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

“… 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

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

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

Pratik Magazine: South Asian Writing Special Issue Vol XVII No. 1-2 

Mir Taqi Mir  Mirza Ghalib  Nagarjun  Parijaat  K. Satchidanandan  Rukmini Bhaya Nair  Ravi Shankar  Gulzar Kunwar Narain  Malovika Pawar  Vivek Narayanan  Arundhathi Subramaniam  Zilka Joseph  Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih Sudeep Sen  Kalpna Singh-Chitnis  Nishi Chawla  Reeti Mishra  Ashwani Kumar Rabindra K Swain  Annie Zaidi  Daud Kamal  Nasreen Anjum Bhatti  Zulfikar Ghose  Sarwat Husain   Zeeshan Sahil  Moniza Alvi  Munir Niazi  Azra Abbas  Yasmeen Hameed  Sarmad Sehbai  Afzal Syed  Waqas Khwaja  Iftikhar Arif  Majeed Amjad  Shadab Zeest Hashmi Anar  Tamilini  S. Karunakaran Siththanthan  Ajeet Cour  Shamsur Rahman  Aminur Rahman Fazal Shahabuddin  Rebecca Haquel  Carolyne Wright Dilara Hafiz  Dilara Hashem  Shamim Azad  Nasima Sultana  Taslima Nasrin  Emer Davis  Rhony Bhopla  Kumar Vikram  Megha Sood  Indran Amirthanayagam Shikha Malaviya  Anand Thakore  Rochelle Potkar Rishi Dastidar Roopa Ramamoorthi  Pramila Venkateswaran Nabina Das Namita Gokhle Divik Ramesh  Mandira Ghosh  Felicity Volk Shayamal Hari Adhikari Ramanand Rathi Sukrita Paul Kumar Yogesh Patel  Divya Joshi Rajni Shankar-Brown  Shailendra Sakar  Ramesh Chitiz Shyam Rimal  Shamsher Bahadur Singh Ashok Vajpeyi Anamika  Manglesh Dabral  Vinita Agrawal  Shahnaz Ameer John Brantingham Amar Aakash

 Amazon India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B0BSKRGP4F?ref=myi_title_dp

Amazon USA: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSKRGP4F?ref=myi_title_dp

Amazon Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0BSKRGP4F?ref=myi_title_dp

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BSKRGP4F?ref=myi_title_dp

Yuyutsu Sharma’s Lost Horoscope Book Party in Brooklyn

Yuyutsu Sharma’s Lost Horoscope Book Party in Brooklyn

Yuyutsu Sharma’s Lost Horoscope book party

Oct 22 at 2 pm at Flatiron Restaurant

397 5th Avenue , Brooklyn, New York, NY, United States, New York (718) 965-4000

Distinguished fellow poets David Austell, Ruth Danon , Fran Antmann , Michael Graves, Anna Halberstadt, Carrie Magness Radna Carolyn Wells, Ellen Lytle

and others will read from their books and speak at event

RSVP: pratikmagsubmissions@gmail.com

Phone:3477233967

Lost Horoscope & Other New Poems by Yuyutsu Sharma ISBN 978-8195781638 Hardcover

Amazon USA : https://www.amazon.com/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp Amzon UK : https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon CANADA: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp

“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”

— 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.

Yuyutsu Sharma to read with distinguished Irish Poets in Dublin

To celebrate the 75 years of India’s Independence, the Indian Embassy in Ireland hosts an evening of poetry and music where Yuyutsu Sharma reads with distinguished Irish poets, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Michael O’ Loughlin, Gabriel Rosenstock, Emer Davis , Judith Mok, Anne Tannam , Patrick Chapman, (with Reeti Mishra as Special Guest), in Dublin the Foxrock residence, Indian Embassy in Ireland event 8 oct, 5 and 7pm A high tea with poetry and music Host: Indian Embassy in Ireland

Yuyutsu Sharma’s 2022 Irish and American Tour

Sunday 2 Oct, 2022 2 pm Yuyutsu Sharma reading at Droichead Art Centre with Drogheda Creative Writers Host: Marian Clarke

