Tag Archives: Love Poetry

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

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MIR MUHAMMAD TAQI

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Your Kiss is a River by Carolyn Wells to be released in March

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Your Kiss is a River
Poems of Love, Food and Life
 by Carolyn Wells
ISBN 9-788182-500778  Hard ISBN 9-788182-500761 2016 pp.56

your kiss go press kaveri

Carolyn Wells’s poetry evokes passion and takes in all the senses. Her stunning work entails virtual trips to Chianti country and the South of France, among other destinations, where she vividly describes the essence of place, nature, and exquisite foods. She finds subtlety in the most precious subjects.
Amy Barone, poet and author of Kamikaze Dance

Professional chef Carolyn Wells’s first collection of poems provides a shrewd and sensuous tasting menu of sweet, sour, and bracing servings from life. Spanning three decades and two continents, her poems use ingredients as diverse as childhood losses, youthful passions, Mediterranean languages, and adult decisions to create a deliciously tight, eclectic, and rich body of work. Now living in both Brooklyn, New York, and rural Pennsylvania, Ms. Wells infuses her work with a highly original celebration of nature and human passion.
Zev Shanken, poet and co-director, Thursdays Are For Poetry Center, Teaneck, New Jersey

With “garlic grown from my loins,” in a “tub of champagne grapes” on the “twisted streets of Toulon,” with “my tongue twisted in yours,” on the “back of a Vespa,” Carolyn Wells is a marvelous poet of food and fathers, sex and travel, all of the things worth writing and reading about.
Steve Zeitlin, Founder of City Lore in NYC

A master chef, Wells loads many of these delightful pieces with the joys of culinary experience as well as with other attractions for all the senses. Reading this book, one will learn a thing or two, but more importantly, one will learn to feel in whole new ways.
John Trause, author of Eye Candy for Andy and Inside Out, Upside Down, and Round and Round.

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Carolyn Wells holds a B.A. in French Literature from New York University. In 1983, she moved to France to study French cooking, and remained there for three years, working as a chef on luxury hotel barges. Upon returning to New York, she continued her culinary career as restaurant chef, private chef, and caterer. Currently, she is Executive Chef Manager at St. Bernard’s School in New York.

As a child, Carolyn loved to write poems, and was influenced by her father, an attorney who wrote poetry, much of it love poems dedicated to her mother. Her childhood was spent on a farm in Pennsylvania. She and her sisters rode horses and took care of the sheep, cats, dogs and other pets. Nostalgia for the freedom of farm life is a subject in some of her poems, as is the loss of her mother who died when Carolyn was eleven.

In her poetry, she attempts to recapture childhood joys and losses, and to celebrate the beauty of an outdoor life. In her spare time, she revisits that era by going to her cabin in the woods of Northeastern Pennsylvania.

She is a member of brevitas, and has contributed to Alimentum Journal.

New Release: Love Opens the Hands: New and Selected Poems by Bill Wolak

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Bill Wolak is a poet who lives in New Jersey and teaches Creative Writing at William Paterson University. He has just published his twelfth collection of poetry entitled The Lover’s Body. His poetry has appeared in over a hundred magazines. His most recent translation with Mahmood Karimi-Hakak, Love Me More Than the Others: Selected Poetry or Iraj Mirza, was published by Cross-Cultural Communications in 2014. His translations have appeared in such magazines as The Sufi Journal, Basalt, Visions International, World Poetry Journal, and Atlanta Review.

His critical work and interviews have appeared in Notre Dame Review, Persian Heritage Magazine, Gargoyle, Southern Humanities Review, The Paterson Literary Review, Ascent, Florida English, and Prime Numbers Magazine. Mr. Wolak has been awarded several National Endowment for the Humanities scholarships and two Fulbright-Hays scholarships to study and travel in India.

In 2007, he was selected to participate in a Friendship Delegation to Iran sponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, America’s largest and oldest interfaith peace and justice organization. During the Summer of 2010, Mr. Wolak was awarded a Field Study Opportunity in China and Japan by the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia. He was selected to be a featured poet at festivals in India four times: at the 2011 Kritya International Poetry Festival in Nagpur, at the 2013 Hyderabad Literary Festival, at the Tarjuma 2013: Festival of Translators in Ahmedabad, and most recently at the 2014 Hyderabad Literary Festival.

Ratna Kaji Shakya, whose art work appears throughout this book as well as on the front cover, is an artist working in watercolors and acrylics, who lives in Kathmandu, Nepal. In addition, he is the director of Light & Shade Art Gallery in Katmandu. Over the years, he has been awarded several prizes for his paintings, and his work appears in many private collections in Nepal as well as abroad in such countries as the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Norway, Turkey, Denmark, South Korea, Japan, India, Pakistan, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, Holland, Ireland, Belgium, Argentina, China, Spain, Chile, Israel, Jordan, Scotland, and Bahrain. Ratna Kaji Shakya’s diverse experiments with oval forms has led him to a comprehensive theory of fine art which he has dubbed Ovalism. Through Ovalism, he undertakes to explain the omnipresent importance of the oval form in every aspect of existence.