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No Rhododendron: Poems
Finalist, 2026 PEN Open Book Award
Featured in Poetry Daily's Best Poems of 2025
Winner, 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, 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.
Featured in Poetry Daily's Best Poems of 2025
Winner, 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, 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.
- GenresPoetry
116 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 7, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 3, 2026
Sealey Challenge 2026: 3/31
I knew very little about Nepal and its 10 year Civil War before picking this up. This is certainly not a history of the country or this specific event, but rather it's a much more personal reflection on Nepal through this family, their lives, and losses. Shertok explores memory and grief in many forms through these poems. I am often drawn to collections exploring grief, but these discuss grief that I cannot even imagine. What does it mean to lose a language? A way of life? For ten years, what does it mean to be embroiled in events that feel both so large and so small? The language used to explore these truths was both beautiful and powerful in its messaging. For me, the writing vividly captured these moments in time that meant I could picture certain scenes or intimately felt the nostalgia or longing expressed. I was just really enraptured with this collection and I hope more readers will check it out! As someone who has had mixed success with the Pitt Poetry Series, I am happy to report to have found such a gem of a collection finally!
Thank you to the publisher, University of Pittsburgh Press, for an e-ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are my own!
I knew very little about Nepal and its 10 year Civil War before picking this up. This is certainly not a history of the country or this specific event, but rather it's a much more personal reflection on Nepal through this family, their lives, and losses. Shertok explores memory and grief in many forms through these poems. I am often drawn to collections exploring grief, but these discuss grief that I cannot even imagine. What does it mean to lose a language? A way of life? For ten years, what does it mean to be embroiled in events that feel both so large and so small? The language used to explore these truths was both beautiful and powerful in its messaging. For me, the writing vividly captured these moments in time that meant I could picture certain scenes or intimately felt the nostalgia or longing expressed. I was just really enraptured with this collection and I hope more readers will check it out! As someone who has had mixed success with the Pitt Poetry Series, I am happy to report to have found such a gem of a collection finally!
Thank you to the publisher, University of Pittsburgh Press, for an e-ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are my own!
August 21, 2025
The thing I liked most about the book was the connection to heritage. The strongest pieces to me were the pieces in which language was being discussed. however, I did feel a lot of the poetry sort of slips by inconsequentially. I always want poetry to have a lasting impact, to be able to recall specific lines and imagery, but I feel I can't do that with this collection.
November 19, 2025
Very nice book with beautifully written poems. You can feel the love the poet has poured into every poem. Loved it 👍🏼
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews