Upcoming Nirala Release : What Love Is: Book One

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Poems by David Daniel – Art by George Cochrane

“More than a book—it’s the best record album I have ever read.”
—Matthew Lippman

“What is a poem, what does it look like, and what can it do?”

Poet David Daniel and artist George Cochrane’s genre-bending collaboration asks and answers these most fundamental questions in their tour de force project, WHAT LOVE IS—a kaleidoscopic experience of over-lapping poems, images, and co-authored commentary that tell a dazzling, true story about the ordinary, heartbreaking, surprising, and sometimes miraculous manifestations of love that are all around us.

Daniel, an award-winning poet, and Cochrane, a widely exhibited and published artist, engaged in daily conversations over the course of a year, covering every detail of WHAT LOVE IS. The resulting volume’s marriage of text and image explodes traditional notions of poetic form and offers a stunning example of poetry integrated into a larger, ever-evolving visual experience. Cochrane’s artwork is not simply paired with Daniel’s words—instead, it transforms them, initiating a dialogue that activates new circuits of meaning and opens new avenues for interpretations.

Drawing on illuminated manuscripts, the work of William Blake, and comic books, Cochrane reimagines some poems as graphic novels, ranging from nine to twenty pages, expanding them into another language entirely—one that includes panels, sound effects, additional text, musical notation, and speech balloons. Daniel’s elegant, yet emotionally raw poetry meets Cochrane’s singular artistic vision—one founded in making his own autobiographical graphic novel and creating a new illuminated manuscript of another poet’s work, Dante’s Divine Comedy. The goal, according to Daniel, was to create a single vision that includes various points of view “that show the contrary states of the human experience, specifically the experience of love.” The result provides a unique portal into the world of poetry and art.

“This is a must have for any educator aiming to engage teens and young adults in the arts,

        or perhaps more importantly, in the art of being.”

                                          —Dr. Daniel Gray Wilson, Harvard Graduate School of Education

The book is divided into three sections: the illuminated poems, the poems presented in plain text, and a co-authored commentary detailing the unique collaborative process, including background information on the poems and art. A reader can enter at any point, starting with the preface, the illuminations, the poems, or even the commentary, to chart their own path through what love is.

As National Book Award Finalist H. L. Hix writes in the foreword: “Of all the kin that What Love Is might claim, none is closer than the books of William Blake, their images and words merged and magicked in service of love. In their collaboration, the two artists become a third artist. And when I read What Love Is, when I am with it in the way of attention, the two of us, I and this book, are accompanied by a third, a spiritual presence other and greater than either of us in separate.

ABOUT THE POET                                               

David Daniel is the award-winning author of Seven-Star Bird (Graywolf Press) and Ornaments (Pitt Poetry Series). He directs the undergraduate creative writing program at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where he founded WAMFEST: The Words, Art, and Music Festival. He designed WAMFEST to break down barriers between the art most of us grow up being inspired by and the art of the academy—a project similar to this one—and it has included extraordinary collaborations between Bruce Springsteen and Robert Pinsky, C.D. Wright and Rosanne Cash, Talib Kweli and Quincy Troupe, Kristen Hersh and Tom Sleigh, among dozens of others. For fifteen years, he was the poetry editor of Ploughshares, and for several years Daniel was Core Faculty of the Writing Seminars at Bennington College. Daniel lives in Belmont, Massachusetts. daviddanielpoetry.com

ABOUT THE ARTIST

George Cochrane’s graphic novel-in-progress, Long Time Gone, was first shownat theMassachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 2009, and later exhibited at the Tweed Museum, 153 Studio, Five Myles Gallery, and the Shirley Fiterman Art Center.  Long Time Gone episodes (created with his daughter Fiamma) have appeared in Esopus, Bomb, and the Deli. In 2018, Cochrane published Inferno (Thornwillow Press), a completely illuminated manuscript of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Inferno by Cochrane.Cochrane’s complete La Divina Commedia – The New Manuscript (Facsimile Finder) was published in Italian and English editions in 2021. His oil paintings, drawings, prints, and artist books have been widely exhibited in the US and abroad. Cochrane lives in Brooklyn and is a professor of Fine Art at Fairleigh Dickinson University. 

georgecochrane.net 

                                                  

ADVANCE PRAISE 

“What Love Is is more than a book—it’s the best record album I have ever read. Its poems and text and artwork swim and interact like some highly evolved organism, some highly sophisticated and simply organized symphony of doo-wop bounce and funk. What Love Is is a miracle of visions coming together to make something utterly new and emotionally reverberant. It is a vision of what it means to be inside of love and to know that there is no way out no matter how much crying you do, no matter how much time has gone by since the last time you held it in your hands.”—Matthew Lippman, We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On (Four Way)

“A raunchy, lyrical, romantic, passionate, vulnerable, mortal work: poems and drawings riff together in this loving and wounded collaboration. One answer to the question of the title—What Love Is—is the book itself: love is poet and artist finding form together, as David Daniel and George Cochrane have beautifully done.” —Rosanna Warren, So Forth (W. W. Norton); former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets


“Daniel and Cochrane’s gorgeous collaboration is a stunning gift to us all. Their visual and verbal collages are unflinchingly honest pairings of love and mortality, companionship and solitude, loss and hope in a brutally beautiful world. They leave poetic pretense at the door by dignifying the real and raw in our everyday experience. This is a must have for any educator aiming to engage teens and young adults in the arts, or perhaps more importantly, in the art of being.” —Dr. Daniel Gray Wilson, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Pratik: Darkness in Style, The Noir Issue Vol XIX No 4

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Edited by Yuyutsu Sharma Guesr Editor : Suzanne Lummis

Amazon USA : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CMDGKY9P?ref=myi_title_dp
Amazon India : https://www.amazon.in/dp/B0CMDGKY9P?ref=myi_title_dp


Yusef Komunyakaa Dorianne Laux Lynne Thompson Elya Braden Tony Barnstone Mehnaz Sahibzada Lynn Emanuel David Lehman Tim Seibles Marilyn Robertson Carol Ellis Tanya Ko Hong Eric Priestley Peggy Dobreer Charles Harper Webb Cece Peri David Lazar Tim Seibles Alison Turner Nicholas Christopher Suzanne Lummis Susan Aizenberg John Allman John Challis Alexis Rhone Fancher Marilyn Robertson David Lazar Lawrence Raab Susan Aizenberg Virgil Suárez John Allman FICTION & Kim Addonizio Lou Mathews C. Natale Peditto Wiktoria Klera Suzanne Lummis Christina Cha NOIR ART Plus all regular Columns

Professor Snowbody in Search of the Yeti by Gabriel Rosenstock (Illustrated by Carol Betera)

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Professor Snowbody in Search of the Yeti by Gabriel Rosenstock (Illustrated by Carol Betera) ISBN 978-81-957816-8-3 pp.34 Paperback Rs. 395 Indian Amazon India : https://www.amazon.in/dp/B0CW3M82X9?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon USA : https://www.amazon.com/dp/8195781683?ref=myi_title_dp

Professor Snowbody in Search of the Yeti is a marvelous tale of Yeti created by Irish language poet Gabriel Rosenstock. Brilliantly illustrated by Carol Betera, the book dramatises Professor Snowbody’s search of Yeti in the Himalayas and meets lots of people who are as odd as himself. A valuable addition to the mythical snowman that hold attention of the scholars as well ordinary people due to its magic and mystery.

Second Edition of Dr. Shreeram Prasad Upadhyaya’s Indo-Nepal Trade Relations released

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Indo-Nepal Trade Relations : A Historical Analysis of Nepal’s Trade with the British India
By Shreeram Prasad Upadhyaya ISBN 81-957816-7-5 Paperback Rs. 695 Indian pp.287 plus 8 color plates

Dr. Shreeram Upadhyaya is Nepal’s prominent historian and educationist today.

Indo-Nepal Trade Relations celebrates Nepalese struggle against the British Raj’s callous moves of suppression and subjugation. It is a first comprehensive Nepalese attempt to explore the economic implications of the dark pages of Nepal’s history of trade with British India. Analytically examining the major aspects of Indo-Nepal trade relations, Dr. Upadhyaya, explores the mood of suspicion that shaped Nepalese attitude towards British India. The British Govt., explains Dr. Upadhyaya, was interested not just in Indo-Nepal trade but also secretly plotted to capture its supremacy over the Tibetan trade through Nepal. But the Nepalese resistance to the imperialist British moves sprang from the fact that commercial activities of the British Raj had ultimately established their colonial rule in India.

 A detailed analysis of the means of transport and communication, different trade routes and variety of commodities that passed through them provide a measure of growth that Indo-Nepal trade witnessed. Nepal enjoyed a favorable balance of trade on account of large exports. Dr. Upadhyaya largely focuses on the major issues of economic history such as commercial policies and monopolies volumes and exchange of commodities, commercial taxes, currency, market and prices of commodities, system of Barter and credit and payment of debt.

 The book is a must for economists, historians, policy-makers and scholars interested in knowing the history of Nepalese resistance against Imperialism.

Born at Siraha, Dr Shreeram Prasad Upadhyaya, is a distinguished historian of Nepal. He was educated first at Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu where he received his Master Degree in two different subjects: MA History and MEd in Education and Social Studies.  Later, he received his Doctoral Degree from the University of Delhi, Delhi, India for his research, Indo-Nepal Trade Relations 1858-1914. He is the author of more than one dozen books including Ancient and Medieval Nepal, Modern History of China and Japan, Socio-Economic and Administrative History of Nepal, History of Modern India and many other textbooks on Social Studies and Moral Sciences.       

Dr. Shreeram Prasad Upadhyaya has done research in both History and Education. Tribhuvan University has published his thesis on Education. Dr. Upadhyaya has experience of working as an adviser in the Secondary Education Project funded by DFID, UK and Asian Development Bank, Teacher Education Project (TEP) and Education Review Office funded by Government of Nepal and Finland.

