Samyak Shertok’s debut collection, No Rhododendron, was selected by Kimiko Hahn as the winner of the 2025 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. The collection itself feels like a circular strand of the prayer beads handed down from his father. Beads for his Ama and Apa, mother and father. Beads for the Mikli-Phoom, the river Shertok grew up along. Beads for the jackals and honeybees and ever-looming Crows. Beads for the rhododendron, Nepal’s national flower. Beads for the Horse-Ghost, Tamang, the poet’s mother tongue. And so many beads for X, the variables Shertok shows us along the way.
From 1996 to 2006, Nepal was fractured by an internal war that left over 13,000 people dead and another 1,300 missing. This was the setting for Shertok’s childhood and is the backdrop for his incredibly touching first collection of poems. This book sings beautifully of both blossom and loss; it bellows for home. Furthermore, this collection feels remarkably prescient in contemporary America, where we see increases in censorship, increases in political violence that include the murder and disappearances of people, and a seemingly widening divide between battling factions who are unapologetic about the innocents they injure.
The collection opens with “Mother Tongue: A Haunting,” and the speaker begins by honoring his mother, his motherland, and his mother tongue, “In my dream the Horse-Ghost always speaks in my mother tongue,” but later the poem assures us, “I am here to tell you: It was not a dream.” The way in which this contradiction works with the invented form of a haunting is to blend the dream world with the real world and create a sense of recurring nightmare founded in personal history, the trauma of war, and the loss of language. In Shertok’s invented form, all subsequent lines after the first must repeat at least one word from the first line. The effect becomes an eerie sense of repetition. This poem’s second line provides some linguistic instructions, “Ta: Horse. Ta: Root. Mang: Ghost. Mang: Dream.” The Horse-Ghost appears and disappears throughout the collection, a root-dream serving as a symbol of loss and becoming synonymous with Shertok’s native oral language, Tamang. This pain becomes profoundly clear as Shertok mourns his loss of the ability to speak in Tamang:
If to speak one’s mother tongue is to keep one’s mother alive
I kill my mother daily.
Fluent Ghost, look how fluently I spit in my step-tongue.
Un-tongue me, Mother I speak.
And the Horse-Ghost ghost-writes my lines.
While it is a tender poem, it also contains a good deal of violent language. Our speaker mentions thunder, vultures, and “the buckwheat stubble burning,” and the sense that we’re heading into painful times is palpable. “Mother Tongue: A Haunting” closes with, “Horses have risen. Mother, Speak!” and we fully feel the speaker’s adoration for their mother and the invocation to sing through her as we move forward.
The backdrop of war in Nepal becomes increasingly tangible in the collection’s third poem, its title poem, “No Rhododendron.” The poem arrives in fragmented sections, similarly to how the brain remembers traumatic moments and often forgets what happened right before or after the remaining fragment. The first stanza feels reminiscent of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool” in structure and Martin Niemoller’s “First They Came” in subject. It begins:
They came unarmed. They came
half-masked. They came
before the crow. They came
with the moon. They came
moonless. They came
out of the rain. They came
as their enemy. They came
wearing our sons’ scarves. They came
smiling.
This enjambment creates a propulsive sense of inevitability, and the fact that “They came smiling” is incredibly disturbing as juxtaposed with some of the other images the speaker later describes. For instance, “They parceled up his fingers in the paper containing his feature / article and left it on the editor’s desk,” and “They made him dig the hole. They scooped his kneecaps with a broken / Coca-Cola bottle and buried him.” One must wonder what has happened to a person when they can behave as such while smiling. Furthermore, made evident in this piece is the difficulty in knowing who was on which side of the conflict. Shertok writes,“We couldn’t tell whether they were Those-Who-Make-You-Disappear / or Those-Who-Walk-at-Night.”
Understanding who was on what side was probably especially difficult for children, and these hyphenated terms seem to emphasize the innocence and confusion our speaker is experiencing, and the fact that during times of political upheaval, often those left in the middle are those who suffer most. Those who suffer most might remain silent due to confusion, or fear, or lack of means, and other times it seems the right words for our emotions just do not exist.
