Girls Are Coming out of the Woods

by Tishani Doshi

Overview

“Tishani Doshi . . . offer[s] an eloquent dissection of the body—its attributes, metaphors, deficiencies and contradictions—all delivered in chromatic, richly textured lines, in which the assured manipulation of rhythm and internal rhyme produces poems of remarkable balance and grace.” —The Guardian

“Tishani Doshi combines artistic elegance with a visceral power to create a breathtaking panorama of danger, memory, beauty and the strange geographies of happiness.” —John Burnside

In her third collection of poetry, Tishani Doshi addresses violence against women by giving bodies abused and silenced bodies a chance to speak at last. Of and for the women that live on, she writes with bold reverence for that which thrives despite the odds—female desire, the aging body, the power of refusal. Doshi reminds us that poetry, at its root, is song—in praise and lament, hopeful and ebbing—calling out for truth and redemption.

From “Fear Management”:

. . . Up ahead, a row of fishermen. Legs like pins, tomb-sized chests, leaning back on their heels to haul. Say they are making noises at you. A sideways kind of sound designed to entice a small, brainless creature into a corner before smashing it underfoot . . .

Tishani Doshi was born in Madras, India. She is an award-winning poet, journalist, essayist, and novelist, whose work has been translated into five languages. Doshi is also a professional dancer with the Chandralekha Troupe. She lives in Tamil Nadu, India, with her husband and three dogs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556595509
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	10/16/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Tishani Doshi was born in Madras, India. She is an award-winning poet, journalist, essayist, and novelist, whose work has been translated into five languages. Doshi is also a professional dancer with the Chandralekha Troupe. She lives in Tamil Nadu, India, with her husband and three dogs.

Read an Excerpt

Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods for Monika Girls are coming out of the woods, wrapped in cloaks and hoods, carrying iron bars and candles and a multitude of scars, collected on acres of premature grass and city buses, in temples and bars. Girls are coming out of the woods with panties tied around their lips, making such a noise, it’s impossible to hear. Is the world speaking too? Is it really asking, What does it mean to give someone a proper resting? Girls are coming out of the woods, lifting their broken legs high, leaking secrets from unfastened thighs, all the lies whispered by strangers and swimming coaches, and uncles, especially uncles, who said spreading would be light and easy, who put bullets in their chests and fed their pretty faces to fire, who sucked the mud clean off their ribs, and decorated their coffins with briar. Girls are coming out of the woods, clearing the ground to scatter their stories. Even those girls found naked in ditches and wells, those forgotten in neglected attics, and buried in river beds like sediments from a different century. They’ve crawled their way out from behind curtains of childhood, the silver-pink weight of their bodies pushing against water, against the sad, feathered tarnish of remembrance. Girls are coming out of the woods the way birds arrive at morning windows—pecking and humming, until all you can hear is the smash of their miniscule hearts against glass, the bright desperation of sound—bashing, disappearing. Girls are coming out of the woods. They’re coming. They’re coming. Ode to Patrick Swayze At fourteen I wanted to devour you, the twang, the strut, the perfect proletarian butt in the black pants of you. I wanted a man like you to sashay into town and teach me how to be an aeroplane in water. I didn’t want to be a baby. I wanted to be your baby. I wanted revenge. I wanted to sue my breasts for not living up to potential. I wanted Jennifer Grey to meet with an unfortunate end and not have a love affair with a ghost. At fourteen, I believed you’d given birth to the word preternatural, and when Mother came home one day, waving her walking shoe, saying, I lost my soul in the Theosophical Society, I wanted to dance as recklessly as the underside of that shoe. I wanted to be a pebble in the soft heel of you. To horse-whisper and live on a ranch in Texas and love my blonde wife forever and have creases around my eyes and experience at least one goddamn summer where I could be like the wind— sexy and untrammelled and dirty. And it was only after I found my own Johnny (and got rid of him), only yesterday, when I rescued a northern shoveler from crows on the beach, his broken wing squished against the crockery of my ribs, only after setting him down at the edge of a canal, where he sank in to the long patient task of dying, that I realized what I’d wanted most was to be held by someone determined to save me, someone against whom I could press my unflourishing chest, who’d offer me not just the time of my life, but who’d tear out reams of his yellowing pancreas, and say, Here, baby, eat. Contract Dear Reader, I agree to turn my skin inside out, to reinvent every lost word, to burnish, to steal, to do what I must in order to singe your lungs. I will forgo happiness, stab myself repeatedly, and lower my head into countless ovens. I will fade backwards into the future and tell you what I see. If it is bleak, I will lie so that you may live seized with wonder. If it is miraculous, I will send messages in your dreams, and they will flicker as a silvered cottage in the woods, choked with vines of moonflower. Don’t kill me, Reader. This neck has been working for years to harden itself against the axe. This body, meagre as it is, has lost so many limbs to wars, so many eyes and hearts to romance. But love me, and I will follow you everywhere— to the dusty corners of childhood, to every downfall and resurrection. Till your skin becomes my skin. Let us be twins, our blood thumping after each other like thunder and lightning. And when you put your soft head down to rest, dear Reader, I promise to always be there, humming in the dungeons of your auditory canals— an immortal mosquito, hastening you towards fury, towards incandescence. Abandon There must be a word for a person who longs to run into the eye of a storm, a word for every tree that lies slaughtered on the streets after a cyclone. A word like lachrymose or pulmonary. A word for they have left you alone to face your doom. In Aleppo. In Aleppo. I cannot speak of Aleppo. Only that it is the opposite of breath. There must be a word for the walk home at night. Your belongings in two bags, feet in mud. For a family thinking they will return. Maybe the house still stands. Maybe the sea. The dead leave no clues about what lies beyond. We call it eternal. We call it now. Summer in Madras Everyone in the house is dying. Mother in an air-conditioned room cannot hear as rivers break their dams against her nerves. Father stalks verandas, offering pieces of his skin to the rows of lurid gulmohars. Husband tries to still the advancing armies of the past by stuffing his ears with desiccated mango husks. And brother? Brother is most lackadaisical of all. He opens the door. Takes death’s umbrella. Taps it this way and that. Sings.

