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.
"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
"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.
—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." 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
Yuyutsu Sharma is one of the few poets in the world who make their living with poetry.
Named as "The world-renowned Himalayan poet," (The Guardian) "One-Man Academy" (The Kathmandu Post) and "Himalayan Neruda" (Michael Graves, Brand Called You), Punjab-born, Indian poet Yuyutsu is a vibrant force on the world poetry stage.
He is also 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.
Author of eleven poetry collections, most recently, Lost Horoscope, he has read his works at several prestigious places and held workshops in creative writing and translation at Heidelberg University, University of Ottawa, Seamus Heaney Centre, Queens University, Belfast, The Irish Writers' Centre, Dublin, Rubin Museum, New York, Beijing Open University, New York University and Columbia University, New York.
Yuyutsu was at the Poetry Parnassus Festival organized to celebrate the London Olympics 2012 where he represented Nepal and India. 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, he edits Pratik: A Quarterly Magazine of Contemporary Writing.
More: www.yuyutsusharma.com
