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

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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.
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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