Your Valuable Resources

Saturday, March 22, 2014

CRI March 2014

Contemporary Literary Review India
March 2014

CONTENTS
Editorial
Poems
Death of a Fertile Woman
The Other India of Indian Farmers
Safron Hitler
Indulgent October
Fooled In April
From A Baghdad Rose
Into A New Dawn
The Weight of Dirt
Why I Am
Where We’re Going
The End
Kung Fu
Old
Paradise
Aura
Essentially Existential…
Stories
Essay
Book Review
Announcement
Call for Submission
7th International Poetry Fest- 2014 (19th and 20th September, 2014)
Check for details at: Announcement
Call for Submission
Submission to CLRI is open year-round. CLRI seeks onlpreviously unpublished submission in poetry, stories, arts, photography, designing, modeling, film reviews, book reviews, essays, criticism etc. For details, check at: CLRI Submission.
Get Your Books Reviewed by CLRI
Subscribe to our CLRI online edition. Our subscribers receive CLRI digital copies directly into their Inbox, get print copies free of cost whenever they come out during the subscription period, and are waived off any reading fee towards our print editions.
You can become our subscribers any time you prefer. To become a subscriber, visit: Subscriber to CLRI
CLRI prides itself to have a good number of review writers. We have different review writers for books of different genres. Our reviews are gaining recognition among the publishers, journals and academia for fair and high quality reviews.
To enquire for book review, visit, CLRI Paid Services
CLRI 2013 Annual Print Edition ISSN  2250-3366
We encourage all the readers to buy the print issue which will help you understand what standard we follow for the print edition. So you can submit your best pieces in future.
Have a look at the preview of the print copy at: CLRI Annual 2013.

Making Self-Publishing Success By Khurshid Alam

Making Self-Publishing Success

By Khurshid Alam

Self-publishing is without doubt a most readily available means of getting published today and brings a great hope to the aspiring writers. If you are an amateur writer and want to get a break through faster, self-publishing fulfils your dream.

But self-publishing writers should behave more like entrepreneurs than backroom boys. You must have a good plan to promote your book in all manners, much like your publisher.

Get Your Manuscript Edited
Your manuscript is not the holy tenet. So prune it as much as possible to make the information accurate, complete and reliable. Do thorough researches on the topic that you deal, tighten your plot and refine your characters, have the most befitting climax, and above all organize your content.

Get your manuscript edited by professional editors before you go for publishing. Write a few lines in the foreword that your book has been well-edited to establish credibility.

Enhance Credibility
Self-publishing writers own high responsibility to their work as they are basically the sole owners of their titles. There are many factors that the writers should attend; possible spelling and grammatical errors including typos, wrong information, and plagiarism threats. Ensure that you have the rights to use the pictures, images, names of characters and places, and other details. Add a note of disclaimer.

Reach to Audience
The first thing in your plan should be to target your audience. Do research on your target readers, understand their requirement, the craft of writing they may love, understand the mediums they are more attracted to or use, and the platforms where they are available.

For example, if you’ve written a romance fiction, the language should be mature, direct and refined. Create a page on social networking sites and create a group of writers and readers, share excerpts from your book and invite comments from them, encourage them to ask you questions and answer them.

Attend to Packaging
Ensure that book covers, layout, print quality are relevant to the concept that your book deals with and are of the best quality. You might have heard the idiom, ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’. But post Internet, the concept has changed. The cover is a window to the core of the concept in your book. To put it straight I would give you an example. You want to read memoirs. Type this keyword on the Google search you will see hundreds of titles on the genre. How would you judge which book you would buy? Most probably, the smartly crafted title and finest cover designs will attract you.

Get Your Book Reviewed
Get blurb written on your titles. Get your book reviewed by some writers. Share blurbs and review on social networking sites and manage them get published with literary journal, magazine or newspaper. They help in boosting promotion.

Promote Your Book
Getting a book published is not the end of the story but it is the beginning. Take out time and spend money on promoting your book. In an age where hundreds of titles come out each month, it is important that your book gets the due flash in the limelight. There are various means available for promoting your book. Get a flyer designed, post ads on literary journals, buy ads of Facebook, Google Adwords, and other ads programs.