One major thread woven through No Rhododendron is the use of “X” as a symbol, most often for what is unknown or what cannot be said. As its meaning deepens, Shertok teaches us what X stands for in the moment, and often it stands for the unspeakable, the ineffable, or what can be said only in Shertok’s native, oral tongue— what simply cannot be expressed now in written English. This feeling of being left speechless is first introduced in “Mother Tongue: A Haunting” when we see the first use of an em-dash, “vultures — there is no way to say this / in English.” Moving forward, page breaks are used to provide various definitions for how we might think of “X,” each accompanied by a gorgeously lyrical or richly imagistic example. The first such break reads, “What cannot be written or unwritten, or can be written only in the sky: The first three letters of Tamang, my oral mother tongue, are X, X, and X.” Some later breaks include, “An unknown or unspecified person or thing: X took my son away as the whole village watched.” and “An arbitrary variable: The total number of the Disappeared in X.” In addition to these definitive page breaks, we begin seeing the symbol used frequently within the poems themselves. After its first use, “X” is continually placed to alert the reader that something in the text is missing, and that it’s something worth considering. There are times that “X” arrives midline, or on a line of its own, serving simply to slow us down and cause us to wonder about the realm of possibilities that lies therein. Several poems finish with an “X” on their own final line, signaling to the reader that there’s more to say, but that the words do not exist for one reason or another.
In “In a Time of Revolution,” each line begins with an “X.” The poem reads as a bulleted list of instructions from a parent to a child about how to stay safe, often about what not to say or not to do, what must be hidden physically, emotionally, and spiritually:
X Never carry a book with a red cover
X If you see us being lead away by two boys on the street, think they’re my
classmate’s parents.
X When a soldier points his rifle at your heart Don’t you know this is curfew
hour? and takes his sweet time with the frisk, look at the stars and think His
hand is my hand. Think I’m searching myself.
X Practice praying prostrate.
X If we aren’t back in a week, call the Kathmandu Post.
This poem and its use of the variable simultaneously relate what can’t be said and what must be. The way in which this collection is structured around various understandings of “X” inserts a sense of the unknown that feels perfectly apt for these poems born from experiences of war and migration.
In addition to the way that No Rhododendron is structured and in which the poems speak to each other, Shertok’s use of forms, including some invented and adapted, is fitting and impressive. In these poems of different worlds colliding, peace and war, Nepal and America, we find ourselves not only looking at original forms like the haunting, but hybridic creations including the ghazabun, ghazanellet, and the ghazanet. Among these new forms is also a series of seventeen sonnets titled “A Sky Burial.” A sky burial is a tradition practiced in Nepal where the deceased are returned to nature through offering their bodies to birds of prey, hence the motif of carrion soaring throughout the collection. In this series of sonnets, the poet has adapted the form and, in honor of the sky burial tradition, instructs us that these are “Sonnets to be read from the Earth to the Sky,” from last line to first line, bottom to top.
While this series and collection honor and cherish Shertok’s deceased father, they also explore a complicated father-son relationship that does not appear as having been one ripe with physical affection. The eleventh sonnet of the series begins, “Does a man feel whole only when he has been recast/ to the skies? Now I touch him everywhere.” The inverted sonnet finishes with some vulnerable admissions from the speaker:
X
If I had, it wouldn’t have been true to our story.
held Apa in my arms as he breathed his last.
I did not get there in time. I don’t know if i could have
were no good. Afterwards though, I was relieved
in New York, who sent me in his place, for his papers
anyone, it would have been my middle brother
She sounded earnest, but if Apa wanted to see
Here we become touched by this sense of closeness that sometimes can only be achieved through loss, and again, the “X” reminds us that there is still more. For as masterfully as he does with doing so, the poet still seems to wonder how one might possibly relay such emotions. Shertok demonstrates an incredible respect for the power of the line and how and where to break it to create suspense, duality, and surprise.
So much of No Rhododendron speaks to proximity and feeling squeezed between realities. “In a Time of Revolution” finishes, “The year the war ended, I swallowed nine bodhi seeds and left my fatherland. / Yam between two boulders. Vultures. Fatherless — Oh bereft my Fatherland!” The collection is a yearning for and a praising of home in terms of both people and place. Its final poem, “The Last Himalayan Beekeeper,” is an ode to Shertok’s Ama and the tenderness with which she loves him, with which “she fed [him] raw/ honey from her palm every night,” with which she implores him to sing their stories:
Let me sky-bury them Ama,
while they are still alive. No,
Tamang she opens
the wounds with crushed hooves
you mouth is our last hive.
And sung he has. Throughout these poems, Samyak Shertok explores his experience growing up amidst civil war, and through settings built upon remarkable images, creative uses of form, and skillfully crafted lyricism, you will find yourself transported into moments of love, honor, and terror. You will feel stingers in your tongue, taste his father’s pumpkin blossom lamb curry, and see the crows forever circling. Samyak Shertok’s debut collection is unique in so many ways. It has caused me to rethink how much room remains for originality, to reimagine what poetry can be.
