American poet Ruth Danon's Scintillating Amazon Review of Yuyutsu Sharma's new book, A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems

 A Wanderer in the City

By 

Ruth Danon

Whenever Yuyutsu Ram Dass Sharma greets anyone, he says “Namaste” and gives the accompanying bow with hands folded in front of his heart. “Namaste” means “I bow to the god in you” and one might say that to write poetry is, for this writer, an endless act of bowing to the indwelling holiness of everything in the universe.

At his master class at NYU, Yuyu said, to be a poet you must set your house on fire and walk away. I think that this speaks to the urgency of the poetic vocation in his own life. When he was a child, his father, who had had a religious conversion, wanted to give him away to a group of austere monks. The monks knew better and told his father to send him to school.

Because of the wisdom of the monks he was able to become a great poet and a great trekker and wanderer throughout the world. His poems speak to a wonder and curiosity born out of his love of this world and the experiences it offers. You will hear in his work an eclectic set of references – Lorca, the Himalayas, Amsterdam, the fish sold in a market in New York. The world presents to him an amazing array of rich experience and that, filtered through wonder and humility, and immense generosity, yields a poetry of wonder an surprise. You will hear lists and repetitions – echoes of Whitman and Ginsberg yes but also echoes of mountain streams and strange gods, brought together in a voice full and fully his own and full of humor generosity, and wisdom.

In his book, A Blizzard in My Bones, Sharma brings this background and sensibility to the city he claims as a second home. Reviewers have remarked on the mixing of east and west and surely that’s here – even in the language as Hindi or Nepali words are made to rhyme with English ones. The book presents a man, haunted by the loss of his mother, who travels to New York, post 9-11 and post- Sandy, hoping to find the literary landscape of this city – Whitman, Lorca, Leonard Cohen are some of his heroes. And he does – he finds Brooklyn and the White Horse Tavern and the Chelsea Hotel. But he also finds a city defined by commercial brand names and homeless people, a city of people suffering from loneliness and isolation. He carries with him the memory of the sacred relationship with nature that he experienced in the Himalayas and he carries this as he wanders the city that he loves and finds dismaying and in many ways alienating. The universal erotic offers some relief, but that sphere, too, is tinged with the isolation that seems so poignant to someone whose culture operates in a more communal way. Sharma’s gift is to see all this and yet to find the sublime in “the holy and the broken.” (pace, Leonard Cohen.) The poems in A Blizzard in My Bones offer a glimpse of New York City that reveals its fissures and its glories. Those of us who live in the city can be grateful for such illumination.

http://yuyutsurdsharma.blogspot.com/2016/09/nyu-professor-ruth-danons-amazon-review.html

Ruth Danon Ph.D, Clinical Professor,Creative and Expository Writing
Coordinator, Creative and Expository Writing
McGhee Division, New York University

Quataquatantankua : A Poem & A Trek With the Buddhist Bard By Nabina Das

Quataquatantankua : A Poem & A Trek With the Buddhist Bard By Nabina Das

The Quataquatantankua

"The pigeons strutting freely in your courtyard\
 coo like exhausted porters
climbing the mule paths in the singing gorges. 

Their guttural quataquatantankua --
they seem to be using human language,
a kind of hushed speech that robbers might use."

 -- "Little Paradise Lodge"  Annapurna Poems

Emeralded into the crevices of words
our roads emerge with coffee and brine
to fan out far towards a city a peak, a town --
each an odd-eyed rooster in one-legged patience.
I see one losing its blue
in the smear of newsprint
another being pocketed
by hands that grope --
grope my soft tissues
beneath the skin of gauze
but the ones bunched deep
inside my throat go untouched!
So, I can gurgle: "Quataquatantankua, Quataquatantankua, Quataquatantankua."
Ramro chha, ramro chha, ramro chha? And the reply bubbles
up in the foothill methane:
All is good, nothing's amiss
where gods sleep; we keep awake to sharpen our verbs in the dawn.

