Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Announcing Final List of The Poets of Eternal Snow

Eternal Snow: A Worldwide Anthology of  One Hundred Twenty FivePoetic Intersections with Himalayan Poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma
 Edited by David Austell & Kathleen D Gallagher
ISBN : 81-8250-0915 2017 Paperback pp 309 plus  24 Photo pages

John Clarke
Tracie Morell
Lori Ann Kusterbeck
David Ray
James Ragan
Ravi Shankar
Eileen O’Connor
Gorka Lasa
Elena Karina Byrne
Pascale Petit
Chuck Joy
Lorraine Conlin
Paul Nash &
Denise La Neve
Andrew Taylor
Amarendra Khatua
Meera Ekkanath Klein
Eskimo Pie
Christi Shannon Kline
Revigya Joshi
Kathleen D Gallagher
David Austell
Maria Heath Beckett
Renay Sanders
Shawn Aveningo
Juan Carlos Abril
Tim Kahl
Dom Kafley
Judy Ray
Tera Vale Regan
Diane Frank
Lady K (Kathy Smith)
Karen Corinne Herceg
Kate Lamberg
Penny Kline
Sharon Metzler-Dow
M. L. Williams
Robert Scotto
Nicole Barriere
Anne Fritz
Ruth Danon
Tim Tomlinson
Mary E. Weems
Roopa Ramamoorthi
Dan Szczesny
Nancy Aidé Gonzalez
Nancy R Lange
Michael Graves
Eugene Hyon
Marcus Bales
Peter V. Dugan
Aixia de Villanova
Leah Taylor
Cristina Querrer
Bari Falese
Agnes Marton
Patricia Carragon
Dd. Spungin
Verónica Aranda
Samantha Bear
Darlene Costello
Mindy Kronenberg
David Axlerod
Tony Barnstone
Russ Green
Alessandra Francesca
Nabina Das
Ronnie Norpel
Eddie Woods
Kim Nuzzo
Chiff Fyman
Barun Bajracharya
Shreejana Bhandari
Charles Peter Watson
Christopher Wheeling
Merik van der Torren
Art Good Times
Robin Mets
Erica Mapp
Bill Wolak
Roxanne Hoffman
Civa Bhusal
James Romano
D. B. Meltzer 
Cee Williams
Bidur Prasad Chaulagain
Vicki Iorio
Barbara Novack
Mary Ryan Garcia
Theresa Göttl Brightman
Steve Brightman
Jack Tar
Kymberly Avinasha Brown
Catherine Gigante-Brown
Marion Palm
Hélène Cardona
André Baum
Phillip Giambri
Devin Wayne Davis
Alex Symington
Rajesh Siddharth
Marisa Moks-Unger
Lorraine  Bouchard
Don Carroll
Anthony Murphy
Timothy Gager
John J. Trause
Jack Locke
Anuj Ghimire
Elaine Karas-Shadle
Irene O’ Garden
Allegra Jostad Silberstein
Gaurav Bhattarai
Su Polo
Ernie Burns
Roger McClain
Ken Ruan
Jen Pezzo
Marcus Calvert
Thomas Jenney
Judi Chabola
Bishwa  Sigdel
Carolyn Wells
Arun Budhathoki
Carol Hebald
Melissa Hobbs
Jan Garden Castro
Swati Sharma






Sunday, May 14, 2017

World Literature Today, May issue, on Yuyutsu Sharma's Quaking Cantos


Author: 
The cover to Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems by Yuyutsu SharmaNew Delhi. Nirala. 2016. 81 pages.
On what seemed like an ordinary day in 2015, a series of rumbles jostled the Nepali region, killing thousands and thrusting countless more into homelessness. An encounter with this disorientating rift produced Quaking Cantos, a visual and verbal response to the wreckage that emerged when planet ground against earth. Much like the title itself, Quaking Cantos—either an epic poem or a quavering song, depending on orientation—is a stunningly heart-wrenching, albeit healing, rendezvous with torment of the highest order. In this compilation, photography by Prasant Shrestha joins the verse of Himalayan poet Yuyutsu Sharma to produce a slim rejoinder to an otherwise blind and mute confrontation with chaos.
Sleek and glossy images smolder from behind the eyes and intersperse this rubblelike arrangement of verse, the cover of which prominently demands an immediate reckoning with unexpected tumult. Bricks, dust, and the unrecognizable remains of a once-normal life confront the reader before the title page to part 1, “I generally do not cry . . .” and once again in the middle of part 2, “Seven Things That Caused the Quakes.” (The title page to part 1 likewise locates itself before the table of contents, another disjunction.) Two etchings of the writer’s face directly follow the epilogue, “A Song of Extinguished Hearths,” and portray the writer with eyes shut and, later, wide open.
With eyes wide shut, emotions tremor from page to page throughout two parts and their summation. Somnolent images of an ancestral grandmother shuffle from one world to the next, leaving Sharma, as it were, to mull over the collective remains of grief under a vast dome of sky. Paradox meets fate when, in an initial poem entitled “Twisted Galaxies,” Sharma soulfully pens: “My bed shakes / as I prepare to reclaim / fractured / fragments of my sleep.”
Like many collections of verse, Quaking Cantos ends in epilogue. What is different is that the grandmother, once again, instructs the scribe to sing, as he recalls, “A song of livid flames / rising out of clay hearths / in makeshift shacks / along the mule paths.” A spiritual quest in search of explanation journeys through a cacophony of images yet ends under the flames of the unknown of what was once possessed but has been lost. Transient and reflective, Quaking Cantos distills loss into revelation as only a shaman and photographer can envisage.
Andrea Dawn Bryant
Georgetown University