Tishani Doshi’s stunning new poetry collection, A God at the Door, performs the difficult task of locating the body within the broader politics of state power and gender. Through it all, her voice remains clear as a bell, her hold over craft unwavering. Over and over, the poems pose the question: How does one return to the body when trapped in the systemic violence of structures designed to make you forget who you are?
- K. Srilata, The Hindu
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The illuminating fourth collection from Doshi (Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods) wrestles with the anxiety and existential despair of environmental peril, the pandemic, and the oppression of marginalized peoples.....With her finger firmly on the pulse of the zeitgeist, Doshi crafts vivid poems that are a balm for a fraught world. - Publishers Weekly
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n these turns of repetition and reinvention lie Doshi’s great affinity and ability for mythmaking. The enormous scope of the book lends itself to a kind of universality, an attempt at truth across time and place, but one that treasures nuances and strives to maximize the number of stories told. Doshi’s ambition in writing a feminist poetic that at once engages with archaic tropes and undermines them, that simultaneously responds to contemporary wounds and eternal ones, and all the while requires us to acknowledge an ever-present beauty is a feat at which she herself must wonder, as when she asks in her poems, “Why are you not astonished?” -- Chicago Review of Books
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" I feel restless when I don’t have a title. I don’t know how Emily Dickinson did it, but to have all those poems just floating around nameless would drive me nuts. Title, shape, form – these are all containers for a poem, and I find a title helps fix a poem, make it an entity. It’s also a way of leading the reader in to the poem. A kind of step-ladder into the swimming pool "
INTERVIEW HINDUSTAN TIMES
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A GOD AT THE DOOR
IS SHORTLISTED FOR THE
FORWARD PRIZE FOR POETRY 2021
"THESE POEMS DELVE INTO THE CONFLICTS BETWEEN DISASTER AND RENEWAL AND BETWEEN PAST AND PRESENT. THEY ARE TENDER ENQUIRIES RATHER THAN RESOLUTIONS."
- THE TLS
"THE POEMS OF TISHANI DOSHI'S A GOD AT THE DOOR OPERATE ON THE GRAND SCALE; REACHING FOR VISIONARY RESPONSES...STUNNING AND AMBITIOUS."
- THE GUARDIAN
"THROUGHOUT THE BOOK, THE POET SUMMONS THE SHAPE-SHIFTING POWERS OF POETRY AND TAKES TREMENDOUS RISKS WITH FORM, ALLITERATION, RHYME, HALF-RHYME AND COUNTER-RHYME TO CREATE A SYNCOPATED DOSHIESQUE MUSIC AS LIBERATING AS SAROJINI NAIDU'S AND AS CONTEMPLATIVE AS LOUISE GLÜCK'S."
- THE POETRY REVIEW
"HERE ARE SEARING POLITICAL POEMS WHICH RESPOND TO THE 'UNKNOWN TERRITORIES' OF THE WORLD ...AND CALL ON THE READER TO RECOGNISE THE EXISTENCE OF TRAUMA...HER ELOQUENT WRITING DEMONSTRATES AN ASTONISHING RANGE OF FREE VERSE SUFFUSED WITH BOTH PLAYFULNESS AND FURY."
- MSLEXIA
A God at the Door performs the difficult task of locating the body within the broader politics of state power and gender. Through it all, her voice remains clear as a bell, her hold over craft unwavering. Over and over, the poems pose the question: How does one return to the body when trapped in the systemic violence of structures designed to make you forget who you are?
- THE HINDU
"SPECIES" - THE ONBEING PROJECT
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The questions that most often and most loudly ask to be heard in the book are: How do we live in a country that demands obeisance when what we most need is radical change? How do we live in these bodies, newly vulnerable and threatened every day?