Participate in Lit Awards
There are many small to big literary prizes run by various literary organizations. Participate in them. Though most of them charge a reading fee, do not keep away. Participating in such literary prizes does not simply mean mere involvement; you get wider penetration and may get feedback that would definitely benefit you in your later venture.


Khurshid Alam is Lead – Technical Writing with an IT company based in Pune, India. Besides, he writes poetry, stories, flash fiction, essays, criticism, screenplay and on life and culture.



Get Your Book Reviewed by
— journal that brings articulate writings for articulate readers.
CLRI prides itself to have a good number of review writers. We have different review writers for books of different genres. Our reviews are gaining recognition among the publishers, journals and academia for fair and high quality reviews.

My Final Journey By Bharat Trivedi

My Final Journey

By Bharat Trivedi
In despair, I contemplate
ending my miserable disease-ridden life!
My body is damaged beyond repair
And so intense is the anguish that I can barely bear.
I'm a worthless mess helpless , a broken man and
my future is just infirmity and agony
so I’ve decided it all ends tonight…
so I will exit and leave the world to be a better place
leaving  nothing but only
broken dreams and fading thumbprints…Not a rope, a blade, a fire, a plunge or pills it was,
but to live each day, was stealing my soul!
so I opened the door of death.
Then, the sword of time will pierce my heavy heart

I go up to my dusty desk to inscribe this last poem
Death in purple ink of fatigued pen
betrays the written yearning on a parched paper.

As the sand begins to pile up and time begins to run out;
I will put myself to eternal sleep now
And I promise you that I won’t wake up tomorrow
Saying goodbye is not the hardest part,

By dawn, this family will have one less member
but I have become a part of your life,
It’s just that I can’t bear to lose you…
Remember me for the good times we had together
and I hope that I made a memorable place in all your hearts and
touched each and every one of you in a special way

My crystal tears smudge the silky bed-sheet
Death is laughing as I cry; so I smile to conceal all my lies!
To snatch my miserable soul, ruthless death beckons me
my life sheds the skin of my body that splits apart,
and the crimson blood starts to spill on the floor
a pool of my deliberate  death…

I’m sad -
because I showered you with all my love and affection
because I won’t be there when you are dolled up as a blushing bride
because I won’t be there when you take matrimonial vows
because I won’t be there to see your children grow

I will die tonight in a shower of my own blood
while my ruby red tears blend with my poetic remains
to read this last of my poem, aloud!

My pyre below me feel like cozy cushions under my head
and ashes like malleable mattress
When you see my corpse is being carried away -
don't lament, shed any tears, or feel sorry

Don’t have crystal drops pouring down your pretty face
because I’ll see from you above the azure skies
as I’ll blend in five elemental Constituents
No sadness, no funerals -
only goodbye as the lamp of life extinguishes.
Please pray that I find a new painless world and happiness
as I enter Almighty’s abode!
and fulfill a last wish of a lonely broken man -

It is my yearning to be cremated on this desert island
and let my ashes be blown into the sands of Bahrain, amid fireworks,
and whisper a final ‘Adieu’ -
when I depart for my final journey!

Born and brought-up in Bombay, Bharat Trivdedi is a Commerce Graduate from Bombay University. He is employed as a Financial Accountant with leading Import firm in Bahrain. He has been writing poems since his college days. His works have appeared in Authors Den, Sulekha, Boloji, The Creative Pen and CLP.

Subscribe to
— journal that brings articulate writings for articulate readers.
CLRI is published online per month, in digital versions occasionally, and in print edition (planned to be quarterly), its print edition has ISSN 2250-3366.
Subscribe to our CLRI online edition. Our subscribers receive CLRI digital copies directly into their Inbox, get print copies free of cost whenever they come out during the subscription period, and are waived off any reading fee towards our print editions.
You can become our subscribers any time you prefer. To become a subscriber, visit: Subscriber to CLRI

