Full Description
Girls 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.
Contents
13 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
