Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods

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.

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.

• 13 Contract17 Summer in Madras18Rain at Three19 A Fable for the 21st Century20 What the Sea Brought In21 How to be Happy in 101 days24 Fear Management25 Ode to Patrick Swayze26 Everyone Loves a Dead Girl28 Monsoon Poem32 Abandon33 To My First White Hairs36 Considering Motherhood While Falling Off a Ladder in Rome38 Love in the Time of Autolysis40 Jungian Postcard 42 Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods44 Strong Men, Riding Horses46 Disco Biscuits47 Honesty Hotel for Gents48 My Grandmother Never Ate a Potato in Her Life50 Your Body Language is not Indian! or, Where I Am Snubbedat a Cocktail Party by a Bharatanatyam Dancer52 Saturday on the Scores54 The Women of the Shin Yang Park Sauna, Gwangju55 Tranås 56 Encounters with a Swedish Burglar 57 Pig-killing in Viet-Hai60 Calcutta Canzone62 Understanding My Fate in a Mexican Museum64 Dinner Conversations66 The Leather of Love70 O Great Beauties!73 Clumps of Happiness74 Meeting Elizabeth Bishop in Madras76 Grandmothers Abroad78 Poem for a Dead Dog80 Find the Poets82 The Day Night Died83 Coastal Life 84 The View From Inside My Coffin87 Portrait of the Poet as a Reclining God91 When I Was Still a Poet95 Biographical note