[REVIEW] Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful by Rohan Chhetri

REVIEW BY HANNAH RIFFELL

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Rohan Chhetri does not write poems for the faint of heart. Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful is a book divided into four parts, the first of which is titled Katabasis, a word that translates to mean a downhill retreat or a descent into the underworld. True to the word, Chethri opens with a monolithic poem that first evokes a bloody folk story before leading into sharp lament for the poet’s own deceased relatives, a transition that weaves subtle inferences of love into a framework of mortality. If the meaning of Katabasis escaped the reader, this introductory poem ought to be a clear forewarning. This physically slim volume of poetry is an emotionally demanding work of art, as Chhetri turns an unblinking eye towards the violent, death-filled nature of reality and questions how it is possible to live in harmony with and to produce poetry alongside the darkness.

“The King’s Feedery,” as the first poem, contains likewise the first lines of the collection, lines that are jarringly stark. “After the rape and the bloodbath,” writes Chhetri, setting the stage for a panoply of poems about sincere pain, but also signalling that the heart of the book extends beyond the actual rape and bloodbath. While Chhetri rarely shies away from graphic details, Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful seems more attuned to the complexities of the “after.” This is a book concerned with the process of remembering desolation and telling stories about agony.

In the first part of the book, the Katabasis section, Chhetri exposes the brutal nature of reality, dwelling on stories of war and genocide and massacres. In “Lamentation for a Failed Revolution,” Chhetri parallels the corporal and psychological effects of violence with a poetic style of disjointed lines, vivid diction, and spliced paragraphs. The images in this poem are horrific: he writes about a man with “blood sluicing down an eye” as he walks to a pharmacy, about a nurse patching together on a fifteen-year-old boy “a medieval coin-sized chunk of skin fallen off the areola,” about “paint-thick blood on the rained streets.” The poem is exhaustive, spanning five pages and nine stanzas; the story does not come quickly or easily to an end. How could it? There is a haunting character to suffering that does not end when the event itself has culminated, something that Chhetri understands keenly. “They dragged our children’s fathers down to the river/ Held them by the hair, pulled their tongues out of their mouths taut like catgut.” This is a historical trauma, one that will affect not only the tortured fathers but the children who observed and will inherit that trauma.

The poems take on a personal note in the second part, called Locus Amoenus in reference to a literary utopia, and seem to describe an intimate effort at reconciliation, as the poet shoulders the lasting legacy of generational trauma. In “Dissociative Love Poem,” he writes that “We are nothing but/ A sum of our history of shame. Grandfather rising/ from a ditch, blood-washed face bloated purple,/ Single pulse beating behind ear, left to bleed out/ By the man who married his only sister- / That’s as far as we talk about in the family.” This is the voice of a man struggling to live in a world where violence is so prevalent, even though it may not have happened to himself in particular. Even so, while Chhetri frequently writes about the violence-marred past of his grandparents and the unspoken griefs of his parents, he also alludes to a lover, who has presumably died, adding a deeply personal layer of sadness to the poems. Indeed, the third section of the book is named Erato, after the Greek muse of love poetry. In Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful, the pain is universal and unique and at all times overwhelming. And yet the words are invariably ornate and powerful, while gruesome at times, sheltered in verses that are appropriately unstructured and free-form. This is one response to tragedy: to frame the tragedy in exquisite language, thereby creating a kind of locus amoenus out of the agony. Chhetri’s poetry, however, challenges this response. Is there truly any way to shape the language of ruin into something permanently beautiful, or is the beauty only found “in transit,” the rest blemished by the reality of death?

There are brief and brilliant moments when the poems reveal a glimpse of beauty. “Bordersong” begins quaintly, deceptively so. “We lived downwind of a bakery,/ butter sesame roasted black cumin.” But it becomes clear that the loveliness of the bakery image is short-lived, as the poem spirals into despair, ending with the line “Downwind blew kerosene & ragsmoke/ in some young martyr’s evening.” It is as if the trauma is inescapable, despite the best efforts of the poet to invoke gorgeousness. Nowhere else in the book is the struggle to move beyond grief more evident, until the third-to-last poem, a pentych entitled “Recrimination Fuge” that a forward-motion is suggested, as the poet manages to refine hope through the simple process of remembering grief.

“Recrimination Fugue” arrives in the fourth and final part of the book, Grief Deer, the name of which derives from the title of one poem and is echoed in the imagery of the closing piece: The ravens calling for the wolves to split/ Open the light from the dead deer’s belly/ Jeweled in the dark purse of its pelt. It is not until this moment in “Mezza Voce” that Chhetri finally admits to the discovery of beauty in spite of horror. “We are each given heaven for brief so heavy./ We put down dance small around it.”

In the confusion of these final lines, there is of course a sense of still being lost and murmurs of woundedness, of still being hurt. But there is also, at the end of the arduous journey that is Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful, something that truly can be called beautiful, something beautiful that can perhaps be made permanent through poetry.

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A native of northern Michigan, Hannah Riffell is an upcoming graduate of Calvin University, where she is a Writing major and a member of the Arts Collective. Her poetry has been published in the on-campus creative journal Dialogue, as well as The National Writers Series Journal and the 2018 book Beyond Stewardships: New Approaches to Creation Care. In 2021, she received the Academy of American Poets University and College Prize at Calvin University. She intends to keep writing and reading poetry long after graduation.