A Trek with the Buddha Bard

Reading Annapurna Poems

Yuyutsu RD Sharma’s face is like a mountain terrain, when the earth emerges in the gods’ peaks after a flash flood or when a river has receded after the monsoon’s regal fury. I noticed this as soon as I sat down opposite to him in the surprisingly sparsely populated Barista coffee shop in New Delhi’s fashionable Khan Market shopping area. Poet of the Himalayas, Yuyutsu’s greeting resounded almost true in what he wrote in “In the Mountains”: Fragile my eyeglasses/ fragile and foreign/I take them off; /There’s a speck of a scar in them. //On the mule path /I take them off /to face the green /stretch of mountains /beneath the saddle of Annapurnas.

Well, almost true, because he didn’t wear eyeglasses at our meeting! His dark irises reflected the green he writes about and the twining paths he sees better without his educated eyeglasses. And since we met to chat – we didn’t waste time to get on first-name terms – the discussion rightfully turned quickly to his meditative collection Annapurna Poems, a Nirala Series book published in 2008 and reprinted several times since.

On that sweltering summer evening, leafing through the Annapurna poems brought in a sudden whiff of cool mountain air. Musical and reflective. Indeed, Yuyutsu’s poetic tenor is pretty much that of a bard, his voice that treks higher and higher into the wild beautiful upper Himalaya bringing alive the smile of the Buddha and the semiotics of the region’s everlasting gods and goddesses, the Yeti and other resident animals, the soulful rivers, and the ice-kissed rain. True, Yuyutsu laments the loss of a familiar landscape he witnessed prior to political trouble fanning out across Nepal. But his enthusiasm is very much rooted to the peoples’ grasp of their own surrounding, the Nepal that is home to communities and creeds, whether he sees them in the backdrop of the Maoist insurgency or that of a defunct monarchy.

On the level of language, this poetry takes us straight into the heart of the mountain country, Nepal’s unique ethos and the nature that entertains both snowy seasons and hidden eternal gardens. The mule paths, the ‘leech-greasy’ forests, the spells under which the mountain people live and tell fantastic tales, the ‘magnificent daggers of snow’, all build up a world where nature is more than just a phenomenon. It is a companion to the poet and his perception. The cognitive faculty of the poet and the reader works in tandem in recognizing the many layers of meanings unfolded in each aspect of “Annapurna Poems”, exactly like the different layers of the snow. The permafrost is made of the century-old legends and tales on which have grown new fables and events.

Yuyutsu is a poet of expressions as he traverses a train of simplicity. He does not twist language in any show of wizardry. He believes in words and sentences, as they are known and heard in the Himalayan reality, to take him along the mountain journey to rediscover the known nomenclature and trusted actions. All he does is re-paint the scenes of Annapurna in unique details and from surprising angles. Like little Tibetan thangkas. In these scenes, he tells us about those place names that ring out the jeweled eco-system of a mountain town or village as familiar as our recurrent dreams. With him, we walk the salt tracks, the gorge trails and visit Birethanti. Ghorepani, Gandrung, Tadapani, Lake Fewa, and many such tongue-trilling spots. For him, Hillside roosters/Punctual, announcing the dawn //are known elements. If sometimes they might appear delightfully alien to our practiced eyes: Possessing floral /Faces of riverside birds

They still draw us into the world of Annapurna like ice drops in the cracks (Yuyutsu himself says in the foreword of the book that his poems exist in each crack of this magnanimous mountain world).

Even in this pristine surrounding something troubles the poet who watches the spray of the white surf: on greasy crotches /of huge mossy rocks //started singing … coughing out /the cacophony of cruel cities

In Yuyutsu’s poetry one might like to find the Blake-ian dilemma of having to dividing the human soul between Nature and its sufferance, mingle her own fate and existences with that of gods, the Yeti and shamans, and the myriad mysterious of Shangri-La, where imageries take fantastic shapes and have their own sensual and sensuous existence (River: Morning)

… each time I come /to her deafening banks //to gleam my dreams /over the plump flanks of her warm body … and a wrinkle appears /across the shriveled leaf of my life.

