CoolGrove

Category: Books

  • Chanoyu for Winter

    By Rolando Pérez

    In this second edition of Tea Ceremonies for Winter (Cool Grove Press, 2018) now also titled Chanoyu for Winter/Chanoyu para el invierno Rolando Pérez translates the poems originally written in English into Spanish, inviting Spanish-speaking readers to partake in these ceremonies. The term “translation” is used loosely here, for these are less translations than complementary versions of one another. Moreover, the poems here are inspired by haikus, tankas, and chōkas, without being constrained by them.

    In Chanoyu for Winter / Chanoyu Para El Invierno, Rolando Pérez shapes language in the spirit of the Japanese tea ceremony. Between English and Spanish, between winter light and memory’s warmth, these poems honor the fragile beauty of what almost goes unnoticed—a woman ironing a white sheet, snow over grey waters, the hush after a quarrel. Rooted in Zen and the devotion to imperfection, Pérez reminds us that meaning is not declared but steeped, patiently, in the small rituals of daily life. To read this book is to sit quietly with a warm cup in hand, aware of how the simplest moments sustain us.

    —Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of Homeland of My Body

    In his latest books Rolando Pérez demonstrates once again his gift for blending intellectual rigor with lyrical grace. What makes this volume especially distinctive is its bilingual artistry: poems conceived in English are adapted by the author into Spanish, creating a dialogue across languages that enriches their meaning. Like the ritual of preparing tea, each piece unfolds with balance and poise, leaving the reader gratified and enlightened. 

    —Gustavo Pérez Firmat, author of Pulitzer Prize nominated Next Year in Cuba

    Chanoyu for Winter/Chanoyu para el invierno is a 2026 International Latino Book Award winner, honored with the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award in the Best Bilingual Poetry Book—One Author category.

    This is the first volume of the quartet Chanoyu for the Seasons / Chanoyu para las estaciones. In this sense, the work participates in a larger multiplicity—a dialogue not only between languages but also between temporalities, perspectives, and ways of being.

    Buy your copy of Chanoyu for Winter / Chanoyu para el invierno on:

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  • Chanoyu for Spring

    by Rolando Pérez

    Spring marks a transitional time between the greyness of winter and the brightness of summer. And in this way, this Chanoyu for Spring/Chanoyu para la primavera explores the complexity of our emotions. As Lawrence Durrell writes in Clea, the fourth and final volume of The Alexandria Quartet: “How is one to make clear a single truth about the human heart?”. The question itself exposes the paradox: it is not that we are duplicitous, but that we are multiple. Our inner lives, like Spring itself, are transitional, layered, and irreducible to a single tone.

    We live, as the Chicana writer and philosopher Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us, in the space between borderlands—fronteras. This means inhabiting multiple languages simultaneously, as is the case here. It is not merely about translating words or even cultures, but rather about dwelling in those liminal spaces where life is often demanding and challenging. The world has little patience for ambiguity; it demands simple answers to life’s most intricate questions. And yet, Spring is that brief interval when, if all else is lost, what remains is Pandora’s enduring hope: the ephemeral cherry blossoms yet to bloom.

    “Cha-no-yu,” the Japanese phrase for “hot water for tea,” encapsulates Japanese tea ceremony, the spirit of which Peréz evokes in his limpid yet sophisticated collection of poems… In Pérez’s poetic universe, every moment matters, whether it carries weight or both “meaning and non-meaning” at once… Through his poetry, Pérez asks: what is life beyond a moment, beyond “tea / held / by / a thin little string / and / silence”?

    —Publishers Weekly

    Chanoyu for Spring/Chanoyu para la primavera is the second volume of the quartet Chanoyu for the Seasons /Chanoyu para las estaciones.

