Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods

The 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 Doshis 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 Doshis poetry collection Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods but I know Ill 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 - thats precisely what Doshi does in this intelligent, elegant, unflinching collection. Its 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) *

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 transgender 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. Fountainville: new stories from the Mabinogion was published by Seren in 2013. Her third collection, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2018 in the UK, and for the poetry category of the 2019 Firecracker Awards in the US. Her second novel, Small Days and Nights (Bloomsbury, 2019), was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her fourth poetry collection, A God at the Door (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), was shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Tishani Doshi lives on a beach between two fishing villages in Tamil Nadu with her husband and dogs. She is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Practice, Literature and Creative Writing at New York University, Abu Dhabi.

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 Trans 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 Cofn 87 Portrait of the Poet as a Reclining God 91 When I Was Still a Poet 95 Biographical note