Poems By Chandramohan S

Poems By Chandramohan S

Death of a Fertile Woman

the flow of streams like clang lings of her anklets
Distant green pastures.
horizons rise and fall as wind swirls on
paddy fields like hemlines of her skirt
gangrene infested intestine
scanty rainfall. un periodic crimson.
diarrhea of poisonous emissions suffuse the rivers
stillness of barren fields .humming of pesticide resistant mosquitoes.
chemically castrated.
Nature's synthetic bore wells,
spurting scentless urine. no erections.
A void in place of the uterus.
Delta of Venus devoid of wetness of fertility.
Unhealthy ovaries .dark clouds of depression.
Premature onset of menopause .purple dream died young.
the sour vinegar of fermented side effect
of a prescription for neo liberal development
by a green eyed imperialist doctor

The Other India of Indian Farmers

(An ode to the unreported farmer suicides)

High up in the sky
even higher than where our dreams could reach
a sickle crescent was shining.
I saw India shining ads on the front-page of newspapers.
The sickle crescent has a larger self to it
it was much closer to me
though invisible
like a void in the newspapers
that failed to report suicides of my brethren.

Safron Hitler

Polarizes the nation as diverse as
flora and fauna in a jungle
into a diode of
saffron and the rest.
The pied piper rouses a tornado
unleashing human genocide to ban cow slaughter
to plunge and perish in a riot the
riot of the twice born
against rule of the people.
He use Godhra rifles to shoot down green birds
has blood on his hands.
His home state a special exploitation zone devoid of beef
riding a chariot of bigotry and hatred
blowing a conch shell of sirens for
deportation of the non-saffron masses to the graveyard
red eyes of fanaticism contagious like conjunctivitis
a rabid dog spewing venom
wearing a mask of nationalism.
His celibate life
an ill-fated
regressive attempt to suffuse our tricolor
with only the first of the three colors
and imprison the nation's subjects into antique caves of four
colours (chaturvarna)
and segregate its eves with a lakshman rekha of pink color.


Chandramohan S is an Indian poet writing in English and a social activist based in Kerala. He writes poetry on socially relevant subjects.
Subscribe to
— journal that brings articulate writings for articulate readers.
CLRI is published online per month, in digital versions occasionally, and in print edition (planned to be quarterly), its print edition has ISSN 2250-3366.
Subscribe to our CLRI online edition. Our subscribers receive CLRI digital copies directly into their Inbox, get print copies free of cost whenever they come out during the subscription period, and are waived off any reading fee towards our print editions.
You can become our subscribers any time you prefer. To become a subscriber, visit: Subscriber to CLRI

Forever Now And All I Might Have By Charles Bane, Jr

 Forever Now And All I Might Have

By Charles Bane, Jr.

Forever now and all I might have
been. I have never loved like
this. Never everything. Never from
town to town, or where I lay asleep;
or my hand straight and deer watching
as they take, hollowed before dark
and venturing to where day breaks.


 
Charles Bane, Jr. is the American Pushcart Prize- nominated author of The Chapbook (Curbside Splendor, 2011) and Love Poems (Kelsay Books, 2014). He is a frequent contributor to The Indian Diary and The Times Of India. His work was described by The Huffington Post as "not only standing on the shoulders of giants, but shrinking them."
  

Get Your Book Reviewed by
— journal that brings articulate writings for articulate readers.
CLRI prides itself to have a good number of review writers. We have different review writers for books of different genres. Our reviews are gaining recognition among the publishers, journals and academia for fair and high quality reviews.

Poems By Deeya Bhattacharya

Poems By Deeya Bhattacharya

Indulgent October

The impish blue, slowly fades
into a nebulous white;
Somewhere in this drab dullness
when the dew is fresh and crisp
a cat ceaselessly , purrs;

The attic is indelible
with remembrances of yester night
stalwart October’s dampness
chill of the wee hours; unabated
a warm sip of water from my flask

The early croon of birds
their languid squeamishness
not a spoilsport at all,
a mood enhancer but at this hour.

Invincible Autumn’s spright
slowly spreads
the woodland paths not far from home
I watch the silent fall, the communion
of leaves , one by one, goaded on
to the dead beat; a patchwork
of slush and mud

It is procreant
every flaw to hide, blemish to withhold
for its time , this hour
to replenish;

My limb invalid grows,
my bosom empty, my bed deterrent
a reminder,  this being just a phase
a passing away of in adequacy
that has crept in
on a sullen October dawn.

