Monday, August 29, 2016

Distinguished American Poet David Austell's Review of A Blizzard in My Bones: New York Poems, by Yuyutsu Sharma

A Blizzard in My Bones: New York Poems, by Yuyutsu Sharma
-a brief background and review by Dr. David Austell, Columbia University
The poetic vision of Yuyutsu Ram Dass Sharma of Kathmandu is a dream-space, a crux-point of mysterious intersections and collisions. His intellectual focal point has often been his homeland of Nepal with its profound cultural heritage and sheer natural wonder, and Nepal has been the subject of much of his powerful poetry, for example as exhibited in his majestic Annapurna Poems. It is his fascination with the pathos of culture-collision, whether in recounting an after-party in The Netherlands (Space Cake Amsterdam), or in meeting the illiterate mother of a young Gurkha who has died on a hillside battlefield in Afghanistan, that has been a hallmark of Yuyu’s poetry. It is his “literary tectonics” that most distinguish his work: the brutal shock of human and animal confrontation with the Himalayas, and the sometimes marvelous, sometimes crushing collisions that occur between peoples of differing cultures, ethnicities, castes, and countries. His literary tectonics further describe the horror of earthquake devastation, and the collapsing human depths and burgeoning heights caused by catastrophe. Never far away in Yuyu’s writing are the luminous mysteries and intimidating wildness of nature at earth’s highest altitudes in the Himalayas:
I am utterly alone,
stuck on the last mountain of the world,
And beyond me just one more mountain
where they say a deity lives
guarding a tiny turquoise lake.
And thereafter nothing but
a realm of melting snows
where the souls of the gods live.
-from "Little Paradise Lodge”
There is an exoticism overlaying Yuyu’s work that is especially captivating (and best experienced in his live readings of the poems); from a Westerner’s perspective, it may at first seem as if Hilton’s Lost Horizon had ballooned into a literary framework, and Yuyu’s verses to new revelations of Shangri-La. Don’t be fooled. There is no escapism here, since we’re immediately faced with the versed reality of the often desperate plight of his homeland, the suffering of people and animals, the sounds of Kathmandu, a city balancing on the knife-edge of ecological and political disaster.

The continuation of his poetic vision is A Blizzard in My Bones: New York Poems, Yuyu’s deeply moving new collection, and a remarkable addition to modern urban literature. The context of the poems has moved beyond Anapurna and away from Europe to that perhaps most exotic of all places, New York City. Here every collision and intersection that can be imagined occurs, often at once it seems, and it is only the mind of a poet who has become in many ways an expatriate New Yorker who might make contemporary sense of the ensuing emotional and artistic melee.
It is not any single focal point, however, or even the combination of three focal points, that make this new poetry so powerful; but rather the fact that the verse is as profoundly multicultural in its perspectives and sensibilities as the city itself. In essence, the verse is filtered through the sensibilities of a devout practitioner of Hinduism. It is Nepal and Hinduism and Brooklyn and Manhattan and Greenwich Village drawn together in a new Space Cake: Amsterdam, but centered in the concrete and steel heights of Metropolis. This is New York City in the early 21st century as measured through the psyche of a mystified expatriate priest-intellectual; and it is quite simply wonderful artistry.


Fantastic review of A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems by Karen Herceg

Top Customer Reviews

https://www.amazon.com/dp/8182500729

Verified Purchase
Yuyutsu RD Sharma’s A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems
allows us to see New York City with new eyes of wonder
as can only be done by someone who is not a native.
With great compassion, he adopts the city with all its flaws and the marvel of its history. 
Iconic images become the vehicle for personal metaphor and examination. 
He explores how readily we can lose ourselves in a city 
so imprinted with the stories of millions yet retain our own personal connections to it. 
With exquisite poetic sensibility he exhibits how so many personalities
add to the collective persona of the city itself. New York becomes an archetypal symbol
 paradigmatic of, and yet distinct from, other places on earth. 
Sharma’s verse moves us from the personal 
to the universal experience without sacrificing
the distinctive nuances of such a complex metropolis 
or a single person’s contribution within its frequently impersonal presence. 
He refines its ubiquity down to the sensibility of a village, 
underlying the great bond of similarities we all share.

