No Rhododendron: 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.

Author: Samyak Shertok
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published: 10/07/2025
Series: Pitt Poetry
Pages: 120
Weight: 0.5lbs
Size: 8.60h x 6.80w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9780822967484
Language: English