Upcoming Nirala Release : What Love Is: Book One

Posted on March 27, 2024 by Nirala Publications

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

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

Posted on June 30, 2023 by Nirala Publications

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.

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

Posted on April 14, 2023 by Nirala Publications

“… 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 : Lost Horoscope & Other New Poems

Posted on September 28, 2022 by Nirala Publications

by Yuyutsu Sharma

“The world-renowned Himalayan poet”

—The Guardian

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

—Charles Bernstein

“Yuyutsu Sharma should be known as The Himalayan Neruda”

—Mike Graves

“Yuyutsu Sharma is one of the finest poets on planet earth”

—American poet Sean Thomas Dougherty, author, The Second O of Sorrow

Lost Horoscope is a grand poem of loss, healing and recovery in the Covid times by Himalayan poet Yuyutsu Sharma. The title poem captures, in words of American poet James Ragan, “an enlarged memory of his childhood and his creative will to recover and rediscover what healing eternal truths lay, lost and buried in our collective unconscious decades and centuries ago.”

The book also showcases 13 new poems that Yuyutsu wrote before the Pandemic and bear testimony to his evolution as a poet, celebrating diversity of multiple forms and faith. Here folk imagination fuses with the personal histories to recreate his encounters with the wayward shadows of his relentless travels around the globe: a young woman revealing her actual age in a Chengdu bar, a lost lover on the flagstone steps of the Annapurna’s steepest climb, a stranger’s request to compose a poem at a birthday party in a San Francisco, a scorpion scar on the marble shoulder of an Australian interpreter in Beijing Book bar, the sighting of jasmine flowers at Vishnu’s alter at a Boston Art Exhibit, a hillside grandma’s advice revealing the wisdom of eating ants to improve eyesight and a demon child on a giant swing ready to unhinge the hunger of the huddled huts in the high Himalayas. In the final poem, the poet reminisces on his life wondering where the story of his travels around the world would come to an end.

These powerful, humane and heart-rendering poems composed in the heat and hush of Yuyutsu’s travels are true jasmine jewels of the modern-day wisdom restored to seek solace in our turbulent times. Another tour de force from the maestro who makes his living as a poet and wears his world and his vocation like his coat to create eternal gems of the contemporary times.

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

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

“A mini epic of recovered and enlarged memory.”

—Robert Scotto, Author, Imagined Secrets, Professor, Baruch College

“There’s a brilliance in the mind of the poet whose imagination created this gem of a poem out of the “crumpled calendar of chaos,” aptly called the “Lost Horoscope.” I was hypnotically immersed in the structure of steps that each stanza offered, hurling the reader down into memory, into the “wingless realm of illogical proclamations” and the resultant “wasteful heap of despair,” while seeking “solace, sleep, and salvation” to arrive at the epiphany that “perhaps all those prophesies were true.” Like an Eliot poem, to gain the enlightenment inherent in this poem, you must read the poem again to capture the nuance and metaphysics of the allusions connecting each image, each stanza, to recover the revelatory “medley of omens” leading to the abyss of “imminent doom.” One must journey, “sight fractured,” through the “moldy world of rickety realities” –typhoid, covid– while “humming the prayers, drenched in the Monsoon showers of the Himalayan valleys rolling in the world of spirits and sages.” Like the poet, one must risk the life of his creative will to recover and rediscover what healing eternal truths lay, lost and buried in our collective unconscious decades and centuries ago… a magnificent sight-healing journey.” — James Ragan, the Emerson Poetry Prize, NEA Fellowship, the Swan Foundation Humanitarian Award

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 Ram Dass Sharma is a world renowned Himalayan poet and translator.

He has published ten poetry collections including, The Second Buddha Walk, A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems, Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems, Nepal Trilogy, Space Cake, Amsterdam and Annapurna Poems. Four books of his poetry have appeared in French, Spanish and Slovenian.

Widely traveled author, he has read his works at several prestigious places including Seamus Heaney Center for Poetry, Belfast, P.E.N, Paris, Whittier College, California, WB Yeats’ Center, Sligo, Gustav Stressemann Institute, Bonn, Rubin Museum, New York, Cosmopoetica, Cordoba, Spain, The Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, Lu Xun Literary Institute, Beijing, The Guardian Newsroom, London, Trois Rivieres Poetry Festival, Quebec, FIP, Buenos Aires, Slovenian Book Days, Ljubljana, Royal Society of Dramatic Arts, London, Gunter Grass House, Bremen, International Poetry Festival, Granada, Nicaragua, Nehru Center, London, Beijing Normal University, March Hare, Newfoundland, Canada, London Olympics 2012, Frankfurt Book Fair, and Villa Serbelloni, Italy.