Yuyutsu Sharma is a treasure as a person and as a writer. 
His poetry invites trans-cultural participation
and a human connection through its global appeal.
He is an artist who works to promote all artists
who endeavor to create at their highest potential.
Help other customers find the most helpful

Saturday, August 27, 2016

Yuyutsu Sharma's Space Cake, Amsterdam's Amazon Review by European poet, Agnes Marton


5.0 out of 5 stars A shaman “chewing Tesco’s vegpledges” on the TubeAugust 26, 2016
This review is from: Space Cake, Amsterdam & Other Poems from Europe and America (Paperback)
Yuyutsu Sharma is Mona Lisa’s hallucinatory lover, saying Namaste (‘I salute the soul of God that is within you’) (Mona Lisa Drunk). A shaman “chewing Tesco’s vegpledges” on the Tube (Miles on the Tube). A cityhopper who is not at all a tourist, who is at home everywhere, exploring urban fields through his Himalayan gaze. The master of observation, of detail, of compassion.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R1TK0PIRVS3UHT/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=8182500591&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books

Friday, August 26, 2016

A review of Yuyutsu Sharma's A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems" from Agnes Marton


5.0 out of 5 stars Multicultural, with echoes of sounds and rhythms of the cityAugust 26, 2016
This review is from: A Blizzard in My Bones New York Poems (Hardcover)
Yuyutsu Sharma’s New York poems are full of collisions and intersections, and his verse itself is also multicultural, with echoes of sounds and rhythms of the city:

“Meager, skimpy, bloodless,

punching the city’s famed roaches

my legs clanging, wheeling mantras

of angry and drunken avatars,

my breaths measuring menus

of Fast Food takeaways

like curses of the demented

on shaky subway tracks”

(The Scream, Subway Avatars)

and fractions of the everyday sightseeing of an expat:

“The day you stop taking the free

Staten Island Ferry to click a perfect shot

of the Statue of Liberty,

or stop visiting Times Square at night

and forget to find a way out of its labyrinth (…)

You are a New Yorker.”

(You are a New Yorker)

It’s glorious contemporary urban poetry where sometimes traces of pastoral elegy can be found, sometimes magic realism, sometimes the individual’s concerns of global matters, sometimes eroticism, sometimes the mythology of Sufi saints… Most often all of these together in harmony.


https://www.amazon.com/review/R2QDCTZW38FH1H/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=8182500729&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books
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Amazon Review of Quaking Cantos; Nepal Earthquake Poems by Brooklyn-based poet Patricia Carragon


5.0 out of 5 stars Nepal's Poet Writes About the Devastation of His HomelandAugust 25, 2016
This review is from: Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems (Paperback)
Yuyutsu Sharma's "Quaking Cantos" is a painful recollection of the earthquake in Nepal. When you read the lines, you feel the emotion of the poet as he goes into graphic details of the horror of death and devastation. When you read the lines, you sense that the gods were communicating with Sharma, helping him find the courage to write each word. Each poem is like a beautiful prayer. Sharma is a guru who prays for the healing of his homeland. But this is also a wake-up call for all of us. The earth is hurting and she is in pain. We need to stop the pillaging and pollution. We need to show respect for Mother Earth and her living creatives if we are to survive into the next century.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R1CM4YIK99O13N/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=8182500818&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books