Tuesday Oct 4. 6 pm to 7 pm Translating poetry to and from Nepali with Yuyutsu Sharma Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation 36 Fenian Street D02 CH22 Dublin, Ireland https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/421269106237/

Friday 7 Oct, 2022. 8 pm Yuyutsu Sharma  reads with Michael Coady and Mark Roper, , Poetry Plus – Carrick-on-Sui Hosted by Margaret O’ Brien

Saturday 8 Oct,2022 5-7 pm :Yuyutsu  Sharma reading with Irish Poets, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Michael O’ Loughlin, Gabriel Rosenstock, Emer Davis , Judith Mok,  Anne Tannam , Patrick Chapman, (with Reeti Mishra as Special Guest), in Dublin the Foxrock residence, Indian Embassy in Ireland event 5 and 7pm A high tea with poetry and music Host: Indian Embassy in Ireland.

United States

Saturday, October 29, 4:00pm Yuyutsu Sharma will read his poetry at the Sacramento Poetry Alliance Salon, Residence in Land Park, 1169 Perkins Way, Sacramento, CA.. After the reading, there will be music and October Festivities with food.

Sunday, October 30, 2:00pm Yuyutsu will be reading his poetry at the beautiful Chateau Davell Winery, 3020 Vista Tierra Drive in Camino, CA. To be followed by an Open Mic.

Wednesday, 2 November, 2022. Yuyutsu Sharma reading at Whittier College, 13406 Philadelphia St, Whittier, CA 90601 Host: Tony Barnstone

Wednesday, 9 November, 2022, 8:00 pm. Yuyutsu RD Sharma reading at Poor Mouth Writers’ Night feat with Soren Stockman at An Beal Bocht 445 W 238th St, New York, NY, United States, New York Host: Melinda Wilson

Saturday, 12 November, 2022, Yuyutsu RD Sharma reading Live Poetry  with Stephen Massimilla and Mary Lau Buschi, Beacon, NY Host: Ruth Danon

Sunday, 13 November, 2022, 7: 00 pm, Yuyutsu RD Sharma at Mike Grave’s Phoenix reading Busstop Cafe, West Village, Host: Michael Graves

Friday, 18 November Time: 6:30-8:30 Yuyu reading at Yale Club with Jeton Kelmendi from Kosovo, Bill Wolak & Others at 50 Vanderbilt Avenue (between 44th & 45th Streets across from Grand Central Station)  New York, NY 10017 either 17th or 18th  floor (TBA) by invitation only Sultan Catto, Host: SCatto@gc.cuny.edu Bill Wolak, Coordinator williamwolak@netzero.net

Saturday 19 November, 2022 Time: 6:00 Yuyutsu Sharma reading with Amirthanayagam, Sara Cahill Marron and Robin Hemley in New York Writers Workshop Reading Series at Underland Gallery, 457 77th Street, Unit #1, Brooklyn, NY 11209, btw 4th Ave and 5th Ave (ground level). Take the R Train to 77th St. & 4th Ave. Brooklyn, head east ⅔ of a block from station. Host:Tim Tomlinson

Sunday, 20 November, 2022 Time: 6:30-8:30 Yuyu featuring at Ray MacNeice’s Monthly event, Cleveland Ohio.

Monday- 21 November, 2022 Time: 6:30 pm to 8 00 pm Yuyutsu Sharma at Poetry in the Valley, Workshop followed by a reading .GAR Hall Peninsula Hosted by Renay Sanders

Tuesday, 22 November, 2022 Time: 6:00 pm to 8 00 pm Special Guest at Express Yourself Live on the Mic with Miss Mabeline, CAM 142 West 12thStreet Erie,Pa. Phone 814-572-0985. Hosted by Mabel Howard

Friday, 2 Dec, 2022 Calling All Poets reading with Mary Louise and Michael O’Mara, Beacon, NY

Sunday 11 Dec, 2022 6:30 pm.Yuyutsu Sharma reading with David Austell Ruth Danon Stephen Massimilla Hilary Sideris Fran Antmann Mervyn Taylor Paola Corso Mike Graves Steven Klett Jack Tar & Others Upcoming Christmas Poetry Reading and celebration of Stronger than Fear Anthology, Flatiron Restaurant Parkslope, 397 5th Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11215 Phone 718 965 4000