Dr. Upadhyaya was Chairman of History Instruction Committee, Subject Committee, Faculty Board and Academic Council of Tribhuvan University, Acting Chairman and Member of University Service Commission, Mid-Western University. He was decorated with many national and international awards including Mahendra Vidhya Bhusan by Late King Birendra, National Talent Award by Acting Prime Minister of Nepal on behalf of Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation, Nepal, Best Teacher Award and Long Service Award by Tribhuvan University and Peace Award by an International Organization, Universal Peace Federation, Thailand. He was also recently decorated by the President of Nepal. 

Upcoming Release : Tallying the Hemispheres : Selected Essays by Indian American Poet and Memoirist, Ravi Shankar

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Tallying the Hemispheres: Selected Essays 1998-2018 by Ravi Shankar ISBN 978-81-957816-6-9 Paperback Amazon US:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/8195781667?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/8195781667?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon India : https://www.amazon.in/dp/8195781667?ref=myi_title_dp

“We are in a kind of orbit around the people, places, and ideas that we once held so close and have since let go of, and that at any given moment we are approaching perihelion or aphelion with respect to these past selves.” –from “In Praise of Abstraction”

Called one of “America’s finest younger poets” by former Connecticut poet laureate Dick Allen and “a diaspora icon” by The Hindu, Pushcart-prize winning poet and acclaimed memoirist Ravi Shankar has been simultaneously crafting a canny and prophetic body of essays. Split into four sections – Self and Subcontinent, Pomegranates, Toxic Debt, Empty Chairs, The American Experiment, and On Finding Futurity – Tallying the Hemispheres finds Shankar casting a roving, deeply curious eye across disparate fields, from world literature and digital humanities to the Avant-garde to the ancient Vedic. Reading deeply and comparatively, revealing himself to be a passionate, erudite essayist, he is equally at home pursuing the Armenian poetic form of the hayren in Yerevan as he is jousting with Rumi, Wallace Stevens, Anne Waldman, William Carlos Williams, Biggie Smalls, Liu Xia, or Agha Shahid Ali. Published in such venues as The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets, The American Book Review, The AWP Writer’s Chronicle, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, The Poetry Society of America, The Quarterly Conversation and anthologies by Cambridge University Press, The University of Iowa Press and others, these essays are deft, eclectic, sympathetic, wry, engaging, and insightful. Throughout this collection, Shankar encourages us to look with greater thoughtfulness and sensitivity at the world around us, marveling at and revealing in it a remarkable breadth of knowledge.

Ravi Shankar is a postmodern flaneur. He wanders the world’s real and

fictional gridded cities (or perhaps his astral body swoops high above

them) and reports back.

—Amy Gerstler, National Book Critics Circle Award winner

Quirky, quizzical, inquisitive, by turns lyrical and meditative, Ravi

Shankar is guided by a strong intelligence toward resolutions that are both surprising and apt.
—Gregory Orr, Rockefeller Fellow

Pushcart-prize winning poet, author, editor, translator, and professor, Ravi Shankar Ph.D. is the author and editor of over fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, including most recently, the memoir Correctional called “the work of an absolutely brilliant writer” by advance reviewer and shortlisted for the 2022 CT Lit Prize; the Many Uses of Mint: New and Selected Poems: 1998-2018 (Recent Works Press); W.W. Norton & Co.’s Language for a New Century called a “beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer; the Muse India Award winning translations of 8th century Tamil poet/saint, Andal: The Autobiography of a Goddess (Zubaan/University of Chicago Press); an anthology celebrating a new poetic form and honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, The Golden Shovel (University of Arkansas Press); a collaboration with T.S. Eliot Prize winner George Szirtes, A Field Guide to Southern China (Eyewear Books); the National Poetry Review Prize winning Deepening Groove; the Carolina Wren judges award winning What Else Could it Be; a collaboration with late American artist Sol LeWitt Seamless Matter (Rain Taxi Ohm Editions); and the finalist for the Connecticut Book Awards Instrumentality, poems from which have appeared around the world. Translated into over 12 languages and recipient of a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner as well as winner of the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize,

Shankar has taught at such institutions as Columbia University, Fairfield University, the City University of Hong Kong and the University of Sydney.

Shankar has held fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Jentel Foundation, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Blue Mountain Center and many others. Recipient of numerous grants and awards, including multiple “Excellence-in-Teaching Awards,” his students have gone on to publish dozens of books of their own. Granted fellowships by the New York State Council on the Arts and the Rhode Island State Commission on the Arts, Shankar has been featured in The New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, BBC, NPR and the PBS Newshour. His essays have appeared in such places as the Georgia Review, the Hartford Courant, and for the Poetry Society of America. He has been featured at the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, Poetry International and he founded one of the world’s oldest electronic journals of the arts, Drunken Boat, winner of a South-by-Southwest Web Award and featured on BBC-Vietnam. He currently teaches creative writing at Tufts University and for the New York Writers Workshop and is outgoing Chairman of the Asia Pacific Writers Workshop.