He has held workshops in creative writing and translation at Queen’s University, Belfast, University of Ottawa and South Asian Institute, Heidelberg University, Beijing Open University, New York University, New York and Columbia University, New York.

In 2020, his work was showcased at Royal Kew Gardens in an Exhibit, “Travel the World at Kew.” Half the year, he travels and reads all over the world and conducts Creative Writing workshops at various universities in North America and Europe but goes trekking in the Himalayas when back home.

Currently, Yuyutsu Sharma edits Pratik: A Quarterly Magazine of Contemporary Writing.

Nirala News: Releasing American poet Carrie Magness Radna’s New Book of Poems, In the Blue Hour

Posted on February 14, 2021 by Nirala Publications

In the Blue Hour : Poems, Carrie Magness Radna ISBN 978-8193936764 Paperback 2021 pp 108 Demy Rs. 495

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/8193936760?ref=myi_title_dp

In the Blue Hour, the new collection by Carrie Radna, carries the reader across borders (Italy, Egypt, 5^th Avenue and 59^th Street, NYC), and through musics (Mozart, Brahms, “Rhinestone Cowboy”), into the heart of a speaker engaged in what might be called meditations on blue. Like William Gass’s On Being Blue, and Kate Braverman’s Squandering the Blue, In the Blue Hour dissects numerous kinds of blue—the blue hour, the Blue Grotto, blue Chevrolet, and many kinds of blues—holiday blues, pocket-size blues, typewriter blues. Its lessons can be painful. In “I wear his sadness like a shirt,” the speaker learns that “Loss does not feel like cotton.” But they can be exhilarating, too. “Can we repair the sky?” the poet asks, and answers yes, once we get above the clouds. We live in a world where Buddhas appear alongside monuments to Trump. In the Blue Hour looks hard at that world, sometimes close enough to spit, sometimes far enough away to soar. It’s a good, blue ride.

–Tim Tomlinson, author of This Is Not Happening to You, (stories), Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire, (poems) and Co-founder, New York Writers Workshop

Carrie Magness Radna is a poet of light and shadow, time and space, inner and outer oceans. Every hour holds years of meaning, and those meanings contain the seeds of their opposites, as a disaster contains all the beauty in the universe: “After lightning struck / the weeping willow, / I saw all the tiny flame-bits / that showered the bark whole / resembling stars … I, covered in ash, was cleansed.” She invites us to walk a path that turns and shifts with the progress of sunlight through trees; sometimes we get turned around, hypnotized by the changing light, but always we are led home by the stars that have grown inside our skin. Always, we know how lucky we are to be alive, to be light: “Floating on a makeshift raft, / but not alone, not dying yet.”

–Sharon Mesmer, Poet, professor of creative writing at New York University and the New School

In the Blue Hour is a collection of poems about love “stripped raw” but with “honey-sap inside”. Carrie Magness Radna’s voice is both tender and tough as she explores her attachments to a sometimes cruel world, and her poetic techniques are deftly displayed at every emotional pitch. I recommend especially “Purple Things” and “Lily” for their exploration of melancholy, “Music Is an Anodyne” and “Melted Rain” for their trenchant and wistful evocations of passing time, “Dilated at Dark” and “Sarabande” for their depiction of the touch that separates or unites — but all of the verses, whether on music, place (local and world-wide), memory or love, are vibrant and alive.

–Robert Scotto, author of Moondog (winner of 2008 ARSC Award for Best Research, The Independent Publisher Book Awards 2008 Bronze Medal for Biography, an entry in the 2nd edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music and is the basis of an upcoming 2020 documentary), and poetry collections Journey through India and Nepal (2010) and Imagined Secrets (2019).

Carrie Magness Radna’s In the Blue Hour is a fine book of poetry, which at times sounds like the blues, especially when it sings of the city dwellers, the lines unrushed and precise:

“Streets are now bluer. The windows, colored either in butter or goldenrod, are bleeding their light as mist from architectural honeycombs; The lights from street level explode like hot magma—cars speed on, double time . . .”