However, he is not merely a romantic poet. What comes across is his deep admiration for the Annapurna region as a system tied to the rest of the world – those parts of the world where he is a traveler of a different kind, giving talks and workshops, reading his published work and attending literary events. In the context of these ‘worldly’ acts where he attributes his own poetry having the “otherworldly” and “archival” quality, he is very much a realist. The book’s first section, “Little Paradise Lodge”, is an account of Nepal and Annapurna’s past and present. Interestingly, ‘lodge’ appears to be a pun on ‘lost’ as if he was talking about a ‘little paradise lost’. To me the poems in this section are very much a ‘lost and found’ affair.

On the other hand, quite prominently, his Eliotesque sarcasm for the modern city life and the external influences on his much loved landscape of rains and snows adorn the images he paints in “Rains”: … This summer they held me up /In the deserts of their skyscrapers. … my face in the dark /feeling tips of snow sacred fishtails of Machapuchchare.

In “Mules” too, their ringing bells are but ‘beating notes of a slavery modernism brings’. While mapping the ‘bloodthirsty mule paths around the glacial of Annapurna’, Yuyutsu watches: cartons of Iceberg, mineral water bottles, /solar heaters, Chinese tiles, tin cans, carom boards //sacks of rice /and iodized salt from the plains of Nepal Terai. … human and mule lives meet

Rain, river, snow, singing gorges and brooks rule the landscape of Annapurna Poems. The romance is palpable between the poet and his subject, almost Sufi in character, ‘madness’ being one of its virtues. Yuyutsu is in complete enchantment of his terrain as a lover is and this love’s longing is realized in a woman’s physical quest (A Lonely Brook): a lonely woman /waits for a stranger to come //and burst

the ice frozen between her thighs //to make a flame

of her cold sleep…

Conversation with the river (River) is a personal history, a sequel to the secret rendezvous with the beloved and is artistically lusty. Between your decisions

/and my flickering lamps /the river mad /you, you poet, you bastard, go away!

With Yuyutsu we travel to Ghandrung where a ‘young girl of the scarlet shawl waits/for the colorful procession/of mules carrying cartons of Tuberg beer to pass’ or to Ghorepani, all the while delightfully apprehensive or even curious if a Yeti was following ‘your trail in the desolate mountains’.

Among these portraits resembling eternity’s passing of time in the mountain world, we empathize with the pain in the poets voice (Fish): Wives wait the final winter /of my rot, opening up /the greed /of their slithering fish /I return to a poem /I postponed decades ago /to touch the mating serpents /slithering on the tip of illicit door /called death.

The book’s second section “Glacier” takes this sentiment to a crescendo as one feels literally like climbing heights with titles like Kala Patthar, Gauri Shankar, Summit and The Buddhist Flag Flutters and looking below with a rooster’s eye view at the fields, the forests and the (once) playful courtyards with their brass bells. The overture continues with the third part “Sister Everest”, a pithy and less descriptive section. In that, the latter is highly evocative. If the first sections read like an ethereal ‘inward’ trek through the upper Himalayan terrain, this section readies us for the fourth one – “The Annapurna Man” – rooted more in the poet’s ‘outward’ experiences. A very brief section, it spews more pain than pleasure. To some extent, I came out of the book through this section with a sense of abrupt termination, as if Yuyutsu’s pain had to invite a quick clinical surgery. For this, the poetry in this section seems disjointed from the book’s original spirit.

Especially, I felt “Silence” is too much of rumination, too personal and reads more like purgation than poetry. The best piece in this section is “Space Cake, Amsterdam”, a witty poem combining introspection and observation by ‘this man from Kathmandu’ (one may well imagine, the rest of our chat that evening centered around that one fantastic experience Yuyutsu recounted to me). The air-conditioned air at that Barista throbbed at my mirth on reading and re-reading the line – ‘whatever happens, you can always make a comeback’!