    Buy your copy of Chanoyu for spring / Chanoyu para la primavera on:

    Amazon

  • Chanoyu for Summer

    by Rolando Pérez

    This is a book composed of prose pieces and accompanying poems (mostly haiku and tanka). Bashō called this hybrid genre haibun. Like Bashō’s most famous work in that genre, Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Interior), Chanoyu for Summer / Chanoyu para el verano is a book about journeys: some physical and rooted in space, most of them internal.

    For many children, summer is a special time of year: the end of school, playing outside beneath the warm rays of the sun, traveling, and so much more. Yet global warming has made summers increasingly inhospitable for everyone, especially for those who live in the most precarious parts of the world. In any case, with time our idealized notion of summer changes, as does the way we experience the season itself. Perhaps that is why the Japanese pay such close attention to the seasons. They are not merely climatic transitions, but embodied and transcendental experiences: surfaces as well as interiors.

    As delicate yet durable as fine tea cups, the poems in Rolando Perez’s seasonal series offer quiet observation and reflection in the howling chaos of the modern world. The exquisite care with which he crafts them allows for surprising, delightful bursts of knowing. In Chanoyu for Summer they’re embedded like jewels in prose memories. Appropriately for the season, these are about coming and going – but also about the stillness between:

    No frogs, no ripples.

    And not even goldfish swim

    beneath the water.

    Listen. What do you feel?

    —John Strausbaugh, author of Duchamp Takes New York

    Chanoyu for Spring/Chanoyu para la primavera is the third volume of the quartet Chanoyu for the Seasons /Chanoyu para las estaciones.

    Buy your copy of Chanoyu for Summer / Chanoyu para el verano on:

    Amazon
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  • Chanoyu for (the) Fall

    by Rolando Pérez

    Chanoyu for (the) Fall / Chanoyu para el otoño employs a variety of Japanese poetic forms to explore the interplay of light and darkness, presence and absence, shadows, subtlety, and the unsayable (yūgen). These forms allow the author to pursue a disciplined attention to thought and feeling (kokoro), revealing the depths hidden within ordinary experience.

    At one level, this volume reflects on autumn and the quiet descent of leaves, light, and time. Yet because the English word fall signifies both a season and the act of falling, it inspired Rolando Pérez to create a work concerned not only with autumn but with the many kinds of falls (furu) that shape a human life—losses, transformations, endings, and renewals.

    The result is a distinctly Western meditation composed in the minor key of yūgen, where what remains unspoken often carries the greatest resonance.

    A sublime collection, moving, searching and profoundly alert to life’s endless challenges.  

    —Junot Díaz, author of This Is How You Lose Her 

    Chanoyu for (the) Fall / Chanoyu para el otoño (en caída) is the fourth and final volume of the quartet Chanoyu for the Seasons/Chanoyu para las estaciones.

    Buy your copy of Chanoyu for (the) Fall / Chanoyu para el otoño (en caída) on:

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    Ingram/Spark

  • Death of New York City

    by Nina Zivancevic

    In Death of New York City: Selected Poems, Nina Zivancevic’s writing straddles two major cultural groups (American/English and European/non English) using English as her medium. Fluent, and having written in her native Yugoslavian, as well as French and English, she is able to bring a wider scope of linguistic references with which to apprehend the psychological and physical phenomena that inform her writing. Nina Zivancevic lives up to her international reputation as one of the foremost living poets of her native Yugoslavia from which she has won numerous prestigious awards since an early age. For this work originally written in English, in his forward, Charles Simic an expatriate and major American poet writes, “Nina Zivancevic is one of the most original poets writing in Europe in the last twenty years…The genius of her art lies in her ability to make surprising connections between diverse cultures and literatures giving her poetry a richness and range that is truly rare.

