It’s impossible not to cheer for the poet’s third collection, with her reflections on female bodies and violence feeling exceptionally timely
Tishani Doshi’s third collection, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods departs from the more transcendent, restless poems of her previous collection, 2012’s Everything Begins Elsewhere. At times, Doshi’s work still hovers over inner landscapes of longing, where the self trails its mortal question across a personal geography from south India to Europe. Her skilled engagements with form, as in her Jungian Postcard, a sestina for Carl Jung, alongside her wry humour, most evident in Ode to Patrick Swayze, continue to show the range and dexterity of her voice. Poems on ageing and family are wrought with a similarly deft irony, laying out the grim absurdities of women’s bodily surveillance from without and within.
In the opening poem, Contract, the speaker appeals directly to her audience: “Don’t kill me, Reader. / This neck has been working for years / to harden itself against the axe.” In exchange for love, the poet commits to various kinds of self-destruction and resurrection, forming a pact with the reader that allows them both to thrive, to “live / seized with wonder”. Straight away, Doshi’s remarkable and knowing blend of irony and sincerity subverts any expectation her reader might bring to the page. Elsewhere, her poems sound a stark warning, grounded in a refusal to suffer violence or shame. Doshi deliberately sets out the boundaries of the female body in order to challenge those who might lay claim to it. The title poem is a haunting vision of retribution, drawn both from the murder of Doshi’s friend Monika Ghurde, to whom the collection is dedicated, and the rape of Jyoti Singh on a bus in Delhi in 2012. Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods is a chilling call to arms whose forceful, oracular incantation compels us to listen to girls “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.”
I will touch your discoloured skin,
your beard, the sundry coils of hair,
as your body morphs from man to farm.
It will almost kill me to see the swarms
of blowflies colonise the fens and flowerbeds
of your nose, mushrooms vaulting
from the mud of abdomen, skin so blue
and mottled, the bloat and putrefaction.