Shankar currently teaches creative writing at Tufts University and his memoir Correctional was published in 2022.

NEW RELEASE : EARTH DAYS: POEMS, CHANTS, & SPELLS IN FIVE DIRECTIONS

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Annie Finch

ISBN 978-81-963601-1-5 Paperback pp.170 Rs.495

Amazon US Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/8196360118?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/8196360118?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/8196360118?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon UK:https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/8196360118?ref=myi_title_dp

Annie Finch’s spellbinding poems give voice to the earth-centered spirituality of our era.  Finch is a renowned poetry witch who skillfully draws on the secrets of poetic rhythm and craft to honor the sacredness of the natural world. Earth Days gathers her poems over five decades around the elements of fire (flame, sun, stars, heat, passion); air (moon, wind, light, wisdom); earth (mud, roots, mountain, tree, strength); water (ocean, river, rain, tears, heart); and matrix (intuition, mystery, ritual, spirit). Finch’s poems enchant the ear as well as the mind, combining her virtuosic use of poetic craft with a rhapsodic, transformative, and feminist postmodern sensibility.

Dense and musically alive, this is poetry meant to be read aloud. This is the first collection of Finch’s poetry to be published outside of the U.S and gathers Finch’s most cherished poems along with previously uncollected new poems. Poems included in the book have appeared in leading periodicals including American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and The Yale Review.

Annie Finch’s poetry is a pure tone that calls us home to the first impulse of poetry. We link to mystery. We lift off.

—Joy Harjo

Like an Olympic ice skater, Annie Finch makes intricate music look smooth and easy. . .I recommend her with enthusiasm—and awe.

—Molly Peacock, President Emerita, Poetry Society of America

“I can state, with absolutely no doubt whatsoever, that Annie Finch taught me to discover the music in my own body.  I have never encountered again someone so unflinchingly passionate about the art of poetry and so dedicated to its potential.

—Patricia Smith, National Poetry Award Winner

Annie Finch’s poems are at once a continuation and a critique of the plural traditions from which they are drawn, a commentary on the seductive and treacherous—and redemptive—qualities of language itself.

—Marilyn Hacker

Annie Finch’s poetry emboldens the spirit and enlightens the soul, offering the listener a journey like no other.

—Jeffrey Cantrell

“In words that soar but are never obscure, Annie Finch tells of Goddesses who have returned offering threads of meaning with which to weave our lives anew. Sing to us, dear Muse.”

—Carol P. Christ, author of Rebirth of the Goddess

An oracle, an ecstatic maenad: that is the kind of traditional poet Annie Finch is. Finch, at the forefront of the re-evaluation of traditional form in poetry, uses poetic structures to distract monkey mind so that wild mind sings through. . . she finds rhyme and meter rooted in the oral tradition with its pagan proletarian values. She takes back the master’s tools by remembering that they were, from the first, tools of the common folk.

—Patricia Monaghan, author of The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets

Annie Finch understands better than any contemporary I know what poetry feels like and sounds like when it is completely at home in its traditions. . .  ..   She is a major poet, one of very few who understand how lyric lives in part because it can speak for something larger than the ego.

—Charles Altieri, University of California, Berkeley

Annie Finch is an American original, a master of control who shows no fear of excess, and none of quietness either. . . The directness and simplicity of her poems are deceptive –they have depths and delights that appear to go on forever.

—Ron Silliman

Finch is a poet in her bones . . .again and again, I found myself shocked with pleasure as image, idea, and sound spun out in a perfect braid.

—C.L. Rawlins

 Gnomic, intricate, lyrical, and deft, Finch’s poetry brings Dickinson’s to mind. . .  a poetry that technically precise, that risky and spectacular. 

—C. G. MacDonald, San Francisco Poetry Flash

Annie Finch has made form a one-eyed woman looking out at us all, beckoning us to enter into her arena and be.

—Sonia Sanchez

The brightest liveliest most gifted person of her generation . . . Whenever I get discouraged about some trends in American poetry, I think of Annie Finch, a shining light, and I feel better.

—Carolyn Kizer

Annie Finch is an American poet, writer, translator, and speaker known for her incantatory poetry, composed to be read aloud. She is the author of six books of poetry including Spells: New and Selected Poems, Eve, and Calendars (both finalists for the National Poetry Series), and Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams (awarded the Sarasvati Award). She has also published numerous books about poetry including A Poet’s Craft, The Ghost of Meter, The Body of Poetry, and nine anthologies on poetics including A Formal Feeling Comes, Villanelles, An Exaltation of Forms, and Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters.  Her poetry has appeared in the New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Paris Review, Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, and Norton Anthology of World Literature and has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, French, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. In 2012 she was awarded the Robert Fitzgerald Award for her lifetime contribution to the Art and Craft of Versification. Finch’s verse plays and Poetry Witch Theater rituals have been produced at venues including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, Deepak Chopra Homespace, and American Opera Projects. Educated at Yale University and Stanford University, where she earned her Ph.D, she has performed her poems cross the U.S. and in India, Mexico, Africa, and throughout Europe.