    Buy your copy of Death of New York City on:

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  • Winged Horse: 76 Assamese songs of Bhupen Hazarika

    Translations by Syed Ahmed Shah. Editor and wordmeanings by Syeda Jebeen Shah

    Dr. Bhupen Hazarika, a true jewel of Assam, was a many-sided genius—a legendary singer, a lyricist, a composer, a scholar, an artist and above all a genuine humanist who dared to dream of a classless society. He left over 800 recorded songs that had touched people so deeply that, in modern history, besides Mahatma Gandhi, no public person in India drew so many people into public mourning which lasted for weeks. It is said that there are few topics that he didn’t write about, from dignity of labour, mystical rapture, to deeply personal crushing blues, whatever he wrote appealed to ‘peasant’ and ‘PhD’ across denominations. In the tradition of visionary message song writing, he filled his songs with people, life and nature to conjure realities not without solace for those in pain. In that special way of seeing his songs remind us that like the ocean, the underlying vastness of luminous certainty is never far. A populist at heart, his core intentions were to uplift and enlighten both the haves and the have nots. That throughout his formative period he wrote in Assamese, his mother tongue – a regional Indian dialect – attests to the importance he gave the language as a validator of common experience, its maturity as a viable medium to express modern concepts and its special quality of being close to nature. The historical, cultural and linguistic syncretism inherent in the language points to the diversity of the region and it’s role as one of the key unifying languages of the NE. With changing demographics affecting spoken and written language, those passionate about Assamese may find some support and hidden direction in the songs of Bhupen Hazarika. That and the fact that he helped put Assam on the map of India is perhaps why people lined up for upto 8 hours to file past his worldly remains as they lay visible in a glass case for three days. It was late in his life that his work started getting translated into English. After three years of gestation, Coolgrove Press is proud to bring out this first edition of Bhupen Hazarika’s songs titled Winged Horse: Assamese songs of Dr. Bhupen Hazarika translated by Syed Ahmed Shah, a poet and resident of Guwahati, Assam.

    Buy your copy of Winged Horse: Assamese songs of Dr. Bhupen Hazarika on:

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  • Origins of Puccini the Cat

    by Charlotte Lily Gaspard

    “Part celestial creature, part sophisticated human” is how Charlotte Lily Gaspard has been described by Faerie Magazine when contemplating the ethereal artist and her work in one of their features. Shadow puppet artist, educator and children’s entertainer, Charlotte’s mission is to activate imaginations and celebrate playfulness wherever she goes. Charlotte is the founder and artistic director of Midnight Radio Show, a shadow puppet sci-fi fairytale theater company based in Brooklyn, NYC. She designs puppets for theater, film, and music videos, including award-winning indie film “Verses at Work” and theatrical adaptation “A Snowy Day & Other Stories by Ezra Jack Keats.” Mommy Poppins declares, “The incredible shadow puppets will amaze the audience.” Along with puppets and performance, Charlotte also creates costumes for theatre & film projects. She holds credits for her costume & wardrobe work from the Public Theater, Shakespeare in the Park, Signature Theater, Roundabout Theater, and many others.

    Charlotte is the resident production designer at Child’s Play NY, a children’s theater company. She also facilitates puppetry & theatre arts workshops all over NYC and beyond.

    Buy your copy of Origins of Puccini the Cat on:

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  • Logging 4 Success: A Diabetic Journal

    by RJ Kikuchiyo

    The purpose of this logbook is to serve your highest purpose; the betterment of you long term health. Keep track of your meals, blood sugar readings, and exercise habits for a lifetime of diabetes remission. Consider your print in this book an indication of your commitment to self-engagement and self-love. – Darryl Diaz Nutritionist

    Buy your copy of Logging 4 Success on:

