Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful by Rohan Chhetri Review by Martha Brenckle

Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful 

by Rohan Chhetri

Review by Martha Brenckle

ISBN: 978-1-946482-54-9

Publication date: October 2021
Page count: 56 pages

The Language of Love and Failed Revolutions 

Love does not always grow in safe places. Rohan Chhetri reminds us of love’s dangers in his brilliant, third poetry collection. Starting with the seemingly simple phrase, “When I think of love,” he brings us on a journey through a love language that is simultaneously grotesque and beautiful, painful and loving: “In the night fragrant with the tea gardens’ first flush/we heard the pain astonished men.” Traveling through his mourning, longing, ongoing and historical deaths, as readers we come to believe the blood and brutality will eventually show us some hard-won flash of pure joy: “wounds like windows left unlatched in a blizzard” and “a fifteen-year-old boy/ Hear the bullet thud to the breast like a second heart.” The lyricism and quiet intensity of his language illuminate the physicality of war and revolution; the materiality of blood and earth could separate into a spiritual, mythical place, but Rohan Chhetri teaches us that tenderness and brutality both come from desire: “every morning my lover woke / there was a bruise.” 

  In the title, Chhetri leaves us with a choice, an “or” but does not deny us or cause us to choose. His history and geography are of the here and now contrasted with bright, sometimes brittle images of the foothills of the Himalayas and the lives of the narrator’s grandparents. He draws us through the villages of childhood and youth and shows us that independence is not always possible. In “Lamentation for a Failed Revolution” the hundred-year-old ongoing revolution for self-determination and a separate state for the Nepali-speaking people of West Bengal is the history of Nepal’s pain. The struggle flamed again in 2017 when in a neo-colonial move, the Bengal government imposed Bengali as a mandatory subject in schools. One way to colonize and conquer others is to take away their language and place it at the bottom of the cultural hierarchy or erase it altogether. He revisits the Nepal of his childhood and his grandparents’ lives, even when writing of a turbulent present.

Chhetri’s use of form is familiar and experimental, inviting his readers to understand how they work together to create meaning. His book is divided into four parts. The first, “Katabasis,” means a descent, moving downhill or a retreat reflecting the inescapable loss of people, relationships, and Nepal’s retreat from revolution. The second section, “Locus Amoenus” is an idealized space, a shady lawn that opens into Eden. Chhetri’s Eden is conflicted, and safety is not promised, even in love. In the third section, “Eratos,” the muse of lyricism, poetry, and love calls on those traditional or ancient forms meant to soothe the listener. And finally, “Grief Deer” is the section that most intrigues me. Unfortunately, I am not well-versed in the culture of Nepal, I thought of Western Symbolism which probably limits my understanding. The deer both causes and absorbs grief and represents innocence and the loss of grace, regeneration and mourning, and the messy reality of love.

In “The Singing Bone,” the poet gives us memory drawn from the sound of bone, “music / Robbed from a grave” and mixed with the fears and desires of adolescence, hiding among the lantana vines “We spoke in the voices of already grown men.” In this poem, the smells of childhood memories are rendered in words a reader can almost take in, and we learn that memory/childhood is in his bones. The often violent forms of these memories take us across a ravaged geography as later in “Lamentation for a Failed Revolution,” Chhetri gives us family memories of his grandfather and the “long summer of bullets” juxtaposed with the words of soldiers forced to both witness and feel hatred for the other without reason: “bullets plunked from the hands-on twenty-year-olds / brought up in the hard streets of small towns / just like ours Given guns first then made / to be afraid of us.” Poems of war and revolution are tightly woven from fragmented lines, the white hollow spaces leaving room for breath while visually leaving a space for memory and history to mix, for the poet’s language to make beauty in spite of the violence: “Found narrative, white root translucence drinking every animal trajectory / of me.”

The violence is also a birth—“every revolution is a child”—and there is opportunity in the transit between people and ghosts. Chhetri’s poems vibrate with ghosts and myth informing our senses with what we should know is alive and carry with us: “It is about the dead returning” intangible in a tangible town until the narrator lets us know that “This town, it dawns on me is in fact / not my town at all.” And, these dead cause the poet to wonder how he can tell himself apart from the returning ghosts, for live and not alive are made from memories and the body itself “has no use for hope.” 

It is impossible to read these poems and not return to them again and again. The language of Chhetri’s heart encompasses a full cycle, a circular expression of life. Perhaps all of our endings are imbued with beginnings. Death and birth, blood flows out and blood flows in, inevitably connected and folding together with tears of joy and exquisite pain, like growing and then peeling an onion.

Rohan Chhetri is a writer and translator. He is the author of SLOW STARTLE (Winner of the Emerging Poets Prize 2015), JURASSIC DESIRE (Winner of the Per Diem Prize 2017) and the forthcoming LOST, HURT, OR IN TRANSIT BEAUTIFUL (Tupelo Press/ HarperCollinsIN, 2021). A UK edition of the book is coming out from Platypus Press, 2022. He has co-edited SHREELA RAY: ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF AN AMERICAN MASTER (Unsung Masters Series, 2021) along with Kazim Ali. A recipient of a 2021 PEN/Heim Grant for translation, his poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Revue Europe, AGNI and New England Review, and have been translated into Greek and French.

Martha Brenckle teaches writing and rhetoric at the University of Central Florida. She writes both poetry and fiction and has been published most recently in Crosswinds, Driftwood, 34^th Parallel, Broken Bridge Review, and New Guard Literary Review, among others. In October 2000, she won the Central Florida United Arts Award for poetry. She recently published a chapbook of poetry—Hard Letters and Folded Wings—with Finishing Line Press. Her first novel, Street Angel (2006) was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and a Triangle Award and was a Finalist for Fence Magazine’s Best GLBT Novel for 2006. 

25 May 2022