{"product_id":"no-rhododendron-poems","title":"No Rhododendron: Poems","description":"\u003cb\u003eFinalist, 2026 PEN Open Book Award\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFeatured in \u003ci\u003ePoetry Daily\u003c\/i\u003e's Best Poems of 2025\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWinner, 2024 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003ePart elegy, part poetry of witness, and part poetry of exile, \u003ci\u003e No Rhododendron\u003c\/i\u003e 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.","brand":"Samyak Shertok","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":47285473378540,"sku":"9780822967484","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0684\/1791\/3068\/files\/9780822967484.jpg?v=1770408594","url":"https:\/\/intl.allstora.com\/products\/no-rhododendron-poems","provider":"Allstora","version":"1.0","type":"link"}