Monday, 12 Dec, 2022, 6;30; Yuyutsu Sharma featuring in the Phoenix Reading at Shades of Green 125 E 15th Street NY Hosted by Jennifer Juneau

Wednesday 14 Dec, 2022 6:30 pm. Cafe Reggio presents Yuyutsu Sharma, Claudia Serea Sherri Felt Dratfield and Andrey Gritsman Caffe Reggio, 119 MacDougal St, New York, NY 10012 Hosted by Sherri Felt Dratfield https://www.caffereggio.com/

Wednesday 21 Dec, 2022 6:30 pm The Himalayan Poet, Yuyutsu Sharma: Poetry Reading and Boston Book Launch at Medford Public Library, 111 High Street, Medford, MA 02155 Host : Julie Williams-Krishnan, Free Admission

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New Release : Lost Horoscope & Other New Poems

by Yuyutsu Sharma

 
Lost Horoscope & Other New Poems by Yuyutsu Sharma ISBN 978-8195781638 pp. 72 Hardcover Rs. 495 Amazon USA : https://www.amazon.com/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp Amzon UK : https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon CANADA: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp

“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.

Upcoming Nirala Release: Kumar Vikram’s Men’s Lib and other literary, cultural and personal essays

 Kumar Vikram: Men’s Lib and other literary, cultural and personal essays ISBN 978-81-9519-153-6 (Paper) ISBN 978-81-957816-2-1 (Hard) pp.260 Rs. 795 Indian
Amazon USA : https://www.amazon.com/dp/8195191533?ref=myi_title_dp
Amazon Canada : https://www.amazon.ca/dp/8195191533?ref=myi_title_dp
Amazon UK : https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/8195191533?ref=myi_title_dp
Amazon INDIA : https://www.amazon.in/dp/8195191533?ref=myi_title_dp
FLIPCART : https://www.flipkart.com/mens-lib-other-literary-cultural-personal-essays/p/itme35ded5b5b2ec?pid=RBKGHPRMTYZZVFRA

This ground-breaking volume examines how one interacts, responds and gets influenced by historical ideas and figures belonging to literature or public life.

Men’s Lib bears testimony to the way one gets evolved as a thinking individual where writers, thinkers, poets, public figures apparently as diverse as Edward Said, Maulana Azad, Brajkishore Prasad, Nagarjun, Barack Obama, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Vishnu Khare, Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes, Mngalesh Dabral, to name a few—including one’s father and brother—jostle together to develop perspectives on multi-layered marginal discourse in which gender discourse is presented as the leitmotif of all dialogue.

A matchless, scintillating treatment of history, literature, contemporary socio-cultural fault lines, translation of ideas and texts along with personal memoirs of people, poets and places—come together to offer an enriching, passionate and intellectually stimulating experience to the reader.

This cogent collection of lucid ideas breathes the air of multi-layered and nuanced post-colonial and identity discourse impacting all thinking human beings in these complex times.

 

This is a work blazing with the spirit of a deep and large hearted humanism. The concerns of the book—political, literary and personal—are about catching a moving force that is at once iconoclastic and integrative. It stands firmly against provocative outbursts and finality of convictions. Bridges are rather built by appreciating the unresolved contours of living relationalities.”

Prof. Prasanta Chakravarty, Professor of English, University of Delhi

“Here is a collection of essays that strikes a balance between academicism and accessibility, a rare feat these days… A fascinating collection in simple prose.”

— Prof. K Satchidanandan, Malayalam poet, critic, playwright, editor, columnist and translator

“Deep dives into his topics open up new worlds, and for foreigners, many of the essays are perfect to get a better understanding of today’s India.”

Claudia Kaiser, Vice-President, Frankfurt Book Fair

“In a broader context, he reconfigures contemporary history and its cultural icons, as he does larger social configurations, contested ideologies and literary canons. He takes us into multiple directions just as life takes us to and enables us to watch them from close quarters.