Fooled In April

Dusty crevices,
suck up your mane
you, a fool, puddle like
in yellow camisole, squirm

the gin and bread, by the stove
flare you up
emotive in dream swollen eyes
catapult a time in memory
waiting the final ordeal
the applaud, that never be-

a fool , justified
in bedimmed eyes
spilling midnight oil till
that swallowed up , everything
aside the penny, the chill, brittle bones
that break from the aftermath of penurious labour

that night, many a nights after
misty eyed, you slap dashed while
crumbling silences evolved negative.

From A Baghdad Rose

Silence gathers on the fringes of a Baghdad Rose
It's succulent fleshy stem hems in all the happiness-
expected on its petals- the theraeuptic dew holds on-
nourishing it: complete

This silence communes mystique-its ethereal beauty
trapped within its petals-speak of no imperfection.

The velvety sheen it wears, unravel Arabian Nights
the shimmering lust curtained veils the libidous glow
of a feminine form to be despoiled;

Years of laxity, stain accumulates on its time-bound history
the harem- the harness

But all these- a wasteful reality we chew

Why should all this settle in the consciousness

Into A New Dawn

Into the forays of darkness
At the moment, when dawn descends
On the Mother Earth
She alights-
Tip-toed,
With a rustle here
And a footfall there
Of the elements of nature
She’s no doubt a beauty to wonder at-

It’s still dark, now
With the morning breeze flowing
Against my face my bare arms
As kisses of my beloved
I wonder how they chill-
Zephyr’s assistants

A muteness prevails at this hour
So delicate-
Waiting, the intense livid ball-
The morning sun
Yet to arise from its bed
And shed its rays on Mother Ochre

The wee hours of the morning stealthily arrive
Against the pale blue, the far
And faded sky-
I watch pensively
As a tiger stalking its prey
I want the in-thing, the beauty
To drink-

But Oh look! She’s arrived-
The fair maiden morning
And how she flirts
With crooning birds
And filled with sound
Of the early dawn
Dwellers, her mates, sworn in
She’s  so sprightly and  cheer, in secrecy
She’s hazy and frosty and pink perhaps
Against her pale skin and cheeks
As if of a maiden blushing, apart
Anticipating her anguished lover. 

 
Born, in the Industrial town of Durgapur, West Bengal, Deeya Bhattacharya pursued her schooling in Carmel Convent. After post-graduation in English Literature from the University of Burdwan, she did a degree on Education under the same University. Currently, she teaches English and poetry at a High School under the Govt. of West Bengal; India.
She is a bilingual writer and contributes to several journals in her mother-tongue.
Her poems have appeared in Poetry World, Journal of Literatures in English, Gulbarga University, All-Round Monthly (Faridkot) and the website: www.dimdima.com for children, Dimdima in print, contemporary Vibes ( Chandigarh) and other several anthologies.



Get Your Book Reviewed by
— journal that brings articulate writings for articulate readers.
CLRI prides itself to have a good number of review writers. We have different review writers for books of different genres. Our reviews are gaining recognition among the publishers, journals and academia for fair and high quality reviews.

Poems By Holly Day

Poems By Holly Day

The Weight of Dirt

under the carved stones dotting
the soft hills spaced every three feet lies a woman
planting dirt stuck to her dress legs stretched out arms
crossed resisting still the

inexorable crush of
decay eyes sewn shut her hair perfectly coiffed
tied in a small knot behind
her head eyes still shut unmoving as the shovel tip
splinters wood

he trusted her so completely but then
she died he says he leans against the
handle puts all his weight behind the blade
uncovers enough of the coffin to open
the lid flashlight patient over her clothes
remembers the color of her eyes
pulls the ring off of her finger

to give to the next wife.

Why I Am

my mother reached out with one hand, felt
my forehead as she passed by.
he has a fever, she announced, glaring at
my stepfather. he just sat and stared at her from
the confines of his armchair, dumb
reluctant to believe that I

wasn’t faking this, too. later, at
the hospital, we found out that
I had been walking
around with a ruptured spleen, that I could have died, even.
my fucking parents
never believed me when I said I

was sick, and they had nearly killed me. I could be dead right now. this
is why I need
you to believe the things
I tell you. don’t argue with
me. if you’re not going
to play along, you will have to leave.

