No Rhododendron: Poems - Samyak Shertok

Winner of the 2024 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry nPart 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.n