Description
Book SynopsisGirls Are Coming Out of the Woods is an unflinching collection of poems that weave between topics from violence against women to time and memory. Tishani Doshi's third full collection in English blends visceral power with artistic elegance, re-imagining form as it sifts through detail and emotion. It followed two earlier, highly praised collections, Everything Begins Elsewhere, published by Bloodaxe in 2012, and her debut, Countries of the Body, winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Tishani Doshi was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award 2018 for Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods and for her accompanying dance performance of the title poem. Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her fourth collection, A God at the Door, was published in 2021.
Trade ReviewThe poet revels in a love of language; its capacity for ambiguity, for awe, to express emotional fragility. Sometimes playful and ambivalent, this is an invariably profound and excavating experience in its search for meaning. -- Linton Kwesi Johnson, Canon Mark Oakley and Clare Shaw * Judges of the Ted Hughes Award 2018 *
Tishani Doshi’s third collection, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, chillingly conjures an uprising of dead women who refuse to be silent victims of male violence... Elsewhere, there are frank and moving poems about the experience of ageing and pressures on women to reproduce, as well as a playful imagined meeting with a young Elizabeth Bishop in Madras and an ode to Patrick Swayze. -- Sandeep Parmar * The Guardian (Poetry Books of the Year 2018) *
I've already read Tishani Doshi’s poetry collection Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods but I know I’ll return to it many times. One of the poems talks about poets ‘holding the throat of life/ till all the sunsets and lies are choked out/ till only the bones of truth remain’ - that’s precisely what Doshi does in this intelligent, elegant, unflinching collection. It’s very much a collection for this moment in history, but one that will endure long past it. -- Kamila Shamsie * The Guardian (Best Summer Books 2018) *
Table of Contents13 Contract 17 Summer in Madras 18 Rain at Three 19 A Fable for the 21st Century 20 What the Sea Brought In 21 How to be Happy in 101 days 24 Fear Management 25 Ode to Patrick Swayze 26 Everyone Loves a Dead Girl 28 Monsoon Poem 32 Abandon 33 To My First White Hairs 36 Considering Motherhood While Falling Off a Ladder in Rome 38 Love in the Time of Autolysis 40 Jungian Postcard 42 Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods 44 Strong Men, Riding Horses 46 Disco Biscuits 47 Honesty Hotel for Gents 48 My Grandmother Never Ate a Potato in Her Life 50 Your Body Language is not Indian! or, Where I Am Snubbed at a Cocktail Party by a Bharatanatyam Dancer 52 Saturday on the Scores 54 The Women of the Shin Yang Park Sauna, Gwangju 55 Tranås 56 Encounters with a Swedish Burglar 57 Pig-killing in Viet-Hai 60 Calcutta Canzone 62 Understanding My Fate in a Mexican Museum 64 Dinner Conversations 66 The Leather of Love 70 O Great Beauties! 73 Clumps of Happiness 74 Meeting Elizabeth Bishop in Madras 76 Grandmothers Abroad 78 Poem for a Dead Dog 80 Find the Poets 82 The Day Night Died 83 Coastal Life 84 The View From Inside My Coffin 87 Portrait of the Poet as a Reclining God 91 When I Was Still a Poet 95 Biographical note
