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Lost, Hurt, Or in Transit Beautiful: Poems
In Rohan Chhetri’s much-awaited second collection, inherited literary forms-the ode, the lyric, and pristine tercets-are juxtaposed with gorgeously fractured and stylistically daring hybrid pieces. Winner of the prestigious Kundiman Prize for Poetry, Lost, Hurt, Or in Transit Beautiful is a luminous and haunting book.
- GenresPoetry
72 pages, Paperback
First published September 24, 2021
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About the author
Rohan Chhetri
8 books8 followersRohan Chhetri is a Nepali-Indian writer and translator. He is the author of LOST, HURT, OR IN TRANSIT BEAUTIFUL (Winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize 2018), JURASSIC DESIRE (Winner of the Per Diem Prize 2017), and SLOW STARTLE (Winner of the Emerging Poets Prize 2015).
He is the co-editor of 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, Fulcrum, Rattle, Prelude, The Antigonish Review, and elsewhere. He has received poetry fellowships from the Norman Mailer Centre and Sangam House, and won awards from RædLeaf Poetry India and Toto Funds the Arts.
His writings have also been translated into Greek and French.
He is the co-editor of 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, Fulcrum, Rattle, Prelude, The Antigonish Review, and elsewhere. He has received poetry fellowships from the Norman Mailer Centre and Sangam House, and won awards from RædLeaf Poetry India and Toto Funds the Arts.
His writings have also been translated into Greek and French.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 12, 2021
Absolutely amazing. Reviewed under US edition – find my blog review here: https://roughghosts.com/2021/10/12/ev...
April 5, 2022
I think that's the most beautiful piece of poetry I've ever read. I won't convince you. Here's my favourite poem.
"The Singing Bone"
The shaman comes to the valley after midnight Circling our boarding house. Pinned to our small beds In terror, we listen to the clean music of bones. Later, through a rift in the curtain, we squint into the mist But cannot see the past from a man Blowing the trumpet of a suicide's hollow shinbone.
Twenty years will pass before I understand this music Robbed from a grave. Sleepless in the new world, Listening to the laboring salt trucks make rounds On the frozen streets, it will come back to me All at once: the echo chamber of the creaking bamboo Grove where we smoked our first cigarette,
The army of deaf and mute in the village who spoke Only in obscene gestures, the lonely daughter From the herbarium who wrote letters to us In a hen's scrawl. The old house replaced By something modern, architecture standing in For a woman's death. Her husband's slow breakdown
Coursed for months, the clocks telling him to jump Off a cliff, the second marriage hurried in mourning. The white seed of lunacy sleeps, then swells to its fate. But all our fears of summer snakes & rabid dogs, Everything depended on them granting us safe passage Through fields redolent with the smell of semen
After a night of rain. Caught in the downpour, We stood under eaves of caves. The wind churned, Some vegetation pushed up lightless from the silver-blue Mud. We hollowed hovels out of lantana brambles Where we spoke in the voices of already grown men. In winter, I traveled down as the coiling roads of the world
Grew dark. I held my insides, bile-soaked, where joy Trembled. Prospect of home washed in the retch Of anxiety. My history of nausea in the cold half Light of childhood, where did it come from? Mother, Or the long descent in the old manner of hell The asphalt frozen, slippery all the way home.
The shaman returns the next morning for alms, Turmeric, rice, strip of black cloth. We circle him, The mystification undone in daylight. Just a man bruised From the cold, with children starving somewhere In the mountains across the border, as we sit here Goading him to reveal to us the singing bone.
⭐5/5⭐
I don't care who you are, what genres you like, if you love or hate poetry...go read this book right now.
"The Singing Bone"
The shaman comes to the valley after midnight Circling our boarding house. Pinned to our small beds In terror, we listen to the clean music of bones. Later, through a rift in the curtain, we squint into the mist But cannot see the past from a man Blowing the trumpet of a suicide's hollow shinbone.
