God at the Door

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 transvestite 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. Her second novel, Small Days and Nights (Bloomsbury, 2019), was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her fourth collection, A God at the Door (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection.Tishani Doshi currently lives on a beach between two fishing villages in Tamil Nadu with her husband and three dogs, and sometimes moonlights as a dancer. For more information, see her website www.tishanidoshi.com

May we always have the music and elegant fury of Tishani Doshi’s poetry.

• 11 Mandala12 Pilgrimage13 Creation Abecedarian14 The Stormtroopers of My Country15 My Loneliness Is Not the Same as Your Loneliness18 A Blue Mormon Finds Herself Among Common Emigrants20 Why the Brazilian Butt Lift Won’t Save Us22 Every Unbearable Thing25 Advice for Pliny the Elder, Big Daddy of Mansplainers26 Roots28 In a Dream I Give Birth to a Sumo Wrestler30 Instructions on Surviving Genocide37 The Comeback of Speedos38 Face Exercises for Marionette Lines39 I Found a Village and in it Were All Our Missing Women41 Contagion42 Tree of Life44 Homage to the Square46 I Don’t Want to be Remembered by My Last Instagram Post48 Everyone Has a Wilting Point50 Tigress Hugs Manchurian Fir51 Poems Lull us into Safety52 After a Shooting at a Maternity Clinic in Kabul54 They Killed Cows. I Killed Them.59 Cell60 Self61 Collective62 Nation63 Species64 Cosmos67 The Coronapocalypse Will Be Televised69 Variations on Hippo72 A Dress is Like a Field74 Postcard to My Mother-in-Law who at 16 is Chasing Brigitte Bardot in St Tropez75 Together76 Many Good & Wonderful Things78 I Carry My Uterus in a Small Suitcase79 Bacterium80 A Possible Explanation as to Why We Mutilate Women & Trees, which Tries to End on a Note of Hope82 What Mr Frog Running Away from Marilyn Monroe Taught Me About #MeToo84 Tiger Woman85 We Will Not Kill You. We’ll Just Shoot You in the Vagina89 Microeconomics91 Macroeconomics92 This May Reach You Either as a Bird or Flower93 Petard94 Rotten Grief96 October Fugue97 Do Not Go Out in the Storm100 Listening to Abida Parveen on Loop I Understand Why I Miss Home and Why It Must Be So102 End-of-Year Epiphany in the Holiday Inn104 It Has Taken Many Years to See My Body107 Hope Is the Thing109 Survival113 Notes118 Acknowledgements