No Rhododendron: Poems

by Samyot Shertok

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.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

Published October 7, 2025

Reviews

[G. Laenvoir-Hale · Rating 5 out of 5]

No Rhododendron is a book of lists: where the flora, fauna, and food of Samyak Shertok's native Nepal morph into mortar that secure its heavier themes to the page. Kaleidoscopic in vision, the verses left me awash in ghee, vultures, ash, crows, monsoons, and of course, the eponymous rhododendrons. The result is full immersion, a survivable drowning, a collection humming with life and pain. The verses often find themselves caught in a kind of emotional superposition, like getting stung by a bee while the honey dissolves on your tongue: the flavors don’t cancel out the venom, somehow, they combine. Elsewhere in the collection, pragmatic dissociation emerges as an inevitable symptom of war, in this case, the decade-long Maoist Insurgency.

"No Rhododendron" shows up early, the third poem in a collection of 33 pieces. What follows is a masterclass of intelligent, occasionally tricky, but never impenetrable work. These poems talk to each other, cross-pollinate from stanza to stanza. They invite you to sit down by the fire and listen closely.

I expect to reread this one again, and pick up entirely new things when I do.

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Notes on Style

Shertok gives voice to his themes by employing a variety of established poetic forms, like the ever-popular sonnet, while freely experimenting and inventing his own. The language is at once explicit and omissive, utilizing “X” as a recurrent symbol. Sections of the collection are each labeled X - though with different definitions included as an epigraph. For example, an early section describes X as something that “cannot be written or unwritten”, but others include “to cross” or “to indicate a choice.”

The poem “In a Time of Revolution” begins every line with “X”, a motif shared by another poem: ”Common Characteristi(x)s of a Displaced Indian with a Learning Disability” by Chrisosto Apache, also in a debut collection ( Ghostword). Does this form already have a name, I wonder? The X-prefix poem? I would be intrigued to see more examples that match.

There is a lucidity to the madness within, sometimes even a playfulness to accompany the bleakest moments. This flexibility is not always in terms of tone, but in a willingness to employ alliteration (e.g. “buckwheat stubble burning”, p.5) or subtle linguistic choices (e.g. using the “un” prefix, as in “unhusked” or “unburied” throughout). Phrases that border on wordplay (e.g. “a landfilled field”, or “they Xerox” in a poem that opens with six “They X” phrases).

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The Art of Revision

The craft and care is readily apparent in these poems. Poetry revision is a fine art, and a somewhat mysterious one, even to poets themselves. Editing poetry is a strange and difficult endeavor, both for the poet, and for those editing their work for publication. Book versions of poems sometimes drastically differ from their original appearance in literature journals.

In No Rhododendron, changes include small, but high-quality changes like in “A Blessing” (p. 22) where the book version has “wild herbs steeped in buttermilk overnight” vs. the Poetry magazine version which merely has them “soaked” in buttermilk. Likewise, in that same poem, “bone stock” in the 2024 version becomes “bone broth” in 2025. These are subtle changes but they reveal an interesting window into how to add depth via word choice in a poem.

Waxwing Magazine’s version of “Bride of the Revolution” the line “Her arms wrapped around her rifle as if it were a beloved’s body.” becomes, in the book, “Her arms wrapped around her rifle as if it were the limb of her brother.” A fascinating change, that adds specificity, since a rifle is more similar to an arm in shape or length than an entire body, and the change of the relationship, from “beloved” to “brother” also adds a different tone to the reading. I counted at least 10 changes in “Bride of the Revolution” - including the line “...until her comrades tossed them into a shallow pit with shrouds of dirt” transforming into the somehow even more intimate and visceral “...until she stuffed her own mouth with raw earth.”

Perhaps in the future, I will continue a close reading of the old magazine versions compared to the book, because I’m always on the lookout for hints at the revision process, looking for insights that may help me as a poet or can be helpful for others as they attempt to edit their work.

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No Rhododendron is a book fit for a particularly troubling time in America, not because of the disquieting parallels one might observe - for me those came almost instantly - but for the exceptional bravery and love that hums throughout. We can love our parents, while also being confused or hurt by them. We can love aspects of our country, while understanding that oblique bureaucracies may also be intent to kill us. We can do all of these things in contradiction, in hope, and in tragedy, as people always have.

Indeed, we all have “reasons for moving,” as Mark Strand famously wrote. Reading No Rhododendron will make you think deeply about your own.

[Rhiley Jade · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and University of Pittsburgh Press for the E-ARC! This E-ARC was sent to me in exchange for an honest review!

Sometimes you read a book where the suffering is so great that your heart contracts and tears well in your eyes and your mind fills with guilt and empathy and that was exactly what happened while I was reading this collection. The author did an amazing job at portraying loss and pain and fleeing home even when you don't want, even when you're leaving behind everyone and everything you know and love. It was heart shattering.
Poetry has been letting me down recently and it's been bumming me out, but this was my light in the dark. I am immensely glad that I requested it. My mind is still spinning.

[Sagar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really nice collection. My favourites were The Last Himalayan Beekeeper, Dear Mouth of the Horse Ghost, Ama, Lachryphagus, Luciferin, Sky Burial.

Thanks NetGalley and University of Pittsburgh Press for the review copy.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Woof (complimentary). I didn't expect to get absolutely obliterated by the overwhelming feeling of melancholy and helplessness and defiance and remembering and grieving and violence and survival that came through every poem.

Thanks for the ARC

[Lisa Davidson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not a collection to read just once. The imagery and the emotion have so much depth and I know I'd find more every time. I also thought the forms were cool; it talks at the end about some of the structures used to create the poems and I want to go back through with that knowledge.

[Graham George · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection is full of hybrid and invented forms that chip away at the negative space around Shertok's experience of the Nepalese Civil War and his forgotten mother tongue. My favorites were "Someday I'll Love Samyak Shertok" and "Dear Mouth of the Horse-Ghost,".