Yuyutsu Sharma, a Himalayan poet
who studied his craft in the United States and on the mule paths of high
Himalayas has brought a visionary sensibility to his New York poems. They read
like Federico Garcia Lorca having a Hindu dream, or like Allen Ginsberg risen
from the dead and howling out a peyote vision for 2013. Their ambition, like
Lorca's in his Poet in New York or like Hart Crane's in his New York epic, The
Bridge, is to write an epic vision of the city--and ultimately of America--in
linked lyrics. Here are the Twin Towers flaming like the red tongue of Kali,
goddess of destruction, a city like a yellow-eyed demon, Hurricane Sandy
burrowing into the island's groin like a furious porcupine. Sharma is "a
shaman...black bag bulging / from magical rainbows, / serpents from an Hindu
Heaven, / skull of an abducted female Yeti," and he casts spells in these
strange, visionary, outrageous and magical poems.
Tony Barnstone
The Albert Upton Professor and Chair of English
Whittier College, Author/Translator of Everyman’s Chinese Erotic
Poems
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