Eros in Sanskrit is a collection of lyrics and meditations on love written over the last thirty years. “A word slinger with unstoppable chops, a spewer of jewels with the baddest ear in the hemisphere,” Kirpal Gordon playfully unites the prose poem to the swinging rhythms of jazz and the montage technique of modern fiction.

Widely published and anthologized, these lines cover a range of territories geographical and historical, musical and metaphysical. Gordon weaves a range of themes — from personal identity, loss, language and beauty to social injustice and the pulse of the street — into a larger participation in the transformative magic of human love.

The book’s companion CD, Speak-Spake-Spoke, delivers eleven of these lyrical gems wed to the American songbook and performed by Gordon and the exuberant Claire Daly Band, also available from LDP Media, where music is sold. (Buy the CD Speak-Spake-Spoke from CD Baby, Amazon, or iTunes.)

Press Release: “LDP Media and Leaping Dog Press Release Companion Book and Jazz / Spoken Word CD by Kirpal Gordon, ‘Poet Laureate of Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in Jazz in Lincoln Center’”

Reader’s Guide: “A Reader’s Guide to Eros In Sanskrit”

Press Kit: “Kirpal Gordon’s Eros In Sanskrit (Book) and Speak-Spake-Spoke (CD)”

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• “Eros in Sanskrit brings to us a riveting selection of Gordon's work over the past thirty years. I am struck again by their freshness, the breadth (and breath) of the poetry, the incantatory sweep of the hard truths these lines bear witness to.”
  

— Cynthia Hogue, author of The Incognito Body

• “Hip, savvy, and inventive, Kirpal Gordon’s prose joins a poetry of the street to the music of the spheres. In subjects ranging from pure jazz lyrics, to philosophical and mythic speculations and revisions, to condemnations of social injustice, to meditations on love, Gordon writes with all five senses awake and in play. When you read him you’ll recognize what’s missing in everything else.”
  

— Greg Boyd, author of The Nambuli Papers

• “On first reading these poems, you wonder if you haven’t entered a very private world with its own private language. But the further you go into this world the more you realize that you are experiencing a very public place of desire and love, of the search for the meaning of the smallest things in life, and the quest to understand and experience the biggest.”
  

— Darrah Cloud, author of The Stick Wife

• “Kirpal Gordon is the Huck Finn of New York City. The kid with the goods, he’ll show you how stories are really made and how each one will remind you of someplace where you have been, or wish to be. Language driven writing that makes music of those molecules, and for once and for all, has you dancing in an empty, quiet room with a book in your hand. The one you’re holding.”
  

— Bob Arnold, author of Once in Vermont

• “Kirpal Gordon’s lines are locomotion and lullaby. In conversation with Kabir and Kerouac, Rilke, Billie Holiday and Kali Ma, they sing ‘the uncontainable yahoo of lightning.’ Whether travelling roads named Paradise Square or the Inca Trail or walking the length of our sorrow, Gordon gives us work that pays our back rent. He teaches us that tenderness is an inside job.”
  

— Jeanne Clark, author of Ohio Blue Tips

• “A poet with unstoppable chops, Kirpal Gordon is a spewer of jewels with the baddest ear in the hemisphere & an unbelievably well-hung mother tongue. He’s not just whistlin’ or kindlin’ Dixie: Gordon’s got a reach equal to his grasp, & both exceed the legal limit. He knows language, in the Biblical sense, but he’s also slept with jazz & death & self-deception & the bone-deep desolation created by such euphemistic entities as the ‘criminal justice system.’ Whirling precise tenderness & eloquent messiness in his devotional blender, he never forgets that ‘the whole world is feminine,’ that ‘the naked god lives.’ His gaze may waver; his words never blink. His singing is lucid & essential. He sings what the rest of us merely think.”
  

— Mikhail Horowitz, word jazz artist, The Blues of the Birth

• http://www.kirpalg.com/