No Rhododendron
Subtitle
Poems
Winner of the 2024 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
Part elegy, part poetry of witness, and part poetry of exile, "No Rhododendron" is a lament to the poet-speaker’s father and fatherland and a grief-wrought love letter to his mother and mother tongue. The collection is haunted by an existential question about Shertok’s oral mother tongue, Tamang: How do you write about a language that has no script? Exploring the erasure, ambiguity, multiplicity, violence, and unknowability signified by “X,” the poems dwell on the lip of a new ghost language, which ultimately fails itself. The polyphonal witnessing of the decade-long Maoist conflict in his native Nepal from schoolchildren’s perspective reveals how a war can fracture the psyche of an entire generation. The final thread of the book, a “reverse-elegy” for his mother, meditates on the impending loss of a loved one as a potential site of mourning, impermanence, gratitude, memory-making, and mythopoeticism.
Bio
Samyak Shertok is an alum of the Department of English at ASU, having earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing in 2014.
Praise for this book
'No Rhododendron' is a gorgeous, formally innovative collection that explores the loss of a father to cancer, the loss of a homeland to war and exile, and the anticipated loss of a mother whose identity contains the final memory of home. These poems do not merely praise or lament but consciously examine what it means to be unable to lament.
Paisley Rekdal Author of "West: A Translation" and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
If poetry is, as has been defined, a species of magic, Samyak Shertok has conjured an elegant and sophisticated collection that is full of hybridity in form and subject. ... This debut collection is an absolute marvel.
Kimiko Hahn Judge of the 2024 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and author of "The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems"
