Madhuri

My books

All my books are listed below, with the most recent first. Links to buy books are also below, where available. For two of the books you’d need to contact me.

Books are such a joy – the reading of them, the writing of them. Producing them is work, but the challenge of it keeps the brain agile. I’ve been writing since my early teens, and all the phases of life that have come since are in my books. With more on the way, if all goes as hoped. The most recent is To Hills and Waterfalls: a Californian in Calderdale. It’s a celebration of ten years in the Calder Valley in the English Pennines, and contains poems, haikus, and photos.

Reluctantly to Kunzum La

by Madhuri Z K Akin

A juicy little book about men, women, mountains, and... face cream!

The title page notes that the book is "A mere and minor memoir of 3 weeks in 1993," but in fact a story of near-disaster and revelation is tucked into it.

To Hills and Waterfalls

by Madhuri Z K Akin

This book is a celebration of 10 years in the beautiful Calder Valley, in the Pennines, a range of hills in the north of England.

During this time there have been floods, a pandemic, an episode of homelessness... and there have also been countless gorgeous walks all over these hills and dales.

Poems and haikus, illustrated with many photos I took, mainly on these walks.

The book was produced locally, and 50% of proceeds go to local charities: Slow the Flow, to combat flooding; and Calder Community Cares.

This is my paean to nature, walking, weather, solitude, and happenstance.

Flying Lady With Cat

by Madhuri Z K Akin

In this book we meet cats from California, Missouri, India, Italy, Germany, Poland, England...

& one very annoyed leopard in the Himalayan foothills.

A Colorful Dessert of Flowers

by Madhuri

This book is made of two long poems: Suppose There Is No Armageddon, and My Personal Utopia. Inspired by Osho’s discourse series/book entitled The Greatest Challenge: the Golden Future (given in the late 80’s in Poona, India).

Love at Dancing Leaves

by M K MacCrae

Madhuri, a Californian who had lived thirty years in India, was alone in Switzerland happily and in a leisurely manner recuperating from a near-death event…when she put an ad on a dating site. This is the story of what happened next.

More About The Moon

by Madhuri

While I was writing the poem Riding in the Car With My Boyfriend, in Missouri in 2009, I fell into a sort of thrall with the mirror-like quality of the moon. That white circle hanging up there could be anything...whatever we see in it, obligingly it allows. For months then I was filling up with moon poems, emptying them out on paper, filling up again. I got the idea to do a book of them. Then, going back through my archives, i discovered moons in many poems from teenage-time on. So I've brought them all together - any poem I ever wrote in which the moon is mentioned somewhere.

The Poona Poems

by Madhuri

A selection of poems written during a 30-year period during which I lived in Osho's meditation communes, in both Poona, India, and Rajneeshpuram, Oregon.. There are poems about the master-disciple dynamic; about the agonizing first months of beginning to peel the onion of the psyche; about the strangeness of a new culture, and the even-more strangeness of a brief return to San Francisco.. Later, back in Poona...

Mistakes on the Path

by Madhuri

After an adventurous teenage-time, in 1973 I was summoned from San Francisco by my little sister Sarita, to Bombay - to meet the mystic Osho (then called Bhagwan). In 1976 Osho asked me to write a book called Mistakes on the Path. Here it is.

The Teenage Poems, and what I've learned since: Volume 2

by Madhuri

In June 1970, the smog in Riverside was so bad it was impossible to see to the end of the block. My younger sister and I had been kicked out of auditing classes at the university when our ages were discovered. We were sleeping on our mother’s living room floor. And so, with our mother’s blessing, we left Riverside hitch-hiking, looking for a better place to be.

The Teenage Poems, and what I've learned since: Volume 1

by Madhuri

Some years ago I was poking around in my first book, Impassioned Cows by Moonlight, a collection of poems and short stories from my teens. And I had an idea: Wouldn’t it be fun to write a little commentary after each poem, to explain what I had learned since, about the subject of that poem?

Impassioned Cows By Moonlight

by Katy Akin

This book was published in 1974 by Red Dot Press, a division of Hanging Loose magazine in New York. I was invited to submit the manuscript for the first book-publishing venture of this long-running literary periodical.