Where We’re Going

A famous poet
moved into the nursing home
where my sister works. She called me up to tell me about him
said she recognized

his name from a magazine
I gave her for the home’s lobby. She says he’s
a nice man, that I should come by to meet
him, give him someone to talk with about poetry.
Weeks later, she tells me not to come
the poet has become a problem, he
cries all the time. “If he’d just take his medication,
he’d be fine,” she sighs. “How can someone so smart

be so dumb?” She says they’re going to take
his computer away because
all he does is look up Internet
porn. “It’s so sad,” she tells me. “I think he’s
trying
to write something.”

The End

The problem with having friends older than you is that
they don’t keep for long. I look up one old friend after another, brilliant
poets I used to worship before befriending, find they’re drugged up
in nursing homes, or just plain dead. My mother

used to claim the reason so many of my friends were so old
was because I needed a grandfather substitute, said
someday I’d appreciate the kids my own age. Instead
I spent my teen-aged summers listening enrapt to stories
about beatniks smoking dope
in Mexico , how easy it was to buy pot in “black” clubs
how homosexual affairs in the Navy were justified during World War I.

but then my friends started dying, and I’d go to school and try
to explain to teachers how sad I was that my friends
were all dying, and they thought I was having out with suicidal drug addicts
they didn’t understand that my friends were just old. They’d tell me
I should find a different crowd to hang out with, a safer one
that I’d probably be happy if I join the literary club, or worked
at the school newspaper.

I still don’t know what my friends got from hanging out with me
except maybe they were just happy to have someone
listen to them without being aghast, someone to unburden stories
about trying to get an abortion in 1930’s Mexico , hallucinating on yellow pot,
what it’s like to have a tapeworm twisting in your gut when you’re on a diet
spoiled me for high school and college prattle, and I can only hope
that the stories I have when I’m old are half as interesting
as the ones they shared with me.

 
Holly Day is a housewife and mother of two living in Minneapolis, Minnesota who teaches needlepoint classes for the Minneapolis school district and writing classes at The Loft Literary Center. Her poetry has recently appeared in Hawai’i Pacific Review, Slant, and The Tampa Review, and she is the 2011 recipient of the Sam Ragan Poetry Prize from Barton College. Her most recent published books are " Walking Twin Cities" and "Notenlesen für Dummies Das Pocketbuch."
  
Subscribe to
— journal that brings articulate writings for articulate readers.
CLRI is published online per month, in digital versions occasionally, and in print edition (planned to be quarterly), its print edition has ISSN 2250-3366.
Subscribe to our CLRI online edition. Our subscribers receive CLRI digital copies directly into their Inbox, get print copies free of cost whenever they come out during the subscription period, and are waived off any reading fee towards our print editions.
You can become our subscribers any time you prefer. To become a subscriber, visit: Subscriber to CLRI

Poems By Mitchell Krochmalnik Grabois

Poems By Mitchell Krochmalnik Grabois

Kung Fu

She was taller and heavier than me
and had a belt in kung fu
not black, a more dangerous color
I never saw her use it
but she was emotionally volatile
like my mother
so her deadly skills
were always on my mind

One day
she was showing me
a driftwood burl
she’d found at the beach

We were intimate
but she was standing
too close

She asked:
Are you afraid of me?
I decided to be honest
and said: yes
She seemed surprised
After high school we were married
I achieved my childhood dream
of becoming a mail carrier
She worked in a shop that sold yoga clothes
to rich women
Altogether we had a good life

except for
her penchant for karaoke
every Friday night
Her voice was atrocious
painful even
but I couldn’t tell her

I was still afraid of her
She’d dropped kung fu
but karaoke was her substitute
Her voice beat me about the ears

punched me in the gut
until I could hardly breathe
and Jack Daniels was powerless
to help