NABINA DAS is a poet and fiction writer currently based in Hyderabad. She teaches Creative Writing and has won several writing awards and grants at home and abroad while being published widely. Her poetry has been translated into Assamese, Bengali, Hindi and Croatian

Leading Indian Daily, The Hindu’s short review of Yuyutsu Sharma’ “A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems

Leading Indian Daily, The Hindu’s short review of Yuyutsu Sharma’ “A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems

http://www.thehindu.com/books/Reading-Room/article17193166.ece

“A collection of poems about the ‘world’s first city’ by a Himalayan poet, the book, explores Yuyutsu Sharma’s transformation into a New Yorker. It speaks of colliding cultures, of an artist whose fate it is to wander, and a tender but triumphant vision of a metropolis that belongs to all the world’s people.”

–The Hindu

"At the Inkwell" Review of "A Blizzard in my Bones"" and "Quaking Cantos" by Benjamin Schmitt

BOOK REVIEWS

The Inner and Outer Journeys of Yuyutsu Sharma

by Benjamin Schmitt • October 14, 2016

http://attheinkwell.com/the-inner-and-outer-journeys-of-yuyutsu-sharma/

A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems by Yuyutsu Sharma, Nirala Publications, $20

“In the cracks/of debased glaciers shine/the beguiled stars/of our twisted galaxies.”

I must confess that I read these books out of order, or at least not in the order that I recommend for other readers. Both of these books were released in the last year and one is actually quite long for a book of poems, at 173 pages. This is an enormous output for a contemporary poet, a cursory polling of my bookshelf reveals most of my poetry collections to be in the 70-page range, and some poets can spend up to a decade polishing a collection. I see these two books by Yuyutsu Sharma, A Blizzard in my Bones and Quaking Cantos, as a depiction of a journey more akin to sagas in lengthier tomes such as Dante’s descent into the Infernoor Milton’s description of a Paradise Lost than as typical volumes of modern lyric verse. Strangely, it is the poet’s journey to a foreign land that initiates inner searching and the poet’s return home that prompts outer travels to seek healing with brethren.

My recommendation for readers is to begin with A Blizzard in my Bones. It is the longer of the pair, but it is a good entry point as I believe this to be the beginning of the journey. In the initial cycle of the book, “Asleep Like…”, a black shape pours forth from the narrator’s grandmother “its flame/burning the walls/of her throat.” It is the search for this black shape that prompts the narrator’s journey to New York City. Soon he is entering “a Babylon/of wandering winter spirits/and wavering speeches” in which he experiences “the Subway’s odor/tingling the lonely/walks to Washington Square.”

While there are many discoveries inside New York City that take place in the book, the narrator’s self-discoveries are the most compelling. He once again sees the black shape, this time “a black bird like Anne Sexton” in “Luna, Fish on Long Island Sound”, a poem about discovering oneself in love. In “The Aging Translator of Mallarme” he explores how others see him. Through the Ginsbergian howl “The Scream, Subway Avatars” the poet begins to find himself in the city, particularly in the grimy dark. A process completed in “Your Name” as the narrator describes a tongue that “licks sadness/out of my life’s numbered streets” thus melding himself with the cityscape. The book does not end with this immersion though, eventually the poet leaves New York to return home with the strength of the city.

Nepal in the aftermath of horrific earthquakes is the setting of Quaking Cantos. Just like the black shape fleeing his grandmother prompted the journey inward, it is this tragedy that moves the poet towards the suffering Nepali people. Quaking Cantos is my favorite of the two books because it allows the poet to display the kind of compassionate craftsmanship such a subject demands. The most stunning accomplishment of this book is the poet’s ability to use short lines to convey the physical and emotional devastation in the wake of a natural disaster. Here is an example of this from the poem “Nipple”:

“a baby crawls

on the cold

chest

of earth

looking for

his dead

mother’s

nipple.”

