The Way to Thorong La

by John Brandi

Literary Nonfiction. THE WAY TO THORONG LA celebrates John Brandi's mountain travels, beginning with a boyhood hike where he stands "in limitless sky" with his father on a granite dome in California's Sierra Nevada. "A wild delight," he called it. "An exalted connection with all that I saw." As a grown man his exaltation continues as he journeys into the "razor-sharp mesas and glittering peaks" of the American Southwest, and to the "elusive heights that vanish into the jet stream"--the Himalayas of Nepal and Sikkim. Brandi's keen eye for particularities make for an absorbing read, as does his use of the haibun (a Japanese literary form combining prose and haiku). This is not simply a travel book, but a record of the importance of "straying from what you know" to enter an unexpected correspondence between the inner self and the mountain world. 72 pages. Two Himalayan mountain-trek narratives, eight haibun, seven pen-and-ink drawings. "Brandi's work seeks source and renewal in new geographies and in the act of travel with its inevitable encounters and mysteries. Lucky for us that John's a praiser, a psalmist if you will, affirming and preserving the facts of his life his art abounds in."--David Meltzer "Brandi writes about the natural world with insight and respect. He offers more than a recitation of places he's been or a call to honor the environment. He connects the reader to the exterior and interior aspects of his active experience as witness to the mountain world."--Jennifer Levin "Brandi writes honestly and wittily; his prose is swift and crisp. Like another poet, Leonard Cohen, who wondered rhetorically if travel leads us to anywhere, Brandi seems to suggest that destination is not as important as the act of adventuring itself."--Preston Houser

80 pages, Paperback

Published July 15, 2020

About the author

John Brandi, poet, painter, essayist and haiku writer, has resided in New Mexico for 35 years. Over the decades his poems and essays have celebrated his rambles into the unexpected crannies of the high desert, as well as presenting his conversations with bizarre loners, spunky elders, and eccentric renegades.

As a poet, Brandi owes much to the Beat tradition, and to poets as diverse as Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, and Matsuo Basho. Brandi's writing and visual art is specifically informed by his world journeys. His dozens of publications include poetry, travel essays, limited-edition letterpress books, hand-colored broadsides, and modern American haiku. He has lectured at the Palace of the Governors Museum, Santa Fe, at Punjabi University, India, and has been a guide and lecturer for university students studying in Bali, Java, and Mexico. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry and four Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry teaching awards.