TiSHANI DOSHI

The challenge then was how to resist the mechanical, how to infuse the piece with new power. So many of my concerns changed and shifted while performing Sharira. I had become emotionally stronger, but I’d lost some limberness in the lower back. I had become possessive about those movements that I’d been rehearsing for so many years. They were mine. Towards the end, something powerful happened. I began to transcend a sense of gender while dancing. This choreography was very much about male and female energies – purusha-prakriti, shiva-shakti – but somehow it was taking me to an ancient place, a time that was pre-gender. I felt like an amoeba, like one of those creatures coming out of the sea to the land for the very first time. I began to feel free from anatomy, and that was the first time I’ve ever felt that.

To view Arthur’s photographs in this context is to understand the kind of seismic changes that India is undergoing in trying to reconcile those two bodies standing across from each other on the river’s respective banks — the ancient and the contemporary.

The luxury of space in India diminishes each year. The idea of a room of one’s own is quite foreign. People must find private spaces even when they are with other people.

GIRLS ARE COMING OUT OF THE WOODS IS THE GUARDIAN'S BOOK OF THE DAY: "It’s impossible not to cheer the boldness and liberation enacted by much of this book, and to be stirred by its bravery. To paraphrase one interviewer, Doshi is writing the anthems of her generation."

This is the mysterious, wonderful thing about poetry. It has this surreal trampoline effect, and is able to generate wild movement with minimal efforts to wrists and knees. Language is the vehicle that drives the poem forward, but there is also mood, and altering of mood. I want the reader to begin with one feeling and end with something completely different. -- interview in the Southeast Review

Among the multiple questions posed by the book, two stand out: “what of ruined flesh?” and “Do you feel destroyed,/ girl?” Doshi leads a serious interrogation, but her work isn’t without playfulness and sarcasm, and she takes pleasure in such simple turns as describing landscapes or weather: “The washing’s on the line./ There are pillows in the grass./ All the weeds we pulled up yesterday/ lie in clotted heaps, dying slowly.” Doshi’s searing imagery and high lyrics are bound to take readers’ breath in equal measure. - Publisher's Weekly

INTERVIEW IN LITHUB

TD: When people say about poetry—oh, you know, it means whatever you get from it, a poem is open to many interpretations, I agree—only tentatively. But, essentially, no. The writing of a poem is such a mysterious act, who knows what the triggers are, how it works, but it is in the writing of it that clarity arrives. I want the reader of my poems to have a sense of that immediately. I’ve always loved Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry”—how it is about making imaginary gardens with real toads in them, and I think that sense of the uncanny is what the poem should hint at without sacrificing any of the clarity of the emotion behind the poem.