NEW RELEASE : The Plague of Love: Selected Sufi Love Poems of Mir Taqi Mir

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MIR MUHAMMAD TAQI

Translated from Urdu by Bilal A. Shaw & Anthony A. Lee

ISBN : 978-81-963601-0-8 Paperback 2023 pp. 110 Rs. 495 Indian

Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/819636010X?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/819636010X?ref=myi_title_dp

Like Mir, Shaw and Lee have taken a classic text and recast it in the furnace of their imaginations. Here is a Mir never seen in English before, witty, rhetorically complex, embodying passion, and making us laugh painfully with his skillfully deployed humor. Here are his poems, no longer receding into the past like ships in the mist, no longer separated from us by the veil of language. They sprout from the ground with color and energy, and in this book, reinvented, they live.
–Tony Barnstone, , Professor of English Whittier College, Poet, Author, co-translator of Faces Hidden in the Dust: Selected Ghazals of Ghalib

Rendered hemistich by hemistich, Mir’s verses come alive with the poet’s aesthetic vitalities, his two worlds – the mundane and the divine, his philosophy of love and life. The translations carry a certain aura of light and shade emanating from the original Mir text. The joy these translations offer lies not so much in transcending the strict bonds of the ghazal artifice as in the enhancement of the virtues of what is being said. Their excellence emerges from free versions, escape from self-indulgence; commendable.
The translators have attempted the primacy of the original and sustained fidelity with passion and precision.
— Bhupender Parihar Aziz, Urdu poet and translator, author, Ghalib: Decolonizing Meaning

Bilal A. Shaw is a Kashmiri-American scientist who completed his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in quantum information science. He studied Mathematics at Whittier College, California. In the past he has worked on DNA-based computation, software architecture, and theoretical self-assembly. Currently he works as a senior director of data-science in identity and fraud analytics at Transunion. With Tony Barnstone he recently published Faces Hidden in the Dust: Selected Ghazals of Ghalib (White Pine Press, 2022). Some of these ghazals have been published in Literary Matters, Able Muse, Arroyo Literary Review, and Pratik. He currently lives and works in Santa Monica, California.


Anthony A. Lee, Ph.D. (History, UCLA, 2007) is retired as a lecturer in African American history at UCLA and now continues his research as an independent scholar. He is the General Editor of the academic series, Studies in the Babi and Baha’i Religions (Kalimat Press, 1982- ), now in its twenty-eighth volume. He translated, with Amin Banani and Jascha Kessler, Tahirih: A Portrait in Poetry: Selected Poems of Qurratu’l-‘Ayn (Kalimat Press, 2005). Also with Amin Banani, Rumi: 53 Secrets from the Tavern of Love (White Cloud Press, 2014); with Nesreen Akhtarkhavari, Love Is My Savior: Arabic Poems of Rumi (MSU Press, 2016), Wine of Reunion: Arabic Poems of Rumi (MSU Press, 2017), and Desert Sorrows: Poems of Tayseer al-Sboul (MSU Press: 2015).

UPCOMING NIRALA RELEASE: AMERICAN POET RUTH DANON’S TURN UP THE HEAT : NEW POEMS

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“… a beautiful book, at turns tender, wry, and heartbreaking.”

— Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

Turn Up the Heat: New Poems by Ruth Danon ISBN: 978-81-957816-4-5 pp84 2023

American poet Ruth Danon hates and fears the cold in all its forms – literal, metaphorical, external, internal.  In Turn Up the Heat she ventures into the chill and explores as well as its problematic opposite. In poems that range widely in form and style and that travel through place and time, Danon introduces us to St. Anthony, who stole fire from the devil and heated the icy desert, and heretic and genius Giordano Bruno, whose prescient astronomical vision led him led him to be burned at the stake. As she moves from Renaissance Italy to modern Sardinia and frosty upstate New York, from the desert to the domestic, Danon’s peregrinations occur within the context of our own times—of a planet grown increasingly hot, a pandemic as cruel as an inquisition, of hotheaded and often coldhearted politics of America, as she contends with personal loneliness, isolation, guilt, and longing. How, she asks us, can we make and find the fire that warms, sustains, and illumines us?

