Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods

Tishani Doshi

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781780371979
• eBook ISBN: 9781780371986
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods is Tishani Doshi's third book of poems, following two earlier, highly praised collections, Everything Belongs Elsewhere, published by Bloodaxe in 2012, and her debut, Countries of the Body, winner of the Forward Prize for best first collection. In Girls are Coming out of the Woods, Tishani Doshi combines artistic elegance with a visceral power to create a breathtaking panorama of danger, memory, beauty and the strange geographies of happiness. This is essential, immediate, urgent work and Doshi is that rare thing, an unashamed visionary who knows that, "while you and I go on with life / remembering and forgetting, / the poets remain: singing, singing".' – John Burnside. 'I admire these poems because they are masterly formal inventions. But I return to them, again and again, for the elegy and the urgency and the prophecy. I want to give this book to the people I love, and say to them, memorize this, never forget.' – Jeet Thayil. 'These are powerful haunting poems about rain, death, poetry and love, with the sea pounding unrelentingly in the background. Whether it is about discovering one's first white hairs or an ode to Patrick Swayze, about seeking ways to surrender "sun-scarred lives" to the tidal dark or to welcome "orphaned slippers, Styrofoam, fossil of crab" washed up by the insomniac ocean, these poems welcome the wildly assorted flotsam of daily detail and transmute them into the greater strangeness of poetry. 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.

CONTENTS

1. Title Page
2. Dedication
3. Acknowledgements
4. Epigraph
   
5. Contract
   
6. Summer in Madras
7. Rain at Three
8. A Fable for the 21st Century
9. What the Sea Brought In
10. How to be Happy in 101 Days
11. Fear Management
12. Ode to Patrick Swayze
13. Everyone Loves a Dead Girl
14. Monsoon Poem
    
15. Abandon
16. To My First White Hairs
17. Considering Motherhood While Falling Off a Ladder in Rome
18. Love in the Time of Autolysis
19. Jungian Postcard
20. Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods
21. Strong Men, Riding Horses
22. Disco Biscuits
23. Honesty Hotel for Gents
24. My Grandmother Never Ate a Potato in Her Life
    
25. Your Body Language Is Not Indian! or Where I Am Snubbed at a Cocktail Party by a Bharatnatyam Dancer
26. Saturday on the Scores
27. The Women of the Shin Yang Park Sauna, Gwangju
28. Tranås
29. Encounters with a Swedish Burglar
30. Pig-killing in Viet Hai
31. Calcutta Canzone
32. Understanding My Fate in a Mexican Museum
33. Dinner Conversations
34. The Leather of Love
35. O Great Beauties!
36. Clumps of Happiness
37. Meeting Elizabeth Bishop ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Contract
• Summer in Madras
• Rain at Three
• A Fable for the 21st Century
• What the Sea Brought In
• How to be Happy in 101 Days
• Fear Management
• Ode to Patrick Swayze
• Everyone Loves a Dead Girl
• Monsoon Poem
• Abandon
• To My First White Hairs
• Considering Motherhood While Falling Off a Ladder in Rome
• Love in the Time of Autolysis
• Jungian Postcard
• Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods
• Strong Men, Riding Horses
• Disco Biscuits
• Honesty Hotel for Gents
• My Grandmother Never Ate a Potato in Her Life
• Your Body Language Is Not Indian! or Where I Am Snubbed at a Cocktail Party by a Bharatnatyam Dancer
• Saturday on the Scores
• The Women of the Shin Yang Park Sauna, Gwangju
• Tranås
• Encounters with a Swedish Burglar
• Pig-killing in Viet Hai
• Calcutta Canzone
• Understanding My Fate in a Mexican Museum
• Dinner Conversations
• The Leather of Love
• O Great Beauties!
• Clumps of Happiness
• Meeting Elizabeth Bishop in Madras
• Grandmothers Abroad
• Poem for a Dead Dog
• Find the Poets
• The Day Night Died
• Coastal Life
• The View from Inside My Coffin
• Portrait of the Poet as a Reclining God
• When I Was Still a Poet
• Biographical note
• Copyright