No Rhododendron

Winner of the 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-speakers father and fatherland and a grief-wrought love letter to his mother and mother tongue. The collection is haunted by an existential question about Shertoks 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 schoolchildrens 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.