It is a book of memory– of parents, lovers, men, women, damaged or lost; of sadness and pleasure, of loneliness and struggle with depression; of a chaotic world on the brink of destruction; a book of longing:

“Man, woman, and those singularly defined,

we cross the paths to the future primed

without a road map, without explanation,

we exist, moving from station to station”

–Anna Halberstadt, author of Vilnius Diary and Green in a Landscape with Ashes; translator of Nocturnal Fire and Selected Selected (in Russian)

In the Blue Hour is introspective, observant, feminist and playful. This visual book of poetry paints pictures, like the artists Carrie Magness Radna references throughout, and shies away from nothing: depression, love, loss, love lost, male toxicity, sexuality, and even hangovers. These poems are playful and have sass; one poem imagines sex with Peter Gabriel and in another, she writes, “I don’t date monsters.” And, in another she skillfully writes, “Fold me like a burrito in a canoe.” Many of these poems explore something so important, something I wish I read more poems about – depression. But even when these poems are their bluest, they still have hope. They still have humor. They still surprise. This is a wonderful book of poetry that explores the complexity of what it means to be human.

–Chrys Tobey, author of A Woman is a Woman is a Woman is a Woman

Beauty, love, and melancholy are Carrie Magness Radna’s themes. Her soft and gentle voice is elegiac. At their best, her poems present memorable images and metaphors that transcend our tragic limits. She might be called Keatsian in that her best poems convince readers that truth and beauty are one “and all [we] know and need to know.” For example, ‘In the sky,’ a love poem spoken to her partner in the morning, imagines the need to restore the beauty of the blown lights of the heavens. As it starts to move to its conclusion, Radna describes glories of the natural world and the flight of herself and her lover:

I woke up in the morning fog, sweet and fragrant berry-green;

…. loose invisible, silver threads were hidden in the queue

In the sky vast and unending like love should be, …

Below the sky we could fly in our minds

And repair the cracks no one else could see.

Impressed by the paradox that the imaginatively true is not the truth of reality a reader might think of the lines of Juan Ramon Jiminez translated by James Wright:

… how lovely, how lovely

Truth even if it is not real, how lovely.

–Mike Graves, author of A Prayer for the Less VIOLENT Offenders: The Selected Poems of Mike Graves

In this collection of poems, Carrie Magness Radna slowly turns a kaleidoscope of muted colors offering a palette that changes from bright orange skies to grey moon nights revealing a view of her life and her world as a work in progress. Her stories span the full range of human tragedy and foibles but the heart of the book lies in her personal story. The colors of her story are varying shades of blue that capture a lingering melancholia as she examines her life choices and their consequences. She paints a penetrating portrait of a life in question and the pursuit of honest answers. A fascinating glimpse at the inner workings of a creative mind’s process of self-discovery and revelation through poetry. A powerful and illuminating read.

– Phillip Giambri, Author, Confessions of a Repeat Offender and The Amorous Adventures of Blondie and Boho

Blue infuses the firmament from which many of these poems descend, depend, impend, often clouding, precipitate with actual rain and sometime snow (inevitably melting), inundates “an inner ocean”, others real — lakes and rivers — that “flow like water” below. It varies widely, from the paint on “fantastic” cars (“big and fast as spaceships”) the poet dreamed as a child, to the blues playing “loudly” in her head, coloring mood to “rare indigo,” to true. “I swim in (or I am) an imaginary sea,” she writes (in “Keep breathing”), “crashing against the rocky street.” This is a voice not heard in the wilderness but a cry emanating from a metropolis. Very soft, very clear, it breaks on the ears and enters the mind in a curious amalgam of city racket combined with waves one can see and feel and enter as though the soul were bare feet. There’s an emphatic cadence to these poems, one that begins as it ends, suspended on the page, sometimes where it lands, sometimes reaching outwards. Poised alternately between the ascension of art and immersion in quotidian waters, between refinement and candid observation, forthright, associative, and free, with interpolated trills of operatic tremolo, covert confessional notes caught between chronicle and reflection, In the Blue Hour archives recollection’s collage.