Prof. Anisur Rahman, Poet, Translator and Critic

“This eclectic collection of essays is a veritable smorgasbord of thought-provoking discussion by an erudite, decidedly empathetic male with vast-ranging knowledge across the socio-cultural and literary scape.”

— Rami Chhabra, Columnist and Feminist Writer

“Useful, enjoyable and quietly encouraging read”

Asad Zaidi, Poet-Critic and Translator

Kumar Vikram

Kumar Vikram (b. 1973, Bihar) is an independent researcher with special interest in post-colonial and feminist studies. He is an essayist, translator, bilingual poet, book diplomat and a publishing editor with nearly 25 years of experience.

A post-graduate in English Literature from Kirorimal College, University of Delhi, he is author of Short Essays (2002), and co-author (with Prof. Arun Kumar Sinha) of T S Eliot: An Intensive Study of Selected Poems (Spectrum Books, New Delhi).

Currently, a Senior Editor with National Book Trust, India, he has delivered talks, and participated in conferences on publishing, translations and literature in India and at various cities and international book fairs of the world like Frankfurt, Beijing, London, Seoul, Warsaw, Moscow, Guadalajara, Abu Dhabi, Paris etc.

He lives in New Delhi with wife, Deepti, 13-year old daughter, Siya, and his mother.

A People’s History of Nepal

by Meena Ojha

ISBN  978-8195191543 pp 360 First Edition 2022 Paper Demy Rs. 795 Indian Amazon USA: https://www.amazon.com/dp/8195191541?ref=myi_title_dp
Amazon India: https://www.amazon.com/dp/8195191541?ref=myi_title_dp

A People’s History of Nepal is a ground-breaking treatise, bringing to light the epoch-making events that transformed the Himalayan nation from the darkness of Middle Ages to the modern-day republic. The author celebrates momentous contributions of the Nepalese people who played a heroic role in shaping the current face of the Nepalese polity. Dr Ojha begins with the background of the 1950 Democratic Movement and moves on to analyze several key events including King Tribhuwan’s participation, King Mahendra’s Royal Takeover in 1960, and its aftermath in detail. In the following chapters, the key upheavals during one-party Panchayat regime and the building of 1990 People’s Movement that ushered multiparty democracy in Nepal are presented empirically. Subsequently, the author delves into the raging decade involving the People’s Movement and the role of the political parties in the restoration of a multiparty system followed by the Direct Rule of King on October 4, 2002. The last chapters analyze the Maoist War 1996-2006 and the People’s Movement-2007 and the emergence of the Constituent Assembly in 2008. Employing primary and secondary sources like newspapers, leaflets and pamphlets, interviews with the actors and the participants in the democratic struggle, Dr. Ojha brings alive the turbulent years of the Nepalese people’s struggle to usher freedom, justice and democracy in numerous shades and colors. She expresses grief that even after seven decades of political struggle the major task of national development remains a distant dream even today.. This monumental book by a distinguished Nepalese woman scholar is a must to scholars, political analysts, policy makers as well lay readers interested in understanding undercurrents of the contemporary Nepalese history and politics.

A People’s History of Nepal is a ground-breaking  treatise, bringing to light the epoch-making events that transformed the Himalayan nation from the darkness of Middle Ages to the modern-day republic. The author celebrates momentous contributions of the Nepalese people who played a heroic role in shaping the current face of the Nepalese polity.

 “A comprehensive account of recent Nepali history covering a span of almost sixty years… Personality studies have pre-occupied the attention of Nepali historians. But Dr. Menna Ojha has made a careful departure from this accepted norm and emphasized people’s role in the three revolutions of 1950, 1990 and 2006… monumental work on the people of Nepal.”

 –Prof. Prem Raman Uprety, Tribhuwan University

Professor Meena Ojha

Dr. Meena Ojha is a distinguished Nepalese scholar and political analyst. She was educated at Tribhuwan University where she received a PhD for her research on contemporary politics in Nepal. She has received numerous awards and honors including Mahendra Vidya Bhushan. She works as Associate Professor at Tribhuwan University and is the author of Students Politics and Democracy in Nepal (Nirala, 2010).

She lived in Kathmandu.