Samyak Shertok
Samyak Shertok’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Blackbird, the Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, the Gettysburg Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, New England Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. A 2020 National Poetry Series finalist, he has received fellowships from Aspen Words, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His poems have been nominated for Best New Poets and The Best Small Fictions, and received an Association of Writers & Writing Programs Intro Journals Award in 2020.
Reading List
A Brief History of Hunger
The sky snakeroot smoke and rasping—a terrible light swallowed up the village. Up close: monsters of dirt, without number. Their wings sickled and shining: fairies rapacious, red red. They sheathed the cedars and barley fields ash yellow. Soon we could see neither land nor sky. We bolted the doors and windows: the Teeth of the […]
In a Time of Revolution
Never wear red. Never wear GoldStar shoes. Bury the batteries beneath the persimmon tree. When someone asks you where you live, point at the neighbor’s house. At the checkpoint when they ask you where you’re coming from, say Home. After soccer, when the goalie says I wish the King were dead! don’t join the chorus […]
The Last Beekeeper
Let it be said Ama was the last Himalayan beekeeper. When she harvested honey barehanded in the stone house we lived in, she took not juniper smoke but song to the hive. A home is one flower and a thousand stings. The bees flew into her oiled black hair and when she combed it, down […]