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

Friday, August 26, 2016

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

Multicultural, with echoes of sounds and rhythms of the city, August 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.