No Rhododendron
by Samyak Shertok
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Pub Date Oct 07 2025 | Archive Date Oct 07 2025
University of Pittsburgh Press | Pitt Poetry Series
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Description
Winner of the 2024 AWP 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.
A Note From the Publisher
Advance Praise
“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. This debut collection is an absolute marvel.” —Kimiko Hahn, author of The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems and judge of the 2024 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
“Here’s a debut that rises out of ash and walks towards us like a ‘walking door of ash,’ shattered but gleaming.” —Valzhyna Mort, author of Music for the Dead and Resurrected and winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize
"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, author of West: A Translation
Marketing Plan
- National print and online review attention
- Print and online features
- Select author appearances
- Social media outreach
- Online promotion
- Feature at AWP 2026
- National print and online review attention
- Print and online features
- Select author appearances
- Social media outreach
- Online promotion
- Feature at AWP 2026
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9780822967484 |
| PRICE | $20.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 120 |
