No Rhododendron

Poems

Samyak Shertok

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780822992202
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Finalist, 2026 PEN Open Book Award
Finalist for the 2026 Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize
Featured in Poetry Daily's Best Poems of 2025
Winner, 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Mother Tongue: A Haunting
• A Brief History of Hunger
• No Rhododendron
• In a Time of Revolution
• No-Man’s-Land Ghazal
• Himalayas Driver’s License
• Ama
• King Vulture
• A Blessing
• A Sky Burial
• Operation Rhododendron: A Ghazabun
• Song in a Time of Revolution
• Love in a Time of Revolution
• Feast in a Time of Revolution
• Luciferin
• Sky Burial
• A Small Talk
• You Who Saved Yama by Turning His Underworld Flesh into Your Feathers
• Bride of the Revolution
• Harvest of the Revolution
• How to Sky-Bury Your Fatherland: A Ghazanellet
• How to Sky-Bury Your Father Tongue
• Lachryphagus
• Breaching
• Heirloom
• How to Return to Kathmandu After Five Years in America
• One Hundred and Eight Doors
• Nomad: A Ghazanet
• Someday I’ll Love Samyak Shertok
• Dear Unborn Moonbug,
• Dear Mouth of the Horse-Ghost,
• Anniversary
• The Last Himalayan Beekeeper
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author