“Be grateful for the poem with its fists raised, angry and tender and yearning all at once. Be grateful for the poem that lives in and against time, the poem that offers the past as a present, the poem in which an egret is a dinosaur dropping through a hole in the continuum to warn us. Be grateful for the poem that wants to be a bird, the poem that is a blood offering, the poem that is an amulet against death. Be grateful for the poet Tishani Doshi.” —Jeet Thayil
“In Egrets, While War, grief and beauty share the same open palm— egrets lifting through smoke, mythic birds guiding ancestry through the present—and [Doshi’s] incandescent poems insist that attention itself is a form of love. Even as war and extinction press close, Doshi keeps turning us toward astonishment, toward the tender fact of being alive together in a world that is breaking and still unbearably radiant.” —Aimee Nezhukumatathil
“Beauty, body, and God positive, Tishani Doshi assembles in this road show of the mind that is part biennale, part takedown of banality, a sensorium of the now. As if to say even this, she transforms the absurd with divine vision. Think sexbots and plutocrats in space in the same held-breath as atrocity and extinction. Egrets, While War points us forward, a prayer map for exploring the borderless territories of catastrophe and rapture.” —Gregory Pardlo
“In Egrets, While War, grief and beauty share the same open palm— egrets lifting through smoke, mythic birds guiding ancestry through the present—and [Doshi’s] incandescent poems insist that attention itself is a form of love. Even as war and extinction press close, Doshi keeps turning us toward astonishment, toward the tender fact of being alive together in a world that is breaking and still unbearably radiant.” —Aimee Nezhukumatathil
“Beauty, body, and God positive, Tishani Doshi assembles in this road show of the mind that is part biennale, part takedown of banality, a sensorium of the now. As if to say even this, she transforms the absurd with divine vision. Think sexbots and plutocrats in space in the same held-breath as atrocity and extinction. Egrets, While War points us forward, a prayer map for exploring the borderless territories of catastrophe and rapture.” —Gregory Pardlo
‘Flowing between rage, resolve, and fierce love, Egrets, While War feels like being carefully guided through a long, dark night of the soul. A book to dwell on; a must-read.’ – Dave Coates, Poetry Book Society Bulletin
I think I sensed early on that poetry was a kind of super power. It was spell-making and incantation and prayer and list and witness and moment and epic and time-stopping.
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“Egrets, While War draws on everything from myth and family history to the metaverse, to create a word-weather, a landscape of individual imagery which we apprehend on our skin. An original and sensory exploration of beauty and loss in the environment and in the body.” —Imtiaz Dharker
“These terrific poems are a document of history, survival, and the recurring need for transcendence. Running through them is something obdurate and strong: an appetite for life, a ‘greed for the bloom.’ Politics is always with us, the poems tell us; so is the incongruous, inexhaustible delight of savoring.” —Amit Chaudhuri "
Her poems scream fiercely, unflinchingly of war and then, without blinking, she sings of what we might return to, what we might survive for."
ELLORA SUTTON, MSLEXIA
"...Egrets, While War, feels like being carefully guided through a long, dark night of the soul."DAVE COATES, PBS BULLETIN REVIEW
“These terrific poems are a document of history, survival, and the recurring need for transcendence. Running through them is something obdurate and strong: an appetite for life, a ‘greed for the bloom.’ Politics is always with us, the poems tell us; so is the incongruous, inexhaustible delight of savoring.” —Amit Chaudhuri "
Her poems scream fiercely, unflinchingly of war and then, without blinking, she sings of what we might return to, what we might survive for."
ELLORA SUTTON, MSLEXIA
"...Egrets, While War, feels like being carefully guided through a long, dark night of the soul."DAVE COATES, PBS BULLETIN REVIEW
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photos: Allen Kiely
Egrets, While War at the Dalkey Book Festival
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TRAILER | EGRETS, WHILE WAR
Birdsong in the Shadows
A conversation between Michael Symmons Roberts and Tishani Doshi POETRY LONDON
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Still from the performance "The Journey Within" in collaboration with Olivia Fraser.
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What does it mean to make an imagined space on stage or on the page? To take a single red brick on stage and call it altar? To put words on a page and call it stanza. Doesn’t stanza mean room, after all? I think of the poem as a kind of house. Title as doormat or threshold for the reader to cross over and enter. Language as furniture, architecture, homeland.
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DANCER IN A BOX
PORTRAITS BY RICCARDO CAVALLARI
PORTRAITS BY RICCARDO CAVALLARI