“Turn Up the Heat is a beautiful book, at turns tender, wry, and heartbreaking. Whether she’s writing about growing older, or the challenges of domesticity, or the fickleness of the English language, Ruth Danon has created a hymn to our complex present and our anxious, unknowable future. These poems altered me as I was reading them, and they are going to continue to stay with me for a very long time.
— Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, author of American Estrangement


In her stark and truly remarkable new book, Turn Up the Heat, Ruth Danon reveals just how much is on edge, from the vast, incremental movements of time, space, and the weather to the tiniest fragile tendril or thread. These poems quite sensitively contend with damage, scarring, alarms, ruins, and forces that threaten relationships, desires, and life itself—including the icy threat of aging. Yet, there is mitigation – the happy swerve of an unexpected cat in the continuum. In her book Danon conjures stillness and rest in contrast to disquiet. In this the poet is aided by the occult powers of Giordano Bruno and St. Anthony of Egypt, bringing light and warmth to the physical and emotional desert she describes. A wondrous collection.
—Stephen Massimilla, author of Frank Dark


Ruth Danon’s Turn Up the Heat is elegiac, edgy, and disquieting. The book takes its main threads from St. Anthony, the saint of lost things, and from Giordano Bruno, who was burned alive for believing in a heliocentric solar system. In articulating a new language to think about losses—in the form of feeling coldness and the cold—Danon takes on aging, the notion of freedom, the idea of bodily autonomy, and the physicality of the self-made real. This is a serious and effective book.
—Sean Singer, author of Today in the Taxi


Ruth Danon is a poet keenly aware of the way we construct and destroy the world through language. Like a child playing the Freudian game of fort-da, or the artist Louise Bourgeois “undoing, redoing,” she gives us visions of life stripped down, of moon without sun, then lights small, red heaters. Time and again, wry, and even tragic resignation (“In this desert I give up”) leads surprisingly, often humorously, to an oasis in the quotidian, as in the recurrent image of golden butter gracing dry bread. Collapse actually becomes resurrection: in humble yet fierce, cockeyed and clearsighted celebrations of resilience, the speaker “refuse[s] tragedy . . . easing [her] self into some sort of human compassion,” and the little cat, her sometime avatar, stops the anxious licking that’s laid her bare. Because the poet does not shy from nakedness, darkness and cold, broken glass and ancient graves, Turn Up the Heat earns its epiphanies. You close this visionary book with a sense that things destroyed can also be put back together, that a fine and canny calibration of light in relation to dark may not rescue the planet but could save our souls.
—Natania Rosenfeld, author of The Blue Bed


A work of subtle resistance, Ruth Danon’s Turn Up the Heat is a poetic pilgrimage that travels through the heart of uncertainty to compassionate acceptance of one’s internal universe, the world, and its mysterious ways. Whether addressing a need to not be afraid – of the cold, death, the death of the Earth, or running out of butter – it’s the speaker’s willingness to let herself turn silver and amazed that makes these poems insist and burn. Just as burning is a form of yearning – and yearning akin to ache – Turn Up the Heat, is infused with a wisdom and deep humility that invites you to make do with what you have while staying open to surprise.
— Tina Cane, author of Body of Work and Year of the Murder Hornet


Ruth Danon’s Turn Up the Heat is a collection of delectable equivocations, of cerebral, soul-searching poems, buzzing with enticing details ranging from a “two-faced stove,” and “men falling out of beds,” to “white rice, / waiting in a small pot.” Readers will find themselves, off-kilter, led to puzzling things out, wondering if we, too, may have “gambled on the wrong saint” in this life. These are poems of nourishment and exile, of domestic transit, as “so many little earths/orbit the plate /around red radishes that burn the throat.” That burning and the poet’s fear of cold are recurring tropes, one as fierce and penetrating as Robert Frost’s fire and ice. And when the poet soberly admits her fears, “because my mind is right,” we think of Lowell, with the opposite sentiment. But here, we are chilled, and awed, and awake in the poetry she makes of this awareness, a poetry entirely her own.
— Elaine Sexton, author of Drive


Turn Up the Heat indeed, and learn from this elemental, elegiac collection by Ruth Danon. Follow Danon to a bonfire in Sardegna, which leads to thoughts of the heroic heretic, Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake, and then to our own, contemporary burnings. The heat of desire, the danger of black ice, the sagacity-gathering process of “edging into age.” These poems embody tricks of vision, quick-witted plays on words, “the false and the true, the angel and devil, [standing] equal.” This book burns with hope, as “white branches of birch trees trace bright lines against the oncoming dark.”
— Moira Egan, author of Synæsthesium


Ruth Danon invites us to meet the devil and wonders about the best approach: “will I spit or / will I chew?” What a wild question! She writes poems that reverberate, not zipping up her lines but casting forward and doubling back, pressing hard on each word until our perceptions shift. Her poems in this marvelous collection are dramas of integrity that offer no easy comfort and suggest how even mistakes can be profitable for the spirit. “Yes, I was wanting my own messy future,” she writes. It’s when her poems seem to be especially quiet that you realize she’s imagining how best to sneak up on the devil.
—Lee Upton, author of The Day Every Day Is


For the poet Ruth Danon, “what remains outside of direct perception is a lure of sorts.” And the poems in Turn Up the Heat are themselves lures—dazzlingly structures made of alternating instances of assurance and bewilderment— bidding the reader join in the “hunt for what can’t be seen or known.” And so, we enter a world steeped in metaphysical encounters: “the snow/seemed beyond relief, /clutched in the naked/arms of trees,” “the slow movement of stones/sliding over silt/after we stopped/looking,” “the tree inverted—its branches/become roots.” With the desire to know (and love) “what’s off the edge of the page” comes a certain vulnerability, a “hesitation, /and weariness/in the bones.” But Danon teaches us how to stand “in front of a smudged mirror” fearlessly, she shows us how to become a “student of blush/and rogue streaks in the sky.”
—Barbara Tomash, author of Her Scant State

