Tag Archives: Nirala Series

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

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

— Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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


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

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

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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, 5th Avenue and 59th 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

Yuyutsu Sharma Upcoming North America and Europe Tour

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October – November, New York

Thursday, Oct 25, 2018– 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM: Reading the Himalayas at Cornelia St Café Readings & Book Launch, Yuyutsu Sharma reading with Jill Hoffman, Robert Scotto, Anna Halberstadt and Mike Jurkovic,  29 Cornelia St, New York, NY 10014, USA Phone: +1 212-989-9319 http://corneliastreetcafe.com/

 

Friday, Oct 26, 2018– 7 pm: Book Culture on 112th as David Austell & Yuyutsu Sharma read from their latest poetry books, The Tin Man, Garuda & New Poems of Astral Planes, Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems, A Blizzard in My Bones: New York Poems, Book Culture 536 W 112th St New York, NY 10025 https://www.bookculture.com/event/112th-reading-david-austell-yuyutsu-sharma

Sunday, Oct 28, 2018– 7 pm:  Yuyutsu Sharma to read at Red Hook’s Ekphrastic Tour BWAC’s 499 Van Brunt Street, Brooklyn. http://bwac.org/

Tuesday, Oct 30, 2018, Yuyutsu Sharma to read with David Austell at NAFSA Region X Conference, Buffalo, NY

 Friday, November 1, 2018, 6:30 pm: Yuyutsu Sharma to read at the Main Branch of  Smithtown Library, Long Island, NY, https://smithlib.org/ Hosted by Gladys Henderson

Friday, November 2, 2018, 7:30 pm: Yuyutsu Sharma and Tammy Green, featured readers: A Poets In Nassau event at Sip This 64 Rockaway Avenue Valley Stream, NY 516-341-0491 https://www.sipthisny.com/

November 2018, Europe

Germany
Friday, November 16, 2018,  Reading with German Novelist and  Editor, Eckhart Nickel at the famous bookstore, “Artes Liberales“ on Ingrimstrasse, Heidelberghttps://buchladen.artesliberales.name/

France

Sunday, November 18, 2018,  Yuyutsu Sharma  reading at Lithuanian artist, Ruta Jusionyte’s  Studio with Selwyn Rodda, Dominique Bernard, Valdas Papievis, Antonia Al1exandra Klimenko, John Alexander Serna at 93 rue de Romaine 93·100 Montreuil, France 0665143873

Slovenia 
Sunday, November 25, 2018, 11-12, National Book Fair, Yuyutsu Sharma to read at the Slovene launch of Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems, Translated into Slovene by Barbara Pogačnik

Wednesday, November 28, 2018, 18.00 pm, Yuyutsu Sharma to read at Central Library, Celje, Slovenia

December, New York

Wednesday, Dec 5, 2018, at Rubin Museum: Yuyutsu Sharma to read his new work inspired by Current Exhibit: The Second Buddha focused on Padmasambhava at Himalayan Heritage Meet.150 W 17th St, New York, NY 10011, USA http://rubinmuseum.org/

Saturday, Dec 8, 2018, 11.00 am -1.00 pm at All Souls Church, (61, Main Street, Stony Brook, New York: Yuyutsu Sharma to read with Jared Harel. Hosted by Suffolk County Poet Laureate, Gladys Henderson

 December, California

Sunday, 16 December 2018, 1-3 pm, Yuyutsu Sharma to speak as Special Guest at Poetry of the Sierra Foothills –  at Caffe Santoro, 493 Pleasant Valley Road, Diamond Springs. open mic follows.

Monday, 17 December 2018, Christmas Reading celebrating Yuyutsu Sharma’s Eternal Snow at Sacramento Poetry Society, Yuyu reads with Select Contributors from the Anthology Read along http://www.sacramentopoetrycenter.com/

Nirala Book Party in Manhattan: Book Launch & Readings

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Friday, June 29, 2018– 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
at Red Room, 85 E 4th Street, 3rd Floor,
New York, New York 10003 
http://www.redroomnyc.com
Nirala book Party: Launch of Five New Books
and Reading by Nirala authors
Tin Man By David Austell
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CJTDLLK

Word Has it by Ruth Danon
https://www.amazon.com/dp/8182500974
Cats, Love & Other Surprises 
by Otis Kidwell Burger & Katherine Burger
https://www.amazon.com/dp/8182500893

A Prayer for Less Violent Offenders by Mike Graves
https://www.amazon.com/dp/8182500931

Eternal Snow; A Worldwide Anthology of One Hundred Twenty Five Poetic Intersections with Himalayan Poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma 
https://www.amazon.com/dp/8182500885‘
Select Contributors to the anthology will read at the Anthology
Plus several prominent authors previously published by Nirala including
Irene O Garden
https://www.amazon.com/dp/8182500869
Fran Antmann
https://www.amazon.com/dp/818250063X
Keren Herceg
https://www.amazon.com/dp/8182500850

and Others will read briefly from their books and display their works...

