No Rhododendron: Poems

Part elegy, part poetry of witness, and part poetry of exile, No Rhododendron is a lament to the poet-speaker's father and fatherland and a grief-wrought love letter to his mother and mother tongue. In search of home, the collection is haunted by the existential question about Shertok's oral mother tongue, Tamang: how do you write about a language that has no script? Exploring erasure, violence, arbitrariness, ambiguity, possibility, the book wrestles with the necessity and inadequacy of a new language. The polyphonal witnessing of the decade-long Maoist conflict in his native Nepal from school children's perspective reveals how a war can fracture the consciousness of an entire generation. The final thread of the book, a "reverse-elegy" for his mother, meditates on an impending loss of a loved one as a potential site of mourning, impermanence, gratitude, memory-making, and mythopoeticism.