Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods

By Tishani Doshi

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. 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: May 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781780371986

Tishani Doshi

Tishani Doshi was born in Chennai. She is an award-winning poet, journalist, essayist and novelist. Doshi has published seven books of fiction and poetry, most recently Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award 2018. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award for Poetry, winner of the All-India Poetry Competition, and her first book, Countries of the Body, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2006. Her debut novel, The Pleasure Seekers, was shortlisted for the Hindu Literary Prize and longlisted for the Orange Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Small Days and Nights was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize 2020. Doshi is also a professional dancer with the Chandralekha Troupe. She lives in Tamil Nadu, India, with her husband and three dogs. tishanidoshi.com

Book preview

TISHANI DOSHI

GIRLS ARE COMING OUT OF THE WOODS

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

‘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, memorise this, never forget.’ – Jeet Thayil

‘These powerful haunting 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 seek 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

Front cover art: Red Point (2015) by Daria Petrilli

TISHANI DOSHI

Girls Are Coming

Out of the Woods

for my mother, Eira,

born in snow,

bold as roses.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editors of the following publications: Abbreviate, Asia Literary Review, Departures, February anthology, Filigree: Contemporary Black British Poetry (Peepal Tree Press, 2018), Fulcrum, Granta, Golden Shovel Anthology (Arkansas University Press, 2017), The Guardian, The Indian Quarterly, Kavya Bharati, Kindle, LA.LIT, Liberty, The Long White Thread of Words: Poems for John Berger (Smokestack Books, 2016), Magma, Poetry, Poetry at Sangam, and Poetry Wales.

‘How to be Happy in 101 Days’ was commissioned by the United Nations Society of Writers to commemorate the International Day of Happiness, and appeared in the anthology, Happiness, The Delight-Tree (2017).

Thanks to Terrance Hayes for inventing the Golden Shovel form, used in ‘Strong Men, Riding Horses’ and ‘The Leather of Love’.

Both aphorisms used in ‘Your Body Language is Not Indian!’ are by Nicolás Gómez Dávila.

‘The View from Inside My Coffin’ was inspired by a news story about how South Koreans are combatting suicide rates with coffin therapy.

The book’s epigraph is taken from ‘January’, from Song at the Year’s Turning (1955) by R.S. Thomas in Selected Poems 1946-1968 (Bloodaxe Books, 1986), reproduced by permission of Bloodaxe Books Ltd.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Epigraph

Contract

Summer in Madras

Rain at Three

A Fable for the 21st Century

What the Sea Brought In

How to be Happy in 101 Days

Fear Management

Ode to Patrick Swayze

Everyone Loves a Dead Girl

Monsoon Poem

Abandon

To My First White Hairs

Considering Motherhood While Falling Off a Ladder in Rome

Love in the Time of Autolysis

Jungian Postcard

Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods

Strong Men, Riding Horses

Disco Biscuits

Honesty Hotel for Gents

My Grandmother Never Ate a Potato in Her Life

Your Body Language Is Not Indian! or Where I Am Snubbed at a Cocktail Party by a Bharatnatyam Dancer

Saturday on the Scores

The Women of the Shin Yang Park Sauna, Gwangju

Tranås

Encounters with a Swedish Burglar

Pig-killing in Viet Hai

Calcutta Canzone

Understanding My Fate in a Mexican Museum

Dinner Conversations

The Leather of Love

O Great Beauties!

Clumps of Happiness

Meeting Elizabeth Bishop in Madras

Grandmothers Abroad

Poem for a Dead Dog

Find the Poets

The Day Night Died

Coastal Life

The View from Inside My Coffin

Portrait of the Poet as a Reclining God

When I Was Still a Poet

Biographical