Table of Contents

Contract 3

Summer in Madras 7

Rain at Three 8

A Fable for the 21st Century 9

What the Sea Brought In 11

How to be Happy in 101 Days 13

Fear Management 16

Everyone Loves a Dead Girl 18

Monsoon Poem 20

Ode to Patrick Swayze 23

Abandon 27

To My First White Hairs 28

Considering Motherhood While Falling Off a Ladder in Rome 32

Love in the Time of Autolysis 34

Jungian Postcard 36

Girls are Coming Out of the Woods 38

Strong Men, Riding Horses 40

Disco Biscuits 42

Honesty Hotel for Gents 44

My Grandmother Never Ate a Potato in Her Life 46

Your Body Language Is Not Indian! or Where I Am Snubbed at a Cocktail Party by a Bharatnatyam Dancer 49

Saturday on the Scores 52

The Women of the Shin Yang Park Sauna, Gwangju 54

Tranås 56

Encounters with a Swedish Burglar 57

Pig-Killing in Viet Hai 58

Calcutta Canzone 61

Understanding My Fate in a Mexican Museum 64

Dinner Conversations 66

The Leather of Love 68

O Great Beauties! 73

Clumps of Happiness 76

Meeting Elizabeth Bishop in Madras 77

Grandmothers Abroad 80

Poem for a Dead Dog 82

Find the Poets 84

The Day Night Died 87

Coastal Life 89

The View from Inside My Coffin 91

Portrait of the Poet as a Reclining God 94

When I Was Still a Poet 97

Acknowledgements 98

About the Author 99

Editorial Reviews

Tishani Doshi… offer[s] an eloquent dissection of the body—its attributes, metaphors, deficiencies and contradictions—all delivered in chromatic, richly textured lines, in which the assured manipulation of rhythm and internal rhyme produces poems of remarkable balance and grace.” —The Guardian “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 “Doshi's poems have both heart and intelligence. They are rich in mysterious images, and narratives both explicit and implied. You could read them a hundred times and still find something you hadn't noticed before.” —Louis de Bernieres “There is a fierce power to Tishani Doshi’s poetry. Delicate as spun silk, it draws us into the zone of desire, even as it opens us to what lies beyond.” —Meena Alexander “[Everything Begins Elsewhere] is a book you will cleave to; by the end, so enlightened that you may feel inclined to read it all over again.” —George Carys Williams, Wales Arts Review

From the Publisher