Monday, August 22, 2016

A Good Reads review of Quaking Cantos and Blizzard in my Bones by Asails F

Asails F's Reviews > A Blizzard in my Bones

by 
3989689
's review
Apr 16, 2016

it was amazing
Read from March 18 to 28, 2016

I can not review A Blizzard in my Bones. I could not possibly review A Blizzard in my Bones before reading the Quaking Cantos.
The two books do not exist without the other and each left alone would be like a sailboat in irons. One a tragedy of human nature, from an intellect honed by old Asian culture; the other footed endlessly on the tripe on New York City. But both, written in a time of massive upheaval: the hurricane and earthquake.
The mighty Gurka houses ripped apart, Ganesha laughing, Buddha's denial, Nath's shrine, Samādhi sprung open, Garuda and Vishnu unleashing. The vice wide open in the market and the mass like that of Whitman's' humanity. Then all gods slammed into New York City's: fall of the trade towers, sordid New York streets with it's preyed apon homeless, the subway rider removing and reapplying her poison, and the opulent malls and coffee shops littering the streets that offer no hope or quiet reprieve.
The books, not black and white and, the cultures not ultimately different; the veranda, the same for all. Together the books slap your face in the words of two different cultures and show that we are one.
A New York City and Nepal, a land of the Indians and peopled by the same. One should not leave one book for the other. The stories continue from our earliest humanity.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1595083520?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1

Yuyu's Summit, An Amazon Review of Annapurna Poems by Robert Scotto

5.0 out of 5 stars yuyu's summitDecember 28, 2012
This review is from: Annapurna Poems (Paperback)
The summit, if you will pardon the pun, of Yuyutsu Sharma's distinguished career, Annapurna Poems both continues and expands the territory that he has uniquely claimed as his own. Writing complex poetry about an enigmatic, even exotic, world in English, he has brought Shanga-La, in its glory and its gritty reality, to the rest of the world. Not everyone will agree on a particular favorite poem, so instead let me recommend that you read them all, slowly and carefully, and enter an unfamiliar world with an eloquent, sensitive guide.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R2LDSCQBZ7B42A/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=8182500478&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books



An Amazon Customer review of Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems by Cathy Brown


5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful proseAugust 21, 2016
This review is from: A Blizzard in My Bones New York Poems (Hardcover)
Yuyutsu Sharma perfectly captures the dichotomy of being a Nepal native in New York: the strangeness, the wonder, the familiarity and feeling at home. If at all possible, catch him reading his work: it's a sublime, humbling experience.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R3MG87Z4BXQXQU/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=8182500729&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books


Amazon Customer Review of Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing imagery and emotion comes throughAugust 21, 2016
This review is from: Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems (Paperback)
Amazing imagery and emotion comes through. When I read from this book I feel like I am transported somewhere beyond my daily reality. If you haven't picked this up yet get it now. An even bigger treat is to hear Sharma rend them as they were meant to be heard. If he is reading somewhere near you please go see him. Until then fall in love with his imagery and haunting words.

https://www.amazon.com/review/RBMDVK68JMW7T/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=8182500818&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books


Monday, August 15, 2016

Recent Amazon Reviews of A Blizzard in my Bones; New York Poems

5.0 out of 5 stars A fiery poet with wanderlust in his soul, Yuyu ...May 8, 2016
By 


A fiery poet with wanderlust in his soul, Yuyu Ram Dass combines flavors of East and West,
juxtaposes the modern with antiquity with underlying motif of deep spirituality. A world traveler, his poetry
describes adventure from the lower east side of New York to Katmandu, from Amsterdam and back to
the mythical lore of the Himalayas, a language rich in words as it is in metaphor. He is a poet of our times.

5.0 out of 5 stars Poet in New YorkAugust 8, 2016


With a cosmopolitan perspective grounded in South Asian heritage, Yuyutsu Sharma brings his clear-eyed imagination and concise voice to a popular topic, New York City. Enjoy his sensuous adventures as this accomplished poet inhabits a city of his, and our, dreams.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/8182500729

