No Rhododendron: Poems

by Samyak Shertok

Overview

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 school children’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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822967484
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	10/07/2025
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Samyak Shertok’s poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Shenandoah, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. His honors include the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. He has received fellowships from Aspen Words, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Originally from Nepal, he was the inaugural Hughes Fellow in Poetry at Southern Methodist University and teaches creative writing at Mississippi State University.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt from No Rhododendron by Samyak Shertok
Heirloom, page 77

Ama used to make us pluck her gray hair on Saturday afternoons.
Nana, Jyojyo, and I partitioned her scalp three ways with braided locks and combed the strands. With ash-rubbed thumbs and fingers, we pulled the silver filaments—harvest or weed—and handed them down to her to keep a tally. For one rupee? An extra piece of goat meat? The throne of her favorite for the weekend? And what did she want? Beauty? Silly woman, you knew time breaks every bangle. I
think of this as I regard my own gray strands in the mirror. Yours is longer than mine she says on Viber once mine was black as monsoon. I look at hers: now more hay than rain, cortex that has known more hail than shampoo, a loom where she wove buckwheat root and buttermilk and jackal song into a shawl that kept us warm at night and carried us to this luxurious afternoon on the roof, the sun warming our backs,
roasted pumpkin-seed shells underfoot—three children too eager to please their vain mother. It’s been years since I last touched her hair, or she mine. I remember her massaging my scalp and rinsing it with the cold well water when I was a naked boy for the last time. If I plucked her gray hair now, she’d be a nun poised to offer herself to her Buddha at last. So I pull one from mine instead, a yarn I will one day gift as dowry to my Unborn Moonbug. Once her fists were full, Ama would bury the hank of her ashen strands in our vegetable garden:
Grow back black as soot! Today on the other side of the earth, I pull—
Mouth of the Horse-Ghost, your monsoon, your loom—by root a line.

Editorial Reviews

No Rhododendron offers elegy and outrage, lyricism and edginess, poems in complex received and invented forms—including a moving sequence of sonnets whose lines must be read from bottom to top—and poems in prose. We have first-person accounts of Nepal’s brutal recent history (‘Beneath every threshold: bones of a nation / buried alive’) alongside magical tales and creatures and characters from Nepali folklore (‘In the morning, the junipers knew and the snow leopard cubs, the wind knew and the one-hundred-and-eight stars’). The real and the imaginary often work in tandem (‘The bees flew into her oiled black hair / and when she combed it, down / fell rhododendrons’). A remarkable debut by a remarkable poet.

Jacqueline Osherow

In Samyak Shertok’s No Rhododendron, what we know of ourselves, our grief, our guilt, and our love for the vast and complicated ashes left behind by history realize themselves to the last syllable. Because history books never satisfy our thirst for a different kind of memory, we follow the poet into the textured noise—‘I'm speaking through a mouthful of bees’—of an epic tale torn into the tiny pieces of pronouncements, blessings, messages, complaints, news, prayers; into a cacophony of voices, familiar and strange, that belong to many participants of a tragedy seeking to be heard. Shertok’s uprooted, rain-beaten, jet-lagged language chants, crows, blooms, cries. His stark lines and poignant images slap us into awakening with the gentleness of a frightening, ancient-yet-still-unfolding fairy tale. Here’s a debut that rises out of ash and walks towards us like a ‘walking door of ash,’ shattered but gleaming.

Valzhyna Mort

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. In the lines ‘What is it that they say about the tongue? / Something like a feathered blade that belongs / only to the dead,’ we are given a view into the conjuring—his view on how language expresses and depresses, how language as noise can mix into cacophony or clarify home. Homes. Diaspora. Conflict—as simple as war and as ambiguous. In all the hybridity, Shertok has stayed and strayed from forms as in his sonnet sequence. Most thrilling are Shertok’s hybrid inventions, where forms are mixed to great effect: the ghazabun is ghazal and haibun, and the ghazanellet is his ghazal, villanelle, and sonnet. And further, he offers forms of his own making that twine together words and sense. There are quotes from sutras, from Blake, from family. There is abiding grief and, in that, surviving to tell and retell stories. This debut collection is an absolute marvel.

Kimiko Hahn

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. They resist the elegy’s conventional gestures of closure and, at times, even the reader’s identification and empathy, as we see in the collection’s persona poems about the Maoist war in Nepal. As much as the reader is drawn in to witness grief, then, she is simultaneously reminded that the elegiac imagination can never fully reproduce or preserve the identities of the dead. A fantastic first collection.

Paisley Rekdal