American Poet Mike Graves on Yuyutsu Sharma's upcoming collection, "In God's Messy Workplace: The 2020-21 Poems"

 

I feel unable to praise Yuyutsu Sharma's new collection adequately. I think of Whitman, Neruda, Lorca. Sharma is a fever and river, at moments a rhapsody and the gods sing through him even his workshop is messy. Yuyutsu Sharma should be known as The Himalayan Neruda not only for the torrents of images and compassion and outrage in his poetry but for the range of his subjects, themes and imagery. Reading him I feel as I do when reading Neruda that he could make first rate poetry out of anything, as he ranges like a vartic voice of the Himalayas through the natural beauties of Nepal and cities of the world.

—Mike Graves, American poet and teacher, City University of New York, author, A Prayer for the Less Violent Offenders:

 

Michael Graves is the author of four chapbooks, two of which are digital, and three full-length collections. The chapbooks are Outside St. Jude’s (R. E. M.,1990), Blatnoy (madhattersreview3.com, 2005), Illegal Border Crosser (Cervena Barva, 2008), and Fifteen Villanelles (Robert Perron.com 2020). The full-length books are Adam and Cain and In Fragility (Black Buzzard, 2006, 2011) and A Prayer for the Less Violent Offenders: Selected Short Poems of Mike Graves (Nirala, 2017). He has published fifteen poems in The James Joyce Quarterly and has read from his “Joycean Poems” to a gathering of the James Joyce Society at the Gotham Book Mark, April 12, 2002. His poem “Apollo to Daphne” appears in Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths (Oxford, 2001) The Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation awarded him a grant in 2006. He organized the conference, Baptism by Fire: The Work of James Wright at Poets House, NY (March 27, 2004). And he has been coordinating and hosting the Phoenix Reading Series for about twenty years.

Charles Bernstein on Yuyutsu Sharma's upcoming, "In God's Messy Workplace: The 2020-21 Poems"

 

Like “globes of light” along a narrow path through “blind night,” these syncopating couplets offer neither escape nor absolution, but something more tangible for “bleary-eyed wanderers”: company along the way.

—Charles Bernstein, author of Near/Miss and Pitch of Poetry & the winner of the 2019 Bollingen Prize for American Poet

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James Ragan on Yuyutsu Sharma's "Lost Horoscope," Epilogue to his upcoming book of poems, In God's Messy Workplace: The 2020-21 Poems

 

“There's a brilliance in the mind of the poet whose imagination created this gem of a poem out of the "crumpled calendar of chaos," aptly called the "Lost Horoscope."

I was hypnotically immersed in the structure of steps that each stanza offered, hurling the reader down into memory, into the "wingless realm of illogical proclamations" and the resultant "wasteful heap of despair," while seeking "solace, sleep, and salvation" to arrive at the epiphany that "perhaps all those prophesies were true." 

Like an Eliot poem, to gain the enlightenment inherent in this poem, you must read the poem again to capture the nuance and metaphysics of the allusions connecting each image, each stanza, to recover the revelatory "medley of omens" leading to the abyss of "imminent doom." 

One must journey, "sight fractured," through the "moldy world of rickety realities" --typhoid, covid-- while "humming the prayers, drenched in the Monsoon showers of the Himalayan valleys rolling in the world of spirits and sages." Like the poet, one must risk the life of his creative will to recover and rediscover what healing eternal truths lay, lost and buried in our collective unconscious decades and centuries ago... 

a magnificent sight-healing journey.”

James Ragan has published 10 books of poetry and is translated into 15 languages with poems in Poetry, The Nation, Los Angeles Times, World Literature Today and 30 anthologies. Plays produced in the U.S. Moscow, Beijing, Athens, Prague. Honors include 2 Honorary Ph.D’s, 3 Fulbright Professorships, the Emerson Poetry Prize, 9 Pushcart nominations, NEA Fellowship, the Swan Foundation Humanitarian Award, and the Platinum Prize at Houston’s Int. Film Festival as subject of the documentary, “Flowers and Roots, Ambassador of the Arts.”