“This debut collection is an absolute marvel.”
-Kimiko Hahn
WINNER: AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry 2024, selected by Kimiko Hahn
FINALIST: National Poetry Series Open Competition 2021, 2024
FINALIST: Jake Adam York Prize 2021, 2023
FINALIST: Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize 2022
FINALIST: Alice James Award 2024
FINALIST: Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Poetry Contest 2023
FINALIST: Michael Waters Poetry Prize 2024
FINALIST: Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize 2024
FINALIST: Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry 2024
HONORABLE MENTION: Vanderbilt University Literary Prize 2024
INDIVIDUAL POEMS FROM THE COLLECTION AWARDED
Auburn Witness Poetry Prize 2023, Final judge: Joy Harjo
Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry 2022, Final judge: Jennifer Chang
Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry 2020, Final judge: Rebecca Lindenberg
Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award for Poetry 2021, Final judge: Felicia Zamora
Utah Original Writing Competition in Poetry 2022, Final judge: CMarie Fuhrman
Runner-up, Iowa Review Award for Poetry 2021, Final judge: Tracie Morris
Honorable Mention, Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry 2021, Final judge: Natalie Diaz
ADVANCE PRAISE
“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’s Citation, AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry 2024
No Rhododendron is a gorgeous, formally innovative collection that explores the loss of a father to cancer, the loss of a homeland due to war and exile, and the anticipated death of a mother in whose identity is contained the final memory of home. These poems do not merely praise or lament but consciously examine what it means to be unable to lament, resisting the elegy’s conventional gestures of closure and, at times, even the reader’s identification and empathy, as we see in the collection’s persona poems about the Maoist war in Nepal. As much as the reader is drawn in to witness grief, then, she is simultaneously reminded that the elegiac imagination can never fully reproduce or preserve the identities of the dead. A fantastic first collection.
-Paisley Rekdal, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award & author of West: A Translation
No Rhododendron offers elegy and outrage, lyricism and edginess, poems in complex received and invented forms – including a moving sequence of sonnets whose lines must be read from bottom to top -- and poems in prose. We have first-person accounts of Nepal’s brutal recent history (“Beneath every threshold: bones of a nation / buried alive”) alongside magical tales and creatures and characters from Nepali folklore (“In the morning, the junipers knew and the snow leopard cubs, the wind knew and the one-hundred-and-eight stars.”). The real and the imaginary often work in tandem (“The bees flew into her oiled black hair / and when she combed it, down / fell rhododendrons”). A remarkable debut by a remarkable poet.
-Jacqueline Osherow, author of Divine Ratios
In Samyak Shertok's No Rhododendron, what we know of ourselves, our grief, our guilt, and our love for the vast and complicated ashes left behind by history realize themselves to the last syllable. Because history books never satisfy our thirst for a different kind of memory, we follow the poet into the textured noise - "I'm speaking through a mouthful of bees" - of an epic tale torn into the tiny pieces of pronouncements, blessings, messages, complaints, news, prayers; into a cacophony of voices, familiar and strange, that belong to many participants of a tragedy seeking to be heard. Shertok's uprooted, rain-beaten, jet-lagged language chants, crows, blooms, cries. His stark lines and poignant images slap us into awakening with the gentleness of a frightening, ancient yet still unfolding, fairy tale. Here's a debut that rises out of ash and walks towards us like a "walking door of ash," shattered but gleaming.
-Valzhyna Mort, winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize & author of Music for the Dead and Resurrected
“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
"‘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
“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