TiSHANI DOSHI

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

Tishani Doshi by Rohit Chawla

INTERVIEW in LITHUB

PM: One thing I really admire about your work is that you have been able to harness clarity without sacrificing an uncanny imagination. Do you have any thoughts on what it means to write a clear image in the context of writing the preternatural?

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.