No Rhododendron

University of Pittsburgh Press

(Pitt Poetry Series)

2025

Forthcoming

“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. In the lines ‘What is it that they say about the tongue? / Something like a feathered blade that belongs / only to the dead,’ we are given a view into the conjuring—his view on how language expresses and depresses, how language as noise can mix into cacophony or clarify home. Homes. Diaspora. Conflict—as simple as war and as ambiguous. In all the hybridity, Shertok has stayed and strayed from forms as in his sonnet sequence. Most thrilling is Shertok’s hybrid inventions, where forms are mixed to great effect: the ghazabun is ghazal and haibun, and the ghazanellet is his ghazal, villanelle, and sonnet. And further, he offers forms of his own making that twine together words and sense. There are quotes from sutras, from Blake, from family. There is abiding grief and, in that, surviving to tell and retell stories. This debut collection is an absolute marvel.”
-Kimiko Hahn, Judge, AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry 2024

"‘Dear Unborn Moonbug’ is a breathtaking feat of profound feeling and expert craft. The poem exemplifies how language can make the past and the future ecstatically alive. Wielding the ghazal form with effervescent energy, the poet gives a language lesson that is also a story of migration, loss, and reinvention. It is through language that the poet makes whole what history has halved, connecting us to a parent's tenderness towards an unborn child, to ancestors and all the other ghosts that make the entire endeavor of poem-making/language-learning/life-building so very meaningful.”
-Jennifer Chang

"‘The Last Beekeeper’ is an extraordinary group of poems that are bound by unforgettable images, innovative form, and beautiful language. The craft used throughout the collection shows how, when placed in the hands of a brilliant writer, the smallest details can lift a poem off of the pages and place it within the reader, where it will never be forgotten. I love the risks taken with form throughout, the very careful attention to syntax, enjambment, and diction---but above all of that, and perhaps most importantly to any writing, is the heart found in these pieces. I shall not soon forget the emotional resonance, particularly in the title poem, that left me mouth agape, an ohh escaping me the first time I read it. This is a truly wonderful collection of poems that affect the reader in all the ways we want to be affected by a poem. It is worthy of this prize and all of the praise it will continue to receive.”
-CMarie Fuhrman

“The poem ‘Mother Tongue: A Haunting’ is a tight construction that embodies the haunting of language displacement amidst liminal familial memory.  Mysterious essences of ghost presences ride the weave.  Even language itself is a ghost because what is spoken can haunt you forever, even as it dissipates in consciousness.”
-Joy Harjo, US Poet Laureate 2019-2022

“This poem [“No-Man’s Land Ghazal”] is gorgeous. It’s an elegant and elegiac use of a really difficult form, unfolding in a series of unexpected images and turns of phrase, passing through love and fear and loss and faith in rich music and expertly mindful pacing.”
-Rebecca Lindenberg