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Yuyutsu Sharma to read at Cleveland's most legendary bookstore, Mac's Backs- Books on Coventry tomorrow evening


http://www.macsbacks.com/

YUYUTSU SHARMA


Yuyutsu Sharma will read at Mac's followed by an open mic on Wednesday, July 13th at 7 p.m.
Yuyutsu RD Sharma is a distinguished poet and translator. He has just published Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems, his response to the devastating 2015 Nepalase earthquake and the ensuing cultural disaster in his homeland.
He has published nine poetry collections including, Nine New York Poems: A Prelude to A Blizzard in my Bones, (2014), Milarepa’s Bones, 33 New Poems, (Nirala, New Delhi 2012), Space Cake, Amsterdam, & Other Poems from Europe and America, (2009, Indian reprint 2014) and Annapurna Poems, 2008, Reprint, 2012).
Yuyutsu also brought out a translation of Irish poet Cathal O’ Searcaigh poetry in Nepali in a bilingual collection entitled, Kathmandu: Poems, Selected and New (2006) and a translation of Hebrew poet Ronny Someck’s poetry in Nepali in a bilingual edition, Baghdad, February 1991 & Other Poems. He has translated and edited several anthologies of contemporary Nepali poetry in English and launched a literary movement, Kathya Kayakalpa (Content Metamorphosis) in Nepali poetry.

Event date: 
Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - 7:00pm to 9:00pm
Event address: 
1820 Coventry Rd.
Cleveland HeightsOH 44118

Monday, July 11, 2016

Yuyutsu Sharma: On the Last Leg of his Current Tour

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Yuyutsu Sharma is South Asia’s leading poet published by Nirala with growing International acclaim. He is currently in New York City as a visiting poet at Columbia University and had several readings in New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Florida and California. He has just returned from Argentina where he had gone to participate in XI International Poetry Festival, Buenos Aires. Half the year, he travels and reads all over the world to read from his works and conducts creative writing workshop at various universities in North America and Europe but goes trekking in the Himalayas when back home. 
Here is a list of some of his upcoming readings in New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
(Only Public readings are listed)
Quake
New York
Friday, July 8, 2016 at 7:00pm
Yuyutsu Sharma Reading with Ruth Danon and David Austell to read at Open Center New York to benefit victims of the Nepal Earthquake at New York Open Center
22 East 30th Street, New York, NY 10016 Phone (212) 219-2527
http://www.opencenter.org/

Pennsylvania and Ohio
Sunday, July 10, 2016, 6;30
Sunday Special with Yuyutsu Sharma  and David Austell  at Poets’ Hall- 16 W 10th Meeting Room 210, Erie, Pennsylvania 16507 Hosted by Cee Williams
Bliaard frontMonday July 11, 2016, 7 pm,
Yuyutsu Sharma to read with David Austell at Barberton Gallery of Fine Art
33 3rd St SE, # 103 Barberton, Akron, Ohio, (330) 328-7619, admission free, donations encouraged. Hosted by Thomas Jenney
Wednesday July 13, 2016, 7.00 to 9.00 pm
Yuyutsu Sharma with Elizabeth Onusko and David Austell at Mac’s Backs– Books on the Coventry, 1820 Coventry Rd, Cleveland Heights, OH 44118 Phone: (216) 321-2665
http://www.macsbacks.com/
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Friday, June 24, 2016

Yuyutsu Sharma with Arturo Mantecón at Sacramento Poetry Center

Yuyutsu Sharma with Arturo Mantecón at Sacramento Poetry Center||| Mon, June 27 @ 7:30 pm ||| 1719 25th St

