Girls are Coming Out of the Woods by Tishani Doshi

Tishani Doshi on Girls are Coming Out of the Woods: “I want to give this book to the people I love, and say to them, memorize this, never forget. – Jeet Thayil Each poem promises the sharpness of broken sea-shells, the smell of brine.

In this collection, Tishani Doshi inhabits the different homes: her childhood, the body, cities that were passed through, cycles of rain. There are poems of celebration and homages, as there are poems lamenting human cruelty and dispassion. This is also a book of travel and of homecoming, of familiar decay and startling, haunting discoveries of our oldest themes of love, grief, suffering and anger.”

Girls are coming out of the woods,
wrapped in cloaks and hoods,
carrying iron bars and candles
and a multitude of scars, collected
on acres of premature grass and city
buses, in temples and bars. Girls
are coming out of the woods
with panties tied around their lips,
making such a noise, it’s impossible
to hear. Is the world speaking too?

Tishani Doshi in Girls are Coming Out of the Woods (fragment)

Tishani Doshi is an award-winning poet and dancer of Welsh-Gujarati descent. She was born in Madras, India, in 1975. She received her masters in writing from the Johns Hopkins University in America and worked in London in advertising before returning to India in 2001 to work with the choreographer Chandralekha, with whom she performed on many international stages. An avid traveller, she has been trekking in the Ethiopian Bale Mountains, visited Antarctica with a group of high-school students, and documented the largest transvestite gathering in Koovakam. She has written about her travels in newspapers such as the Guardian, International Herald Tribune, The Hindu and the Financial Times. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 2001. In 2006, she won the All-India Poetry Competition, and her debut collection, Countries of the Body (Aark Arts), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her first novel, The Pleasure Seekers (Bloomsbury, 2010), was longlisted for the Orange Prize and shortlisted for the Hindu Fiction Award, and has been translated into several languages. Her second poetry collection, Everything Begins Elsewhere, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2012. Her third, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, is due from Bloodaxe in 2018. Tishani Doshi currently lives on a beach between two fishing villages in Tamil Nadu with her husband and three dogs, and sometimes moonlights as a dancer.

Girls are Coming Out of the Woods
by Tishani Doshi
PBS Recommendation Summer 2018
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publication Date: 10 May 2018
Paperback £9.95
ISBN: 9781780371979
Pages: 96
Size: 234 x 156mm
Engelstalig

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