poetry Prize, 2017. Her story ‘Chit Mahal (The Enclave)’ appears in The Best of Asian Short Stories. Her poem ‘The Girl from Lal Bazaar’ was shortlisted for the Gregory O’ Donoghue International Poetry Prize, 2018. She is editor of the Goan-Irish anthology Goa: A Garland of Poems, with Gabriel Rosenstock. Her poem ‘Skirt’ has been made into a poetry film by Philippa Cousins for the Visible Poetry Project, 2018. https://rochellepotkar.com