Old

I am thin, but flabby
My muscles have atrophied
When I was young I could bench press
three hundred pounds
but that was an eternity ago
That person was not even me

but I serve my purpose in the world
I echo Joseph Conrad:
Your strength is… an accident
owed to the weakness of others

and your youth is turbo-charged
owed to my advanced age

Paradise

Taking Mark Twain’s advice
she went to Heaven for the climate
but found it too chilly

Don’t you remember
you gave me thyroid cancer?
she complained to God
I don’t have a thyroid
I’m freezing up here
Can’t you turn the AC down
or give me some better clothing
These wings are fine 
but if I wrap them around myself
I can’t fly
I just have to sit here
and it’s boring
I never liked to sit still
If I didn’t have anything else to do
I’d clean my house

So compassionate God
sent her to a place even warmer than Florida
where she had a whole new set of complaints

 
Mitchell Krochmalnik Grabois’ poems have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He is a regular contributor to The Prague Revue, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, most recently for his story “Purple Heart” published in The Examined Life in 2012, and for his poem. “Birds,” published in The Blue Hour, 2013. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for 99 cents from Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition.
  


Get Your Book Reviewed by
— journal that brings articulate writings for articulate readers.
CLRI prides itself to have a good number of review writers. We have different review writers for books of different genres. Our reviews are gaining recognition among the publishers, journals and academia for fair and high quality reviews.

Poems By Nikita Parik

Poems

By Nikita Parik

Aura

Bitter hospital air, coupled
With the cacophony of foreign smells,
Makes her squirm
With unease
Meanwhile
Scarlet roses in green vases
Wilt comfortably in the costly air
Of the MD's chamber.

Essentially Existential…

Beyond the gigantic stretches of vacuumed blue,
Beyond the spatiotemporal laws and rules,
Beyond love and hope and faith and virtue,
Beyond the ubiquitous questions of ‘ich’ and ‘du’,

Lies the eternal truth.

 
Nikita Parik, 21, hails from Calcutta, India, is currently pursuing Masters in Linguistics from the University of Calcutta. Her works have appeared in The Commonline Journal, Femficatio, Blackmail Press, Efiction India, A Billion Stories, and The Voices, and she awaits publication in the anthology "Dampen to Bend" by Coal and Femficatio Publishing.
  
Subscribe to
— journal that brings articulate writings for articulate readers.
CLRI is published online per month, in digital versions occasionally, and in print edition (planned to be quarterly), its print edition has ISSN 2250-3366.
Subscribe to our CLRI online edition. Our subscribers receive CLRI digital copies directly into their Inbox, get print copies free of cost whenever they come out during the subscription period, and are waived off any reading fee towards our print editions.
You can become our subscribers any time you prefer. To become a subscriber, visit: Subscriber to CLRI


Jharkhand By Pitambar Naik

Jharkhand

By Pitambar Naik
A lot of hue and cry all over
From village panchayats to parliament
I have allegedly been deprived of my share for centuries.

My voice is like a voice in the wilderness.
Can you evaluate?
How your schemes and policies are embarrassing

My womb is not barren.
I produce bountifully.
Many survive from my bowl.

Why then are my children valueless commodities?
What you have and I don’t.
Look at my wildly transverse valleys and mountains
They full of symphonies and laughter.
I can groom Tata and Sail from heart.
But my siblings are allegedly sold to whore houses.
How despotic our democracy is!
Even the buds can’t shriek in their mother’s lap.

Why do you condemn?
I can’t make it clear to you
Why my children take up weapons as Maoists!


 
Pitambar Naik was born and brought up in Kalahandi district of Odisha. He holds an M A. in Journalism and Public Relations. He works as a social worker in Jamshedpur in India. He writes in English.

Subscribe to
— journal that brings articulate writings for articulate readers.
CLRI is published online per month, in digital versions occasionally, and in print edition (planned to be quarterly), its print edition has ISSN 2250-3366.
Subscribe to our CLRI online edition. Our subscribers receive CLRI digital copies directly into their Inbox, get print copies free of cost whenever they come out during the subscription period, and are waived off any reading fee towards our print editions.
You can become our subscribers any time you prefer. To become a subscriber, visit: Subscriber to CLRI

Donate to CLRI Now!