The short lines slow down the tempo of the poem so much that the reader almost feels as if they are crawling with the baby through the rubble. In poems like “Bhaktupar” and “Sunya” the abrupt lines create the very effect of the debris they describe, an accumulation of unexpected objects lying on top of one another and sometimes mixing together. Sharma is gifted at an enjambment that reflects the destruction of the scene, evident in the poem “Course of Courage” which describes “buildings about to tumble/into the grand jaw of Time.”

Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems by Yuyutsu Sharma, Nirala Publications, $18.99.

In his outward journey, the narrator often fixes his gaze on the NGOs that have descended onto his country in the wake of this crisis. Throughout the book, he amusingly calls such organizations “Compassion Inc.” In “Quake Relief” a lamb starves under a sign in which an NGO is seeking blood from donors. The stark imagery of an animal suffering under such an appeal raises legitimate questions about the abilities and methods of these organizations, particularly their blindness to the everyday life of the Nepali people. InQuaking Cantos, Sharma brings this life to the epicenter of his collection, creating “a song/of human lives/crackling.”

In A Blizzard in my Bones the narrator begins picking up the inner wreckage of his life. It is only through this process that he is able to confront the outer wreckage ofQuaking Cantos and raise up the lives of the Nepali people. This is not a perfect journey, there were some sections in both books that could have been truncated and others that could have gone deeper. If you only have the time or budget for one of these books, I recommend Quaking Cantos, though both of them stand on their own. Regardless, Yuyutsu Sharma is an essential voice whose inner and outer struggles are worth chronicling. I am glad to have spent some time traveling with him, and I think you will be as well.

---

Benjamin Schmitt is the Best Book Award and Pushcart nominated author of two books,Dinner Table Refuge (PunksWritePoemsPress, 2015) andThe global conspiracy to get you in bed (Kelsay Books, 2013). His poetry has appeared in Sakura Review, Hobart, Grist, Wisconsin Review, Two Thirds North and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle where he also reviews books, curates At The Inkwell’s Seattle reading series, and teaches workshops to people of all ages. Learn more at http://bens25.tumblr.com/

NYU Professor Ruth Danon's Amazon Review of Yuyutsu Sharma's new book, A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems

 A Wanderer in the City, September 29, 2016

By 

ruth danon

This review is from: A Blizzard in My Bones New York Poems (Hardcover)

Whenever Yuyutsu Ram Dass Sharma greets anyone, he says “Namaste” and gives the accompanying bow with hands folded in front of his heart. “Namaste” means “I bow to the god in you” and one might say that to write poetry is, for this writer, an endless act of bowing to the indwelling holiness of everything in the universe.

At his master class at NYU, Yuyu said, to be a poet you must set your house on fire and walk away. I think that this speaks to the urgency of the poetic vocation in his own life. When he was a child, his father, who had had a religious conversion, wanted to give him away to a group of austere monks. The monks knew better and told his father to send him to school.

Because of the wisdom of the monks he was able to become a great poet and a great trekker and wanderer throughout the world. His poems speak to a wonder and curiosity born out of his love of this world and the experiences it offers. You will hear in his work an eclectic set of references – Lorca, the Himalayas, Amsterdam, the fish sold in a market in New York. The world presents to him an amazing array of rich experience and that, filtered through wonder and humility, and immense generosity, yields a poetry of wonder an surprise. You will hear lists and repetitions – echoes of Whitman and Ginsberg yes but also echoes of mountain streams and strange gods, brought together in a voice full and fully his own and full of humor generosity, and wisdom.