Ruth Danon is a distinguished American poet and scholar. Her previous books include Word Has It (Nirala Series 2018), Limitless Tiny Boat (BlazeVOX, 2015), Triangulation from a Known Point (North Star Line, 1990), a chapbook, Living with the Fireman (Ziesing Brothers, 1980), and a book of literary criticism, Work in the English Novel (Croom-Helm, 1985), which was reissued by Routledge in 2021. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies including Eternal Snow (Nirala, 2017), Resist Much, Obey Little (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), Noon: An Anthology of Short Poems (Isobar Press, 2019), CAPS 20 Anthology (CAPS 2020), Stronger than Fear: Poems of Compassion, Empowerment and Social Justice (Cave Moon Press, 2022), and is forthcoming in the Poetry is Bread Anthology (Nirala, 2023).


Her work was selected by Robert Creeley for Best American Poetry, 2002. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Florida Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Post Road, Versal, Mead, BOMB, the Paris Review, Fence, the Boston Review, 3rd Bed, Crayon, 2Horatio, Barrow Street, and many other publications in the U.S. and abroad. Danon has been a fellow at the Ragdale Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Ora Lerman Foundation, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. For 23 years she taught in the creative and expository writing programs that she directed for The School of Professional Studies at New York University and was founding Director of their Summer Intensive Creative Writing Workshop. Those workshops ran from 1999 to 2016.


She is the founder of LIVE WRITING: A Project for the Reading, Writing, and Performance of Poetry, which has been operating since 2018. Before the pandemic she curated the Spring Street Reading Series for Atlas Studios in Newburgh. In 2021 she was co-curator of the Newburgh Literary Festival in Newburgh, NY and is currently one of the curators for the newly created Beacon LitFest, to be held in June of 2023.
Currently, she lives in Beacon, NY and teaches through LIVE WRITING and New York Writer’s Workshop.

New Release: The Diaries of Adam and Eve, A Novel by Evald Flisar

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Translated from the Slovene by David Limon

The Diaries of Adam and Eve, A Novel by Evald Flisar 978-81-957816-1-4 pp 216 Paperback 2022 Rs. 495 Indian

Amazon India: https: //www.amazon.in/dp/8195781616?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/8195781616?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon USA : https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/8195781616?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/8195781616?ref=myi_title_dp

Slovenia’s bestselling novelist, Evald Flisar’s the Dairies of Adam and Eve is one of the most unusual complex novels.  Considered one of the most unusual “love stories,” the book weaves the story of Adam and Eve are a young couple who desperately want a child, but cannot have one, because one of them is infertile. Unable to communicate openly, they secretly read each other’s diaries, and in their need to have a child finally invent one. The problem is that each invents a different one and that by clinging to their images, living in a world that is reality and fiction at the same time, their lives take a turn for disaster. The novel requires dedicated reading, but is endowed with many layers of meaning, open to many interpretations, rich with unexpected twists and turns, forcing us to doubt the certainty of what we perceive as reality.

“Flisar’s novel can be seen as an artistic testimony that mental problems are in a way worse than physical illness, since their consequence is that a person cannot be included in a community and in tune with it, and with this everything that gives meaning to our life remains absent.”

—Majda Travnik Vode in the Afterword

Born in 1945 in Slovenia, then still part of Yugoslavia, Evald Flisar is an iconic figure in contemporary Slovenian literature. Novelist, playwright, essayist, editor, globe-trotter (travelled in 98 countries), underground train driver in Sydney, Australia, editor of (among other publications) an encyclopedia of science and invention in London, author of short stories and radio plays for the BBC, president of the Slovene Writers’ Association (1995 – 2002), since 1998 editor of the oldest Slovenian literary journal Sodobnost (Contemporary Review), he is also the author of 16 novels (eleven of them short-listed for kresnik, the Slovenian “Booker”), two collections of short stories, three travelogues, two books for children and 15 stage plays (eight nominated for Best Play of the Year Award, three times won the award).

Winner of Prešeren Foundation Prize, the highest state award for prose and drama, and the prestigious Župančič Award for lifetime achievement. His work has been translated into 40 languages. His stage plays are regularly performed all over the world, most recently in Austria, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, Serbia, Bosnia, Belarus, USA and Mexico. Attended more than 50 literary readings and festivals on all continents. Lived abroad for 20 years (three years in Australia, 17 years in London). Since 1990 he lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

His legendary novel, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, set in Ladakh and Zanskar, is the most widely read Slovenian work of fiction since World War II; still a “must-read” 36 years after its first publication, it will soon appear in its 12th edition. His novel My Father’s Dreams, published in 2005, has earned him a place at the European Literature Night, an annual event at the British Library that features 6 of the best contemporary European writers. Another of his novels, On the Gold Coast, was nominated for the Dublin International Literary Award and was listed by The Irish Times as one of 13 best novels about Africa written by Europeans, alongside Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Isak Dinesen, JG Ballard, Bruce Chatwin and other great literary names.

