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.

Samyak Shertok’s debut collection, No Rhododendron, was selected by Kimiko Hahn for the 2024 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. His poems appear in Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and the Jake Adam York Prize, he has received fellowships from Aspen Words, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His work has been awarded the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Originally from Nepal, he was the inaugural Hughes Fellow in Poetry at SMU and is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Hendrix College.