Also Spring Issue of Pratik; A Magazine of Contemporary Writing to be launched at the Party

Nirala to release distinguished American photographer Fran Antmann's book, Maya Healers: A Thousand Dreams in January, 2017

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Maya Healers: A Thousand Dreams : Photographs and text by Fran Antmann

ISBN 9-788182-500631  pp.200 2017 Hardcover 

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A book of photographs and writing that explores the power and mystery of ancient indigenous healing practices among the Maya people of Guatemala.

“Fran Antmann grew to know a culture, lived in it, merged with it, translated it,and loved it. She photographed the dreams that guide us to wisdom and healing, then wrapped those images in quetzal feathers. Today, she returns her vision of the world to the men and women she met through this encounter between cultures. It is a privilege to have been invited to write the preface to this book which is more than a book—it is a revelation.

—Carolina Escobar Sarti, Guatemalan poet

“Fran Antmann’s work in Maya Healers, years in the making, is imbued with the depth and texture only great photography can achieve; where the images transcend being mere documents but reach great art. Many of the images, especially of the people in their daily lives, are transcendent and absolutely gorgeous, revealing an empathy and visual perception that is timeless.”

— Ed Kashi, international prize-winning photojournalist

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“…With clear-eyed reporting and her starkly moving images of Mayan life along the shores of Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, and the healers who live and work there, Fran Antmann has shed light on a story known to few outside the Mayan world….”

 —Joyce Maynard, novelist and journalist

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Maya healers derive their powers from connection to the supernatural. Drawing on dreams, intuition and ancient traditions, they heal the sick surrounded by friends and family. I was privileged to be included in these intense, intimate healings and to listen to the stories and dreams of these healers, shamans and bonesetters. Thirty years ago such ceremonies could have triggered a brutal crackdown. Now they are now part of a proud resurgent Maya identity.

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Fran Antmann is a documentary photographer, writer and teacher living in Brooklyn, New York. For thirty years, she has been documenting the lives and cultures of the Maya, Andean, Inuit and Dene indigenous people—in the villages surrounding Lake Atitlán in Guatemala, in the villages and mining towns of the Peruvian highlands, in the tundra of the Canadian Arctic and in Baffin Island, Canada.

Her work has been exhibited and published in New York, Texas, Peru, Mexico, France, England and Denmark.  Her photographs are in the collections of the International Center of Photography, the Brooklyn Museum, the Haverford College Collection, The Museum of Photographic Arts, Denmark, and various private collections.

Antmann received a doctorate in Fine Arts from New York University and teaches at Baruch College, City University of New York.  She has received grants from the Fulbright Commission, the Ford Foundation, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, Agfa Corporation, the Social Science Research Council, the Puffin Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Foundation. She was also awarded numerous New York State Foundation for the Arts fellowships.

 

 

Distinguished American poet and playwright Irene O' Garden's "Fulcrum: Selected Poems released

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fulcrum-for-print

 

Fulcrum: Selected Poems

by Irene O’ Garden

ISBN 9-788182-500860  pp.90 2017 Hardcover Demy

 

Praise for Irene O’Garden’s Work

Sparkling musicality, deep emotion and discerning reflection distinguish O’ Garden’s poems. Here is a fine intelligence at work—and at play—revealing a tonic perspective in a range of poetic expression, including lyric, narrative and her own innovative “fulcrum” forms. Her close observation and sensual delight in language make “Fulcrum” an experience both grounding and uplifting.

“Bewitching…astounding…heartbreaking” — New York Times

“For many years now, the poet, playwright, and memoirist Irene O’Garden has been a hero to me. I think of her as a walking, writing, beam of light… numberless others will come to know her gifts and, most of all, her captivating talent for wonder and marvel.”

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

“Lush imagery…poetry set to the life cycle of nature.”

–Kirkus Reviews

 

irene-photo

Distinguished American poet Irene O’Garden has won or been nominated for prizes in nearly every writing category from stage to e-screen, hardcovers, as well as literary magazines and anthologies. Her critically-acclaimed play, Women on Fire, (Samuel French) played sold-out houses at Off-Broadway’s Cherry Lane Theatre and was nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award. O’Garden won a Pushcart Prize for her lyric essay “Glad To Be Human,” (Untreed Reads.) Harper published her first memoir Fat Girl, her second, Risking the Rapids: How My Wilderness Journey Healed My Childhood is forthcoming from Mango (November 2018) O’Garden’s poems and essays have been featured in dozens of literary journals and award-winning anthologies. Fulcrum, published last year by Nirala, is her first poetry collection. Irene is also a Poetry Educator with the Hudson Highlands chapter of the national River Of Words program, connecting children to nature via poetry and art.

Irene O’ Garden

Praise for Irene O’Garden’s Fulcrum.