Twenty years will pass before I understand this music Robbed from a grave. Sleepless in the new world, Listening to the laboring salt trucks make rounds On the frozen streets, it will come back to me All at once: the echo chamber of the creaking bamboo Grove where we smoked our first cigarette,
The army of deaf and mute in the village who spoke Only in obscene gestures, the lonely daughter From the herbarium who wrote letters to us In a hen's scrawl. The old house replaced By something modern, architecture standing in For a woman's death. Her husband's slow breakdown
Coursed for months, the clocks telling him to jump Off a cliff, the second marriage hurried in mourning. The white seed of lunacy sleeps, then swells to its fate. But all our fears of summer snakes & rabid dogs, Everything depended on them granting us safe passage Through fields redolent with the smell of semen
After a night of rain. Caught in the downpour, We stood under eaves of caves. The wind churned, Some vegetation pushed up lightless from the silver-blue Mud. We hollowed hovels out of lantana brambles Where we spoke in the voices of already grown men. In winter, I traveled down as the coiling roads of the world
Grew dark. I held my insides, bile-soaked, where joy Trembled. Prospect of home washed in the retch Of anxiety. My history of nausea in the cold half Light of childhood, where did it come from? Mother, Or the long descent in the old manner of hell The asphalt frozen, slippery all the way home.
The shaman returns the next morning for alms, Turmeric, rice, strip of black cloth. We circle him, The mystification undone in daylight. Just a man bruised From the cold, with children starving somewhere In the mountains across the border, as we sit here Goading him to reveal to us the singing bone.
⭐5/5⭐
I don't care who you are, what genres you like, if you love or hate poetry...go read this book right now.
April 28, 2022
Every failed revolution is a child
۔learning the edge of himself
Every revolution is a child
۔grown before fire
------ ------ ------
I was a little lost while reading this book trying to make sense of the context. I concluded, atleast my first understanding of the book was that it (the poems) might be based or inspired by the Indo-Bangla Partition Chronicles or the MNF Insurgency in the North East of India. Then I found out that the author is a Nepali-Indian so it most probably can be about the Indian Nepal Border Dispute as well. What struck me the most in between my Google's searches in the hope to find the right context was that no matter what the context turns out to be, potery based on wars or from the perspectives of people from a conflict zone will always leave you with the same feelings and conclusions
–greed for power is the cause of majority of the problems
–people can be pathetic
–history is the proof
–it keeps repeating itself
–why the hell do we not learn from it?
The poems are structured in a manner that I'm not much familiar with, so, it was hard to go through them sometimes failing to understand it's reasoning for why it was framed the way it was (which did make my reading experience not so good) but the emotions did it's talking well. I would however love to talk about the poems in depth and understand them better with someone doing their Masters in Literature (particularly fond of poetry styles), so looking forward to that.
۔learning the edge of himself
Every revolution is a child
۔grown before fire
------ ------ ------
I was a little lost while reading this book trying to make sense of the context. I concluded, atleast my first understanding of the book was that it (the poems) might be based or inspired by the Indo-Bangla Partition Chronicles or the MNF Insurgency in the North East of India. Then I found out that the author is a Nepali-Indian so it most probably can be about the Indian Nepal Border Dispute as well. What struck me the most in between my Google's searches in the hope to find the right context was that no matter what the context turns out to be, potery based on wars or from the perspectives of people from a conflict zone will always leave you with the same feelings and conclusions
–greed for power is the cause of majority of the problems
–people can be pathetic
–history is the proof
–it keeps repeating itself
–why the hell do we not learn from it?
The poems are structured in a manner that I'm not much familiar with, so, it was hard to go through them sometimes failing to understand it's reasoning for why it was framed the way it was (which did make my reading experience not so good) but the emotions did it's talking well. I would however love to talk about the poems in depth and understand them better with someone doing their Masters in Literature (particularly fond of poetry styles), so looking forward to that.
January 8, 2026
3.5 stars // Rohan Chhetri can write. He can write beautifully. His words are heavy, his sentences dense with metaphor and imagery. Even though I did not understand half of the poems in this collection, I still loved immensely the ones that I understood, and I will remember them as long as my heart beats in my chest. Some of my favorites are “King’s Feedery,” “The Indian Railway Canticle,” “Dasai,” “New Delhi in Winter,” and “The Intelligence of Hunger.”
July 13, 2023
An exceptional book, a true marvel. One of the most sparkling things I've read in the last five years. I'll remember it forever.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews