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)

Nirala to launch the full version of my New York book, “A Blizzard in my Bones : New York Poems” in April.

A Blizzard in my Bones

  New York Poems

By Yuyutsu Sharma

Art and Photographs by

Phil Padwe

Fran Antman, Andreas Stimm & Sahadev Poudel

After the success of Nine New York Poems, Nirala to launch the full version of my New York book, “A Blizzard in my Bones : New York Poems” in April.

A Blizzard in My Bones: New York Poems

Yuyutsu Sharma

ISBN 9-78812-500723 2016 pp.134 Hard

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)

Cover Illustration for Yuyutsu Sharma's "A Blizzard In My Bones: New York Poems

Cover image for Yuyutsu Sharma's upcoming "A Blizzard In My Bones: New York Poems" Illustration by American Artist, Phil Padwe

A Blizzard in my Bones to Appear in the end of November

A Blizzard in my Bones: New York poems to appear in the end of November, Thanks to all the readers  and friends from all over the world for a great response to A Prelude to A Blizzard. Hope the same will happen with the full book....

Photo by Sahadev Paudel

A Nota Bene mention of Nine New York Poems in the March/April 2015 issue of World Literature Today

Nine New York Poems Yuyutsu Sharma Nirala 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

The Ofi Press Magazine Review of Yuyutsu Sharma's Nine New York Poems & Space Cake, Amsterdam & Other Poems from Europe and America by Agnes Marton

The Ofi Press Magazine

International Poetry and Fiction from Mexico City

By Agnes Marton

Poetry Review: Yuyu, the wandering poet

Both books are beautifully designed, with elegant bookmarks. I received them from India by post. When 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.

Yuyu, the wandering poet
Yuyutsu Sharma: Nine New York Poems. A Prelude to A Blizzard In My Bones. New York Poems
Nirala Publications, New Delhi, 2014
Yuyutsu Sharma: Space Cake Amsterdam & Other Poems from Europe and America
Nirala Publications, New Delhi, 2014
Poetry Review by Agnes Marton
Published in issue 39 of The Ofi Press

Yuyu 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.
Half the year, Yuyutsu Sharma leads creative writing workshops at American universities and performs his poems all over the world, but then he returns to Nepal and India.
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:
“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.

The collection ‘Space Cake Amsterdam’ is more like a series of colourful snapshots (of museums, of cafés, of castles), without any superficiality, on the contrary, time to time reaching the profound. Yuyu calls himself a “shaking frame” (Temple, London); inherits his role as a writer and he can accomplish it through his wandering (“Someone left a pen / on the palpable table of my travels”). In De Zuarte Ruiter Café he (“you man from the Himalayas”) is asked whether he can stop ghosts of relatives slipping into dreams, whether he can explain nightmares.

“I knew they wished me to wear
a shaman’s feathered crown for my head   
and dance round and round for several centuries
to avenge the atrocities of the male Buddhas
in the corridors of history for them.”

He depicts naked, noble, leopard‑like, shiny dances (Ruigoord) and talks about remembering long‑ago admired lovers (Look‑alike, Galway), about the uncanny language of husbands (Frankfurt), and about parrots flying out of the zoo to the city to sing (what else?) the song of survival (Heidelberg, Danke!).

Both books are beautifully designed, with elegant bookmarks. I received them from India by post. When 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.