In his book, A Blizzard in My Bones, Sharma brings this background and sensibility to the city he claims as a second home. Reviewers have remarked on the mixing of east and west and surely that’s here – even in the language as Hindi or Nepali words are made to rhyme with English ones. The book presents a man, haunted by the loss of his mother, who travels to New York, post 9-11 and post- Sandy, hoping to find the literary landscape of this city – Whitman, Lorca, Leonard Cohen are some of his heroes. And he does – he finds Brooklyn and the White Horse Tavern and the Chelsea Hotel. But he also finds a city defined by commercial brand names and homeless people, a city of people suffering from loneliness and isolation. He carries with him the memory of the sacred relationship with nature that he experienced in the Himalayas and he carries this as he wanders the city that he loves and finds dismaying and in many ways alienating. The universal erotic offers some relief, but that sphere, too, is tinged with the isolation that seems so poignant to someone whose culture operates in a more communal way. Sharma’s gift is to see all this and yet to find the sublime in “the holy and the broken.” (pace, Leonard Cohen.) The poems in A Blizzard in My Bones offer a glimpse of New York City that reveals its fissures and its glories. Those of us who live in the city can be grateful for such illumination.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2M5RFJGHZ88C8/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=8182500729

A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems on Amazon.com

Product Details Series: Nirala Series Hardcover: 165 pages Publisher: Nirala Publications; 1st edition (2016) Language: English ISBN-10: 8182500729 ISBN-13: 978-8182500723 Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.6 x 1.1 inches Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/8182500729

A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems is a brilliant and groundbreaking new work focusing on the "first city of the world" by the internationally acclaimed Himalayan poet, Yuyutsu Sharma. Reminiscent of F.G. Lorca, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O' Hara and Carl Sandburg, the poems constitute Sharma's reflections on what it means for a Himalayan poet to transform to a new creation, a New Yorker. The poet begins the book with a shamanic vision of his grandmother several decades ago, then weaves a family tapestry of a traditional life abandoned as the poet embraces the artist's life and its ceaseless wanderings around the globe. In an evocative sequence, the poet is sleeping by the Atlantic shore where he envisions his deceased mother getting ready for a marriage that will never take place; and as the poet wakes, he moves from vision to vision as his Himalayan culture collides with the cultures of New York City: a zoo/ of blazing skyline on a moonlit night/and steps into a place / six feet deep, dank, under ocean, omnivorous. Sharma carefully unfolds a tender but triumphant vision of a metropolis that is not a city of any one country, but of the world. Most importantly, as in all of Sharma's work, A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems celebrates a shared, ennobling vision of humanity. Recipient of fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and The Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature, Yuyutsu RD Sharma is a distinguished poet and translator. Widely traveled author, he has authored ten poetry collections. 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. Currently, Yuyutsu is a visiting poet at Columbia University, New York.

Yuyutsu Sharma's A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems launched

A Blizzard in My Bones: New York Poems
Yuyutsu Sharma
ISBN 9-78812-500723 2016 pp.134 Hard
Art and Photographs by
Phil Padwe
Fran Antman, Andreas Stimm & Sahadev Poudel

A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems is a brilliant and groundbreaking new work focusing on the “first city of the world” by the internationally acclaimed Himalayan poet, Yuyutsu Sharma. Reminiscent of F.G. Lorca, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’ Hara and Carl Sandburg, the poems constitute Sharma’s reflections on what it means for a Himalayan poet to transform to a new creation, a New Yorker.  The poet begins the book with a shamanic vision of his grandmother several decades ago, then weaves a family tapestry of a traditional life abandoned as the poet embraces the artist’s life and its ceaseless wanderings around the globe.  In an evocative sequence, the poet is sleeping by the Atlantic shore where he envisions his deceased mother getting ready for a marriage that will never take place; and as the poet wakes, he moves from vision to vision as his Himalayan culture collides with the cultures of New York City: a zoo/ of blazing skyline on a moonlit night/and steps into a place / six feet deep, dank, under ocean, omnivorous. Sharma carefully unfolds a tender but triumphant vision of a metropolis that is not a city of any one country, but of the world. Most importantly, as in all of Sharma’s work, A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems celebrates a shared, ennobling vision of humanity.