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  • Two Magic Rupees and a Space Chillum: Post-colonial travels of a seminal British Rocker

    by Neil Rock

    Two Magic Rupees and a Space Chillum are writer Neil Rock’s (1936 – 2018) 48

    lucid essays that bring us closer to a world and it’s populations in transition after WWII and the collapse of the European Colonial age. The subtitle, Post Colonial Travels of a Seminal British Rocker alludes to his childhood growing up in England when the rapid shrinkage of the British Raj also coincided with another invasion on it’s shores-that of Black American music, into the very soul streams of white British youth. Deeply inspired by the Blues, Jazz, Rhythm & Blues and Rock n Roll, the black men and women who made this music suddenly become subjects of admiration and emulation. Fully affected by this code switch in behavior, our author affords us a fresh look at the aftermath of the Empire as witnessed by an English native who describes his childhood background as follows, “Yorkshire is England’s largest county, an area of industrial cities and large open countryside with quiet valleys dotted with small agricultural villages. Most settlements are old and full of tradition. My playgrounds were places that have names of early English historic provenance: Oakwood, Roundhay, Temple Newsham, Seacroft, Harewood and Cross Gates. In the county there are towns and villages with names such as Streoneshlh (Whitby), Ulaskelf, Thriebergh, Jervaux and Rievaulx, which reveal Yorkshires’ Saxon, Viking and Norman French history. The Shire of York is Hobbit country, the Real Hobbit Country, which having been born in I came to love by exploring it since I was a child of eight years old.”

    But in the 50’s, once he heard music from America, this is what he remembers, “My mission in life was to get up and dance, but I’m looking and I’m talking and can’t find any kids who know this jivin’, swing, boogie stuff.” He steeped himself in the music, jamming and busking with other musicians, adding a component to the music that became the unifying soundtrack of the social revolution brought on by the civil rights movement, hand in hand with the anti-war movement- major social factors not lost on the post-war British youth. Neil Rock did not wind up playing in a British rock band, but being a literati, he continued writing about things as he saw them and his calling took him overseas to experience the world without the usual cultural and racial biases towards the ‘other’ people of the world, attitudes enforced and maintained during the colonial age. Through Mr. Rock’s eyes we get to see what else was going on out.

    Buy your copy of Two Magic Rupees and a Space Chillum on:

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  • American Fools Day

    By Anthony Kishko

    American Fool’s Day is an open invitation to enjoy a timely epic farce. Enter, a quantum perversity of civilization. This novel for the 2020’s is set in the 1930’s when Duke The Suit is mysteriously warped into a 1939 film noire just as the explosive cusp of new and advanced technology grips power through propaganda to darkly galvanize a world throttled by totalitarianism, poverty and the hell shadows of global war. They haunt the blinding carnival lights of a surreal, absurd and decadent Hollywood fabricating and cloning their own realities of race, class and gender – beyond the traps of tribal identity politics. From corny Main Street to horny Wall Street, the thorns of D.C. hurtle us on a runaway rollercoaster yet to stop. We are entangled in a spiraling cascade of plots and coups where the real underlying conspiracy has always been the super rich toying against the poor with the subsequent buffering of the deadly carnage unfolding in between by the electrified cash crazy casino economy of a kleptocratic plutocracy fully invested in mesmerizing the star gazing public. We plow through the play of language to tackle the hyperbole of twisted swill – euphemism for an unscrupulous and clandestine demagoguery poking right in the camel’s eye!

    To confront this amorphous hydra of wicked forces Duke the Suit joins the legendary and heroic Jazz musician Louis Armstrong, actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr and the prolific and resurrected Marx Brothers in an exposition of their outrageous shenanigans in slapstick dialogue and acrobatics ever. AFD is a literary metaphor for the year 2020 – a scarred and paranoid decade cutting us deeper still as the film within the story reflects back to us the 1930’s when many of our worst issues and paradigms took root. This book asks the big questions conveyed through compelling angles of an expansive spectrum of mirrored details. It does not peddle nor pander for a political party or ideology but rather dives into a wider perspective by which we can step back and embrace a challenged democracy with our bunkered neighbors. We are spared the red horizon spelling disasters of an uncivil war, competing dictatorships, or a global apocalypse ignited by our fears of “The Other” thus averting a perverse polarization of all illusions to divide and conquer to sink from opiated distraction, to a nameless grave. If we crave more than hope for tomorrow, we need to learn the facts of the past- today! Here is a musical journey through literary prose

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