CoolGrove

Category: Poetry

  • 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.

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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.

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  • 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.

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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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  • 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.

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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.

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  • Culinary Poems / Poemas cocinados

    by Ana Pascual Zurriaga, Translated by Rolando Pérez

    In Culinary Poems / Poema Cucinado by Ana Pascual Zurriaga is a Spanish-English book of poems. Facing pages (left page Spanish, right page, English) allows for comparative reading of the poems. Ms. Zurriaga embarks on her own existential journey as a poet and as a woman poet: through the word and through her pictorial art (her watercolors and socarrats). The materiality of the plastic arts reminds us of the natural elements, organic and inorganic, that are part of our humanity…These poems, brief and seemingly simple, refer to the most profound and complex aspect of human beings: their spirit and their carnality. In short, her well-constructed, culinary poems, nurture like a good stew made of words, metaphors, and images, selected with love. From the Prologue by Rolando Pérez, author of The Electric Comedy (Cool Grove).

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  • Where I Stand in Angel

    by Louise Landes Levi

    In her latest poetry book, Louise Landes Levi is ‘on the road’. Nomadic & hermetic, exiled and initiated, she reveals uninvited encounter and encounter w. the marvelous through the poetics of collage, the cut-up of perceptual process. Mostly untitled, the poems narrate dissociation but also pleasure, poetry as practice, as purification, itself a vehicle for the re-emergent feminine.Her pilgrimage leads to the European city, for her in decline, to her birthplace New York City and to the villages surrounding Mt. Amiata, site of rebirth & in this work reexamination, a marked departure from her earlier Guru Punk (coolgrove press, 1999). “Louise Landes-Levi joins the unclaimed territory of visionary writers and artists like Simone Weil, Mirabai and Hilma af Klimt. Desire and transcendence are both expressed with astonishing beauty. Her sharp eye trained on the human condition in samsara her quest takes the reader through the pain of love affairs, fulfilled and broken, and the elevation and strength endowed by moments of union with the

    divine. In this collection the reader finds herself Dante to Landes Levi’s Virgil. Instead of the circles of hell, she guides us through her chakras, invites us so intimately into her solitary heart and vastly expansive consciousness, that we too are embraced.”- Bonny Finberg (Kali’s Day)

    “Unclear if seeker LLL works for the CIA or Yahweh, however drinking from this ecstase of yearning and soaring on the astral plane will transfer a certain wisdom if not at least a delicious relief, something to strive for amidst the madness of the eros. if we wld. just learn / how to die, we cld. really / enjoy the adventure of being / ALIVE. writes L and damn does she show us one truth of rebirth. Thank Goddess these poems exist, to remind us there is yet fruit in this wasteland: at last, / I appeased my / ancestors … & you wonder why / I memorize the names / of / plants, / Plotting the return, while you plot / w/o knowing it the last / note in the / eternal, / lament. Brava Louise!”- Katy Bohinc (Trinity Star Trinity)

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  • American Poems

    by Azahara Palomeque

    How does it feel to confront a foreign world while speaking a strange language? Can an immigrant ever overcome the nostalgia for the lost country, for the family and friends who were left behind, for the old self that used to be? American Poems describes the deep sense of uprooting that permeates the immigrant experience, and the nuances of a wound which never heals but keeps changing its appearance and meaning as time goes by. Through a rich, witty imagery taken from her surroundings -the snow, the Canadian geese who console the author in her gelid nights-, as well as a careful elaboration of musicality, the fragmented body faces a cultural landscape seen for the first time while adapting to a territory that reveals always uneasiness for the new comer. Originally titled American Poems in its Spanish version, this book narrates the process of becoming someone else from the beginning of a journey that still continues. In its pages, the reader will learn about the arrival moment, with multiple checkpoints and stamps that mark the lyric voice’s identity; about the tough winters and recently embraced work rhythms; about the causes of displacement -the 2008 financial crisis- and their most intimate consequences, all of that expressed with meticulously crafted lines that speak to the mastery of the Hispanic poetic tradition. It is a book that will leave no one indifferent, everyone interrogating their own belonging and displacements.

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  • Roller-Skating Notes

    by Nina Zivancevic

    Teleported across the Iron Curtain, Zivancevic sounds the hidden alienation of a language on the brink, of mantras of the unsayable compulsively disgorged in lieu of a politic of linguistic refuge. Poetry is not, as Adorno claimed, impossible after Auschwitz, any more than it is impossible after the Soviet Union or the present drowning of the planet in commodified junk, but the contrary: such catastrophes make language possible in its critical poetic aspect.- Louis Armand

    In this book Nina Zivancevic is a stand-up poet in the true tradition of the great stand-up comedians, like Lenny Bruce, for instance, like Groucho Marx. But she’s more than that! When Nina Zivancevic’s says in her poem, Active Artists Reforming Action, “No, I’m not an Anarchist/My grandfather did it for me…,” then you’re really in the presence of someone whose every poem is an assault on the senses, a bullet to your ears.”- Gerard Malanga

    This transnational writer reflects on her current life in Paris, France and the situation with migrants, her past in Belgrade, Yugoslavia and its civil war, as well as New York, US and its problems with gentrification. But she also speaks regarding other current or past events, like the civil war in Syria, and Afghanistan. We delight in her reflections on ancient Greece; philosophers like Nietzsche, Freud, Hannah Arendt and Zizek; painters and composers like Chagall, Chopin, and Liszt; and even drug lord, El Chapo Guzman.”- Biljana D. Obradovic, Xavier University of Louisiana

    As usual, Nina Zivancevic’s poems do a bunch of things I’ve been trying to figure out for years. She is basically the master mathematician of ideas translated into poetry.- Malik Ameer Crumpler, author of Beneath the Underground, Collected Raps

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