Yuyutsu Sharma’s new collection is concerned with notions of home and being away in the exotic elsewhere. Home strikes deep, like ‘my grandma / asleep // on a plump / bubble // of a folk song’ but is then flung into the great proper nouns of New York, all detail, all observation and dazzle. The poems are registered at the tips of the eyes then connected with the sense of deep home. That is where the power lies. It emerges through ear and mouth as a kind of cosmopolitan love letter.’

—George Szirtes, British Poet, winner of Faber Memorial Prize & T.S. Eliot Prize

‘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
If Langston Hughes, Federico García Lorca and Frank O’Hara were exhumed to rub their recollections of New York City together over dal and black tea, they might produce a manuscript as rapturous as Yuyutsu Sharma’s love letter to the five boroughs. Infused with the mythology of Sufi saints and Hindu deities, Blizzard Go Delhi is nonetheless utterly contemporary, juxtaposing Duane Reades and Occupy Wall Streeters alongside Punjabi wheat fields and muscular Halwai-confectioners working over huge cauldrons of oil. Unrepentant in its sensuality, self-assured and visionary, Sharma’s book is an extravagant tour de force that shows us that stepping off the train into New York City is to enter a realm “of wandering winter spirits and wavering speeches…a bedlam vision of a bedroom utopia that tries very hard every night to find a partner of sleep.” Tries, but thankfully for us, fails and instead stays up to channel the manic, long-limbed energy of the city in this memorable and original verbal jazz solo. This book is a poetic triumph.
—Ravi Shankar, Executive Director of Drunken Boat, author of seven books/chapbooks of poetry & co-editor of W.W. Norton & Co.’s Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond

Nine New York Poems , subtitled A Blizzard in My Bones, deepens the tourist’s experiences of New York into a spiritual encounter. The collection begins with the ecstasy of disorientation but quickly locates the self in the unknown. Written by a Nepalese poet and trained ascetic, this precise collection of poems combines the pain of homelessness with the joy of traveling.
—World Literature Today, University Of Oklahoma

A Blizzard in My Bones, Yuyu’s deeply moving new collection and a remarkable addition to modern urban literature. It is Nepal and Hinduism and Brooklyn and Manhattan and Greenwich Village drawn together in a new Space Cake: Amsterdam; but here the hallucinogen-stoked celebration is amid the concrete and steel heights of Metropolis.
—David Austell, Columbia University, author of Little Creek and Other Poems

Capacious and wild, offering itself energetically to contrasting continents and sensibilities, Sharma’s ambitious and honest New York collection offers a vivid tribute to Lorca, its presiding muse.
—Annie Finch, winner of Robert Fitzgerald Award and author of Spells: New and Selected Poems

A Blizzard In My Bones is worth the wait. The marriage of eastern angst and western jitters is beautifully realized, both in dreamscapes and in naturalistic description. The sexual suggestiveness is very powerful, as is the evocation of NY place time in all its gritty glory.
—Robert Scotto, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Baruch College, CUNY

Yuyutsu Sharma’s Blizzard in My Bones: New York Poems posits a pair of eyes up in their perch and looking down on the city of New York (and all of America) as they sweep across the pavement and finally settle on bit of muffin left on a table outside of a Starbuck’s. They are poems that look and venture deeply into the mannerisms of a young continent even as they insinuate themselves into a bustling scene. They suspect the “wandering lunatics,” “the basking brown seals,” and the “ceramic cells of Super gurus” stand as markers on this New Found Land, as the eyes behind the poems continue consuming everything on the move.
—Tim Kahl, Poet & Translator, Sacramento

Yuyu is Mona Lisa’s hallucinatory lover… a shaman “chewing Tesco’s vegpledges” on the Tube … a city hopper …who is at home everywhere, exploring urban fields through his Himalayan gaze. The master of observation, of detail, of compassion …Yuyu’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… I received the books from India by post. While opening the envelope, the first thing I noticed was the spicy scent coming out of the pages. Then I started reading and couldn’t stop…
—Agnes Marton, Poet, Editor of Estuary: a Confluence of Art and Poetry & Ofi Press(Mexico)