Fulcrum is a stunning assessment of human life on the planet, a requiem of the mutant seasons when ‘wind steals/the juices from our eyes/our land cracks open / with an unrequited love ‘and ‘our mountains are on fire.’

Experimental, theatrical and engaging, these poems are like molten lava of our minds, ‘a single stinging tear,’ a howl of every heart, a garland of ‘offered images’ on the altar of life,  ‘funeral of funerals themselves,’ and a song of  ‘American shame (that) brings us to our knees.’

This is a newer version of The Waste Land, a metaphoric pyramid of natural elements whose admirations ‘blooms like fruit,’ a casebook of the wounds of life and the wisdom you draw out of them. Like splinter of a stone that the poet once stepped on never came out, the poems once read will become part of you and help you ‘know the knowing that we know.’

–Yuyutsu Sharma, Himalayan Poet, author of Quaking Cantos; Nepal Earthquake Poems and A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems

The poems in Irene O’Garden’s new book, Fulcrum, illustrate the importance and vitality of poetry in our daily lives.  Beautiful imagery, powerful emotions, simplicity, complexity and thought provoking subjects – all drawn from relatable life experiences – make reading her work a journey of discovery and reflection by focusing on what it means to live a life of passion and wonderment.   Like the author herself, the poems in these pages inspire and draw one in. This is a beautiful collection.  

—Professor Jane Kinney-Denning of Pace University, President of Women’s National Book Association

“Somewhere between Wordsworth and Dylan Thomas but soaring on her own wings, Irene O’Garden flies high, taking language to new strata with effortless-appearing dips and ascents which made me gasp. Every line could be a poem in itself. I often thought of the “green fuse of life” as nature and color combine in indescribable but absolutely recognizable ways.”

—Laura Shaine Cunningham, best-selling memoirist (Sleeping Arrangements and A Place in the Country) and frequent NY Times contributor.

An immersion into what we relish, how we live, a kind of shining beacon that doesn’t shy away from the tough stuff…Highly recommended.

– Janet Pierson, Producer SXSW Film Conference and Festival

In a far-ranging and elegant suite of poems, Irene O’Garden balances a galaxy of incommensurates on the fulcrum of a disciplined intelligence. “I am a blueprint of Herbert-like sacred meditation, the latter in a narrative about being chased by a bull. Her technique suggests influences ranging from Donne to Bishop, from Frost to Moore. Soulful and rewarding, these poems remind us that “We’re not made of matter but of mattering.”

—T.R. Hummer, whose poems appear in The New Yorker, Best of American Poetry, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, and twelve volumes of his own.

Having delighted in and been enlightened by Irene’s eloquent human poetics for over two decades, I was kind of shocked when she told me this was her first published poetry collection. I couldn’t quite believe it. Then I checked all her warmly gifted and gratefully shared titles on my bookshelf and yes, indeed, this was her first poetry collection.

And thus, Fulcrum, where we all balance and “blossom like a love-mussed bed.” Like “a wound in the noon of a life.” Language hinging on voice. Voice on the cyclone currents of our aches and pains. Our joy and promise. The realization that “I sing a thanking song.” And “caress creation’s verbs.”

– – Mike Jurkovic, curmudgeon poet, VP, Calling All Poets

Announcing New Edition of Yuyutsu Sharma's Space Cake, Amsterdam, and Other Poems from Europe and America

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espace cake

Space Cake, Amsterdam & Other Poems from Europe and America
Yuyutsu RD Sharma
ISBN-81-8250-059-1 2014 Hard pp. 100

Sharma is “a shaman…black bag bulging / from magical rainbows, / serpents from an Hindu Heaven, / skull of an abducted female Yeti,” and he casts spells in these strange, visionary, outrageous and magical poems.’
Tony Barnstone
The Albert Upton Professor and Chair of English
Whittier College, Author/Translator of Everyman’s Chinese Erotic Poems

A fiercely sublime poet …the book confirms an enormous talent, as well as purity of purpose with which he approaches his calling. Lines jump out, burning themselves into your consciousness.
Eddie Woods in Amsterdam Weekly

Yuyutsu RD Sharma brings the bracing airs of the Himalayas to any city. His vigorous, expansive and elemental poems leave Yeti tracks on the streets and mule trails on the Tube. They are packed with rapturous couplings of the urban and the feral.
Pascale Petit, Former Poetry Editor, Poetry London

Most noted, justifiably, for his poems about his native India/Nepal, Mr Sharma proves in this volume that he is a genuine poet of the English-speaking world whose gentle yet ironic gaze is equally at home in the west, and equally adept with cultures which must have been as strange to him at first as the Yeti is to us.

So, if you want a glimpse of the future, when cosmopolitan writers cross borders and enrich techniques, Space Cake, Amsterdam is an excellent place to start. Mr Sharma is living proof that English has become the medium for international cultural exchange, and that poets of his skill and scope are its chroniclers and sages.
—Robert Scotto
Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
Baruch College, CUNY