In June/July 2015 he completed a three-week literary tour of USA, reading at the Congress Library in Washington and SUA convention in Chicago, attending the performance of his play Antigone Now at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington, speaking at the Slovene Permanent Mission at the United Nations.

His international success is truly astonishing: speakers of languages into which his works have so far been translated represent half of the world’s population.

NEW RELEASE : Shramatan : A Nepalese Migrant Worker’s Memoir by BN Joshi

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Translated from the Nepali by Arun Budhathok

Shramatan: A Nepalese Migrant Worker’s Memoir by BN JOSHI Translated from the Nepali by Arun Budhathok ISBN 978-81-957816-5-2 Paperback 2023 Rs. 495 Indian Art by Sarita Dongol Amazon USA: https://www.amazon.com/dp/8195781659?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon India : https://www.amazon.in/dp/8195781659?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/8195781659?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/8195781659?ref=myi_title_dp

Shramatan is a harrowing ride that millions of Nepalese take every day, a tale of ‘coffin ships’ that take them away from their humble hillside homes to a hostile world of uncertainty and misery. A highly evocative, lived experience that can its readers sleepless nights.

– Yuyutsu Sharma, world-renowned Himalayan poet

Shramatan is a flashback of the author’s life. Although it is a memoir in terms of genre, it has a mocktail flavor of stories, poems, essays and plays. The dialogues, setting and characterization seem fictional. This book is not a flower pot found in the crowded cities, it’s a floral countryside garden. Being a flaneur and chronicle the personal details in scintillating prose remains the hallmark of Joshi’s craft.

–Raj Kumar Baniya, Kantipur

Before reading Shramatan, one has to gather courage and make one’s heart strong. Once you start, it’s impossible to stop. Quoting scientist Albert Einstein’s statement, “The power of imagination is more important than knowledge, “instead of surrendering to death, the writer is better off searching for imaginative solutions. Comparing the situation of the country and the government’s attitude through ‘natural reflection’ is extremely relevant. Also, the descriptive style is unparalleled.

–Sharu Joshi Shrestha, former UN Women official

Shramatan is a powerful memoir that can represent the emotional life of millions of Nepalese migrants who move out to seek employment and fortune. The protagonist’s vivid description of the life and death of Palpal stems from what the author saw, experienced and lived. The image of the British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘life in death’ continues to haunt as one reads the book.

–Tulasi Acharya, Annapurna Post

Shramatan is an endless catalogue of assiduous journeys trampled over recurring failures. Even in modern times, how time forces humans to struggle as primitive people? The book dramatizes how much suffering the humans have to undergo to their flaming desire to survive alive.

–Rupak Alankar, Naya Patrika

Shramatan brings forth reality that seems fictional. This is a writing done with the dark ink of tears. In it, more than the mind, the heart and emotions advance to the forefront. This is the text that evokes suffering caused by the desire for foreign employment. The book ridicules the establishment that attempts to run the nation on the basis of remittance rather than exploring job opportunities in the home country. The author has presented a vivid memoir of his own Shramatan experience in the book which has to be first-hand.

–Kumari Lama, Gorkhapatra Daily

This book has exposed the hidden side of truth and resultant societal insinuation of the foreign employment. The author has dared to bring to light the social incongruities and human degradation triggered by deportation and transnational human trafficking. There’s a great deal about failures and ineffectual implementation of the Nepalese government’s policies. The language is emotionally surcharged and compelling. For example:  The sound of crying gets stifled in the sea. So does a slice of dried meat found in the central desert.

–Dr. Somlal Subedi, Former Chief Secretary, Government of Nepal

Nepalese novelist and travel writer BN Joshi was educated at Tribhuvan University, Nepal and has published two books, Modern Beli, a novel and Shramatan. Joshi regularly contributes to national papers raising the issues of youth and labor migration.

He lives in Kathmandu and works as Executive Director at Tamas, a private business company.

Arun Budhathoki is a Nepalese poet, fiction writer, journalist and translator based in Canada. He has authored two poetry books, Edge and Prisoner of an iPad and two fiction books, Second in Love: Short Stories and Going Home. His work has appeared in several newspapers and journals including Vice, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Pratik, Asia Times, and Nikkei Asian Review, among others.

Sarita Dongol is a freelance visual artist with a Master degree in Fine arts from Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal. She is the Lecturer at Himalayan College of Architecture. In addition, her 12 solo art exhibitions in Nepal, Japan, France and Australia, her works have also been exhibited in many national and international Galleries since 1992. She received South Asian artist residency in Fukuoka , Japan 2002, South Korea in Gwanju 2006. International artists residency The floating Peers, Bangladesh 2014. She was awarded a Gold medal from Arniko Yuwa Sekwas Kosh 2011