–Jack Cooper, editor/co-publisher, Poets Wear Prada, and creator of These Are Aphorithms https://aphorithms.blogspot.com

If I were to assign a color to the spectrum of Carrie Magness Radna’s In the Blue Hour, it would not only be blue, but purple, to signify the poet’s passion, the royal color that she opines has many layers, like fresh blood oozing from dark roses and violets. Ms. Radna gives nature and human nature such a lyrical, musical, and radiant twist, posing melodious and imaginative philosophical questions (Can we repair the sky?) from poem to poem that etch indelibly like delicate pieces of art. In this gem of a collection, both melancholy and beauty coincide with the blooming of flowers and the endless sky, and the reader willingly follows as Radna takes us on her real and metaphorical travels. With a child’s exuberance and an adult’s acuity, she turns family secrets, dark clouds, and muddled hearts into pearls of wisdom and a rebirth of joy (with a few well-aimed digs at Donald Trump, to boot). These poems will fill you with hope and song, and even within the blueness, they will comfort you.

–Cindy Hochman, editor-in-chief of First Literary Review-East

New Release : Dancing in Place: Poems by S. Renay Sanders

Posted on September 1, 2019 by Nirala Publications

Dancing in Place: Poems by S. Renay Sanders ISBN 978-8182500488 Paperback pp 64 Rs 395

Chock full of song and timbre and truth on every page, Renay Sander’s Dancing in Place is an intimate look into the landscape of Northern Ohio’s working class. Metal lunch boxes, lace-up boots; women in pert party dresses with Bibles tucked safely in their purses, this collection showcases the realities, the courage and honor it takes for “hometown’ culture to survive urban growth. The way people living in these communities lean into one another to preserve the rich roots of where it all began – with the music. The tempo of the rain hitting the ground, the cadence of cicadas; from those early primal connections fixed in mountain music, to Polka, to Rock and Roll, to Up Town Funk.

“Believe me reader, you will feel the beat.” — Kari Gunter-Seymour Author of Serving, Poet Laureate, Athens, OH

“Dancing in Place delivers a generous serving of poetry from a lady with her sleeves rolled up at the all-night cafeteria across from the music club. Memories, characters, emotions, experience, all the ingredients. Savor the word song.” —Chuck Joy, Poet Laureate, Erie County PA

“Renay Sander’s poems celebrate post industrial Cleveland while hearkening back to her Appalachian roots. These are lyrics laced with wry humor and raw emotion that dance “in the light of the full now moon.” Feel their pull and sway.” —Ray MacNeice, author of Love Song for Cleveland, host of the Tongue-in-Groove poetry jam

The voice in Renay Sanders’ debut collection, Dancing in Place, is both knowing and pondering. Exploration of the ethereal realm of a veiled bridge or a ghostly fiddle bow is skillfully balanced against the tangible world of metal lunch boxes and AM radio in a parked car. These are poems of place: Cleveland’s blue collar, rock and roll history; a homespun mountain landscape; the inner life of spirit. The reader is guided into the particular atmosphere of each via the poet’s deft images, her clear and nearly audible voice.” Barbara Sabol, author of Solitary Spin

Nirala News– American poet David Austell's The Tin Man to be the first of five Poetry-Book Releases to celebrate the Poetry Month, 2018

Posted on April 21, 2018 by Nirala Publications

Nirala to celebrate Poetry Month by launching 5 new books by 5 American Poets in April, The first one, American poet David Austell’s The Tin Man now out and available on Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CJTDLLK

The Tin Man, by distinguished American poet and educationist, David B. Austell, is a moving homage to a little known but charismatic figure in the Christian biblical narratives, Saint Joseph of Arimathea. Completed after six years of research and writing, The Tin Man is based on a myriad of primary and secondary source materials including canonical texts, apocrypha, religious traditions, church history, medieval literature, and folklore. The Tin Man is a grand narrative poem in epic style regarding the key intersections of Joseph of Arimathea’s life both with Pontius Pilate, Roman Governor of Palestine, and with the strange and charismatic Jesus of Nazareth. The poem explores the experiences of a dramatically flawed man, and the transmutation of his inner being in the presence of the Numinous.

