Girls are Coming Out of the Woods by Tishani Doshi
PBS Recommendation Summer 2018
'In Girls are Coming out of the Woods, Tishani Doshi combines artistic elegance with a visceral power to create a breathtaking panorama of danger, memory, beauty and the strange geographies of happiness. This is essential, immediate, urgent work and Doshi is that rare thing, an unashamed visionary who knows that, "while you and I go on with life / remembering and forgetting, / the poets remain: singing, singing".' – John Burnside
'I admire these poems because they are masterly formal inventions. But I return to them, again and again, for the elegy and the urgency and the prophecy. I want to give this book to the people I love, and say to them, memorize this, never forget.' – Jeet Thayil
'These are powerful haunting poems about rain, death, poetry and love, with the sea pounding unrelentingly in the background. Whether it is about discovering one’s first white hairs or an ode to Patrick Swayze, about seeking ways to surrender "sun-scarred lives" to the tidal dark or to welcome "orphaned slippers, Styrofoam, fossil of crab" washed up by the insomniac ocean, these poems welcome the wildly assorted flotsam of daily detail and transmute them into the greater strangeness of poetry. Elegiac and fevered, Tishani Doshi’s poems search for ways to make their peace with tide and temporality, with fragility and violence, even as they celebrate that there is really "no end to unknowing".' – Arundhathi Subramaniam
Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods is Tishani Doshi's third book of poems, following two earlier, highly praised collections, Everything Belongs Elsewhere, published by Bloodaxe in 2012, and her debut, Countries of the Body, winner of the Forward Prize for best first collection:
‘These poems move in different directions, as true poetry should. We hear in them joy and sadness, praise and lament, love and disenchantment – simultaneously. Tishani Doshi speaks courageously about herself, about her choices, about the growing shadows. It’s a beautiful book' – Adam Zagajewski
'A quest for the truths contained within that "failed infinity / Of body, fibre, blood". She works under her expressive title to offer an eloquent dissection of the body - its attributes, metaphors, deficiencies and contradictions - all delivered in chromatic, richly textured lines, in which the assured manipulation of rhythm and internal rhyme produces poems of remarkable balance and grace' – Sarah Crown, Guardian
'Free of the habitual lyricism of Indian writers, her work is austere and beautiful. Her refreshing muscularity gives her a distinct voice, both as a woman and an Indian, focusing on the female body, which she treats as a venue for male pleasure and a factory for patriarchy, producing desired sons and unwanted daughters' – Nirpal Dhaliwal, The Times Online
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