Tuesday, September 13, 2016
Sunday, September 11, 2016
Distinguished Nepalese literary columnist, Raj Kumar Baniya on Yuyutsu Sharma's travels in leading Nepali language weekly magazine, "Nepal"
Distinguished Nepalese literary columnist, Raj Kumar Baniya on Yuyutus Sharma's travels in leading Nepali language weekly magazine, "Nepal"
http://nepal.ekantipur.com/Saturday, September 10, 2016
Refreshing Amazon review of Quaking Cantos: Nepal by American Poet Doreen Deutsch Spungin
Quaking Cantos,
This review is from: Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems (Paperback)
Yuyutsu Sharma ’s Quaking Cantos leaves me in awe. How is the poet able to get so deeply inside this horrific natural disaster and make it become the reader’s personal experience? How is he able to write with tenderness and beauty, as well as with anguish and sadness, painting with his own inimitable brush of words and observations what certainly was tearing at his own heart.?
Sharma writes of the destruction as he describes what he has seen-- “A lamb Tethered to an electric pole…” from Quake Relief, a poem in which the word, ‘tug’ is used often. And tug is what it does to this reader’s heart. The simple lamb becomes symbolic, its need for survival after the quake representing all of Nepal. And in Seven Things that Caused the Quakes, Sharma touches on traditional beliefs and superstitions and takes us to the 21st century’s newest gods: “the earth changed side in her sleep…” “But they did not listen lost as they were in their virtual worlds, iPads, iPhone Facebook, Twitter. They killed it and they threw it in the Sunkosi river…” “From its insulted eyes it shot a curse, bringing the mountains upside down…” And from the Epilogue, 3, we return to the animal world, “a dead horse being pulled uphill by a muscular mountain man.” And in 8, from the Epilogue, this stunning question: “On whose side are you, poet?” These are poems that will put you beside the poet as he surveys the destruction and seeks words to convey his emotions. Read this book and discover how successfully he has done so. |
https://www.amazon.com/review/R3VMTFROM1TSU/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=8182500818&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books
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.
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
By Karen Herceg on August 28, 2016
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
who endeavor to create at their highest potential.
Saturday, August 27, 2016
Yuyutsu Sharma's Space Cake, Amsterdam's Amazon Review by European poet, Agnes Marton
A shaman “chewing Tesco’s vegpledges” on the Tube, August 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
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.
“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
Help other customers find the most helpful r
Amazon Review of Quaking Cantos; Nepal Earthquake Poems by Brooklyn-based poet Patricia Carragon
Nepal's Poet Writes About the Devastation of His Homeland, August 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 Yuyutsu Sharma (Goodreads Author)
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.
Yuyu's Summit, An Amazon Review of Annapurna Poems by Robert Scotto
yuyu's summit, December 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
Powerful prose,
By
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.
|
Amazon Customer Review of Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems
Amazing imagery and emotion comes through, August 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.
Monday, August 15, 2016
Recent Amazon Reviews of A Blizzard in my Bones; New York Poems
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.
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.
Poet in New York, August 8, 2016
By
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.
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 Heights, OH 44118
Monday, July 11, 2016
Yuyutsu Sharma: On the Last Leg of his Current Tour
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)
Here is a list of some of his upcoming readings in New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
(Only Public readings are listed)
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/
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
Sunday Special with Yuyutsu Sharma and David Austell at Poets’ Hall- 16 W 10th Meeting Room 210, Erie, Pennsylvania 16507 Hosted by Cee Williams
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
33 3rd St SE, # 103 Barberton, Akron, Ohio, (330) 328-7619, admission free, donations encouraged. Hosted by Thomas Jenney
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
Posted on June 24, 2016
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