Joseph of Arimathea appears as a key figure in the “passion narratives,” those sections of the four Christian Gospels that focus on the trial and death of Jesus in Jerusalem immediately prior to the celebration of the Jewish Passover in 33 A.D. It is here that we learn of Joseph’s status in the community as a wealthy man, a secret follower of Jesus, and a member of the high council of Jerusalem. It is also here that we read of Joseph’s unenviable task in the interment of the maverick rabbi who many believed to be the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. In the apocryphal gospels and later writings, Joseph’s influential role in the early years of the Christian Church is brought to light. For the first time, we are introduced to Joseph of Arimathea as a member of the Davidian royal family, the uncle of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the great-uncle of Jesus. Later in the Vulgate, Joseph is referred to as NobilisDecurio (Noble Decurion). Thereafter he becomes the Roman citizen, the provincial Senator, and the legendary Roman superintendent of tin mining operations in the southwestern shires of England. In the final analysis, The Tin Man explores the life-changes that transform an arrogant and troubled expatriate into a Christian saint, missionary, evangelist, and church leader.

The Tin Man is the epic song of Joseph of Arimathea.

“The figure of Joseph of Arimathea has always been dear to English hearts because of the age-old tradition, linked not only with Cornwall but also with Glastonbury, that he travelled here himself…Anyone reading this work will feel a great debt of gratitude to David Austell…The writing is full of music and it is music that leads us to the amazing figure of ‘The Tin Man’ so that we journey with him through history as pilgrims.”

-from the Introduction by the Very Reverend Dr. Robert A. Willis, Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, England

“Very compelling…an immense work…the poems are lit with primary passion, which is everything, of course.”

–Christian Wiman, Poet and Senior Lecturer in Religion and Literature, Yale Divinity School
“The Tin Man is an elegant wrestle with history and meaning.”

–Eliza Griswold, Journalist, author, and poet, The Tenth Parallel, Wide Awake Field, I am the Beggar of the World

The Tin Man is a meticulously researched and masterfully written account of Joseph of Arimathea. David Austell weaves prose and poetry, history and imagination, humor and gravity into an exquisite, seamless story that is both fascinating and a pleasure to read. David’s craft of poetry and prose here is exquisite. “

–Sholeh Wolpe, Poet, Dramatist, and Performance Artist

The Tin Man is a fascinating collage of poetry, theology, history, epic, meditation, and engagement with large ideas. It’s a wonderful book and unlike any other I’ve ever read.

–Kevin Prufer, Poet and Professor of Creative Writing, University of Houston

Enlightening and engaging…this marvelous read introduces you to the saint evolved from a lifetime of adventures as a soldier, senator and merchant. David Austell’s tantalizing tale, pulled from the mists of time, places flesh-and-blood on one of the central, but little-known characters in the chronicles of Jesus Christ. These incomparable, extraordinary narrative-poems shed a light on the heretofore unexplored Joseph of Arimathea as a man who sought an ordinary existence but came to believe and live the missionary life of The Way.

The Reverend Canon Matthew T. L. Corkern,, Rector, Calvary Church, Summit, New Jersey

David B. Austell, Ph.D. is Associate Provost and Director of the International Students and Scholars Office at Columbia University in New York City where he is also an Associate Professor of International Education in Teachers College-Columbia University (adjunct). David has over thirty years of executive leadership experience in International Education, and is a frequent writer and presenter in his professional field. David has undergraduate and graduate degrees in English Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also completed his Ph.D. in Higher Education, focusing on International Education. His doctoral dissertation, The Birds in the Rich Forest, concerned Chinese students in the United States during the Student Democracy Movement. David was a Fulbright Fellow in Japan and Korea in 1992. He is also a poet, and The Tin Man is his third book.

American poet, Otis Kidwell Burger's fabulous book, Cats, Love & Other Surprises in Nirala Series