Yuyutsu  Sharma and Arturo Mantecón
      Monday, June 27 @ 7:30 pm
Sacramento Poetry Center, 1719 25th Street
Host: Wendy Williams
Yuyutsu Sharma is the recipient of fellowships and grants from TheRockefeller Foundation, the Ireland Literature Exchange, the TrubarFoundation, Slovenia, among others, and is a distinguished poet and translator. He has published nine poetry collections including, A Blizzard inmy Bones: New York Poems (Nirala, 2016), Quaking Cantos: NepalEarthquake Poems (Nirala, 2016), and Milarepa’s Bones and 33 NewPoems (Nirala, 2012).
Arturo Mantecón is a poet and translator born in Laredo, Texas andraised in Detroit, Michigan. His poetry has appeared in La Ventana Abierta, Poetry Now and various anthologies. A collection of his short stories, Memories, Cuentos Verídicos, y Otras Outright Lies, was published by En Casa in 2014. He has translated the poetry and prose of the mad Spanish poeta maldito, Leopoldo María Panero. He is currently translating the work of Francisco Ferrer Lerín.
Poem by Yuyutsu SharmaI see my world shaking…
I see my world shaking—
my floor, my bed, my table, my house
my pen stumbling across the soggy span of my page
the stanzas splintered from the kicks of a demon
awake after a sleep of million years…
I see my squares mangled from the litter of a wheezing earth
I see top of our towers crumble and topple onto the dried up riverbeds
I see rickety bridges shudder, waters undulating in the turquoise lakes
on the lofty Himalayan heights, a bowl of milk held in the hands of a fearful grandma.
I see dagger of snow crashing onto the mule paths,
salt routes threading through rocky terrains clogged,
the sheets of snow stained from mammoth avalanches
the pinnacles of snow thrust from the earth’s heart tumble
and disappear in a fraction of a second in God’s colossal mouth…
I see domes of our stupas crack,
five colored flags fluttering before Buddha’s  own eyes bend and break,
oil lamps lit by Yeti’s hollowed skull dim out
in the sunken canyons of the monks’ wailing eyes…
I see famished angels coming out of snow-clad sanctuaries
like the saffron flames fleeing their kingdoms in exile
I see them come out and lean against the mossy fences
on the threshold of great canyons to ponder over the loss of  lives
uttering prayers as the earth cracks open and engulfs
their settlements in front of their own bemused eyes…
I see shrines of our deities shake,
the Lord’s own body cracked into two lifeless boulders,
his mace, his scepter, his lotus,
his conch shell, his brass bowls of nectar,
his splintered quiver full of blunt arrows…
AND WHO WILL BOTHER
by Arturo Mantecón
how tell one from another
another from one
without killing the one
without fating the other
without forking the paths
of the homeward lamb
and the sinful goat
without splintering
the sharp arcs
of the crow
into irrational numbers
it is the mayhem of the word
burning drowning
the soluble body
of the sugar and the salt
the high silk hat
wherein the rabbit disappears
over and over again
to emerge from a sleeve
as a starting bouquet of doves
over and over again
it is to loom the sierpinski carpet
until it lifts up and grazes
the crescent moons
of the inescapable
minarets of baghdad
it is to sweep the dust
of gentile cantors
through those dream
alleys of the souqs
that loll and curl
like ribbons of flesh
like acute angles of smoke
it is to present oneself weeping
and as cock naked
as the humbled jesus
to the cruel gasping laughter
of the stars
    Coming Events:  SPC and Elsewhere
       Events take place at the Sacramento Poetry Center
7:30 PM (unless otherwise noted)
Poetry Center Gallery June: “Comrades in the heart”
by local artists Susan Kelly-DeWitt and Helen Plenert
June 26, SPC and SMAC present:  An evening with Dana Gioia at the Crocker Art Museum, 6:00 PM.
July 1, Host Nancy Aidé González: Mosaic of Voices with Yuyutsu Sharma and Andy Jones at the Avid Reader, Sacramento, 7 pm
July 2, Host Penny Kline:  ASIAN DIASPORA with Yuyutsu Sharma, Rhony Bhopla, Heera Kulkarni, Meera Klein and Jasmeen Kaur Bassi, 2:00 pm
July 11, Host Emmanuel Sigauke:  Monika Rose and Sarah Pape
July 16, Host Phillip Larrea: Sacramento Voices with Susan Kelly- DeWitt, Nancy Aidé González and Mary Mackey, 4:30 pm
July 18, Host Bethanie Humphreys: Hot Poetry in the Park, Fremont Park, 7 pm
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Sacramento Poetry Center
1719 25th Street, Sacramento, CA 95816 | Phone: 916 240 1897