Posted on February 24, 2018 by Nirala Publications

Cats, Love & Other Surprises by Otis Kidwell Burger

Illustrations by Katherine Burger

ISBN : 978-8182500891 2017 Hardback pp 65

Cats, Love & Other Surprises is an astonishing book of poems by 93-year old Otis Kidwell Burger, of New York City. Both a poet and a sculptor, Otis delights in the company of her cats in verse both whimsical and lyrical. Other poems reflect on a long life divided between New York City and a country cabin in the New England woods; these explore family memories, the vagaries of love, and the natural world, to which she is connected by both scientific curiosity (she was a zoology major at Cornell College) and philosophical questioning. The poems traverse territories from the quotidian to the metaphysical; from rejoicing in the return of a lost cat “sitting on my lap purring/and stitching us together again/with her tiny, needle-sharp claws” to imagining a prehistoric woman artist sitting on the floor of her cave, “whittling a bit of mammoth bone. /I don’t know yet if it will be/A horse or a bison. Prey. Food. Perhaps a charm for the hunter./Or perhaps a cave bear, immense, terrible./Death itself, but made small and manageable. A protection.” Solemn, yet also witty and accessible, these are American poems of great strength and a quirky animistic sensibility. They are also poignant. Musing on her unmatched “bachelor” socks, the poet imagines their lost, significant others and why they stepped out, never to return. In another poem, she mourns that “the darkness falls/And tucks us in our homes/No more telephones/No more visiting/No more conversations/No more sleepwalking, or I/Would be five miles away soon/And in bed with you.” Delightfully illustrated by her own daughter, Katherine Burger, this is a majestic little gift from a marvellous mother/daughter team.

American writer and artist Otis Kidwell Burger was born in 1923 in Staten Island, NY, and has lived in Greenwich Village since 1932. She graduated from Cornell University and married Knox Breckenridge Burger in 1946; they had two daughters, Neall and Katherine.

Her published work includes: An Interesting Condition, a novel; The String That Went Up, a children’s book; poetry in The New Yorker, Good Housekeeping, and Gourmet Magazine; science fiction in Galaxy and Astounding magazines. She’s written book reviews for The New York Times, Book of the Month Club; The Village Voice, and Kirkus Services, as well as articles in the Villager. All of the poems included in the book, except The Stag, were written in the last two years

Katherine Burger, Otis’ second daughter, is a playwright and artist. She and her husband Randy live in the Hudson Valley.

March Release: Word Has It: Poems by distinguished American poet, Ruth Danon

Posted on February 23, 2018 by Nirala Publications

ISBN 81-8250-097-4 2018 Paperback pp 85

Word Has It, by American poet, Ruth Danon takes on the unease that has accompanied the troubling politics that have created so much disturbance in the last few years. The book launches the reader into a journey marked by foreboding and innuendo. In the first section the speaker proceeds on an uneasy path while a character named “Word,” referring to herself in the third person, offers acerbic commentary along the way. In the second section the speaker retreats first into the domestic, then to a deeper interiority in which a journey through the rooms of a house embodies a study of various states of consciousness that lead her to the recognition of her role as a poet. By the end of the second section the speaker in ready to leave the interior space and venture into the third section, where she takes on the daunting poetic task of augury. The foreboding of the first section culminates in the violence that has been hinted at all along.

Ruth Danon gives us one of her most darkly oracular works. . . . .” The poems are acid,ingenious, and unsentimental.
–Andrew Levy, editor, Resist Much, Obey Little

. . . Deep and skeptical, natural and magical, melancholic and beautiful, Danon’s oracle makes a truly compelling statement – one to be heeded, one to be savored. – Stephen Massimilla,, author, The Plague Doctor in His Hull Shaped Hat and Cooking with the Muse

Ruth Danon’s extraordinary poems take us directly into states of feeling and perception that are subtle and profound. . . These are necessary poems. –Chase Twichell, author, Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been (winner of Kingsley Tufts Award)

Poetry Reading at Montauk Club, Brooklyn

Posted on December 7, 2017 by Nirala Publications

Saturday, Dec 9, at 6: 00 — 8:00 pm

Eternal Snow Readings in New York

followed by Yuyutsu Sharma & David Austell reading their fresh work at

Montauk Club, Brooklyn The Montauk Club 25 Eighth Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217 Phone: 646 591 9951, 917 293 9334

Himalayan Poet Yuyutsu Sharma will share his recent work. After years of travelling the globe as an itinerant poet, Yuyutsu Sharma has earned the respect and admiration of thousands of people all over the world. Yuyu will unravel the secrets of Himalayan spirituality and read new poems written during his recent stay in Brooklyn.

American poet and Editor of Eternal Snow, David Austell will read his new work and discuss the anthology

The Readings from the contributors to the anthology, Eternal Snow: A Worldwide Anthology of One Hundred Twenty-Five Poetic Intersections with Himalayan Poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma will take place.

Free to Public

RSVP :Phone: 646 591 9951, 917 293 9334

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Tag Archives: American Poetry