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"Poems don’t murder people. Dictators do. But poetry brings us close to death, demands that we witness, take stock." - ON DICTATORSHIP AND THE DANGER OF POETRY, IN THE GUARDIAN REVIEW
Increasingly, I begin to think that freedom can only lie in multiplicity. The “Free World” has given us rampant capitalism, which has promised all kinds of freedoms but has trapped us in a hyper-individualist, consumerist, climate-nightmare idiocracy, where our sense of freedom trumps any sense of community. ESSAY ON FREEDOM IN OPEN MAGAZINE
new poem, commissioned
by Vogue India
July 2021 Issue
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Featured on BBC's From Our Own Correspondent
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Art: Leonora Carrington's "The Last Fish" | Essay in the Indian Express
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How do we grieve now that so many of us cannot move? Families are separated, friends live in faraway trenches. Our world has shrunk, and we have accepted this shrinking as a condition for living. The chance to “please come flying” has vanished. Instead, a flurry of death notices arrive like pigeons at our feet, and we have run out of breadcrumbs, of words. We can no longer keep company with our dead. Our grief rituals have been seized. Which boatman is going to take us across the river? - NEW ESSAY in the INDIAN EXPRESS
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with Albers’s “Pink-orange surrounded by 4 grays” at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice.
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"The breast in India is one of the most eroticized and policed body parts. From 8,000-year-old Harappan terracotta mothers with their suckling infants to Bollywood starlets cavorting under waterfalls with wet saris, the breast has been central to the idea of sex, maternity, nourishment and power. And as in many countries where mother-worship is practiced, the dichotomy between adoration and abuse is significant. The idea of a neutral breast in India? A breast just casually hanging around, being a functional exocrine gland, enjoying the sun? Impossible."
NEW ESSAY IN GRANTA
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"A recent UN report revealed that India accounts for 45.8 million of the world’s 142.6 million ‘missing females’ over the past fifty years. These statistics are solely for female foeticide and infanticide, but there are many ways to disappear a woman. In 2019 there was a news report that 21 million Indian women had been denied the right to vote because their names weren’t registered on voting lists. Add to this rape. Add to this bride burning. Add to this domestic violence, trafficking, acid attacks.
The warnings are clear: If you are a woman in India, no matter what size your breasts, you better make sure they have teeth." From BREAST OR TOOTH, GRANTA
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There is a Hindu creation story that has to do with breath. When blue-skinned Vishnu, reclining on the cosmic serpent Ananta, breathes out, the world is born; when he breathes in, the world is reabsorbed within him. Creation is the lotus springing from his navel in the form of Brahma, who makes the heavens and earth, giving birth to time, to us.
Breath is taken from us and we call it suffocation, from the Latin suffocare, “to be stifled, smothered, extinguished.” Breath is returned to us, and we call it resuscitation. - new essay "Out of Breath" in Orion Magazine
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DISASTERS TAKE OUR BREATH AWAY. When we are shocked by wonder or horror, our fingers shoot over our mouths as if to stop breath from falling out. ..... Breath has to do with believability. The more unbelievable something is, the more we reach for our mouths. -- new essay "out of breath" in Orion Magazine
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MY LIFE IN BOOKS FOR IRELAND'S SUNDAY INDEPENDENT
It’s a lot of work. Even talking about it now, it’s so tiring and I am thinking god, why do people write novels! -- interview Spacebar Magazine
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PANDEMIC DIARY FOR OPEN MAGAZINE
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NEW POEM PUBLISHED IN LITHUB
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New Poem Published in
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
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A GOD AT THE DOOR, FORTHCOMING FROM BLOODAXE APRIL 2021, IS ON THE GUARDIAN'S LIST OF BOOKS TO LOOK FORWARD TO THIS YEAR!
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Review in La Reppublica's cultural pages -- "sinuous, luminous, full of shadows but never tragic..."
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A New Essay in LitHub: "Time expands in solitude. Our days and nights took on a different rhythm at the beach. Carlo worked in a room down the corridor and I worked at a desk in our bedroom. He was in charge of lunch, I was in charge of dinner. We met for meals and walks but for many hours of the day, we sat behind doors in rooms by ourselves. Certain experiences took on religious proportions—swimming in the ocean with dolphins, observing a black-shouldered kite hover and swoop, hover and swoop. Interactions with bronze-back tree snakes, frogs, field mice, and our army of Indian beach dogs (at one uncontrollable point, we peaked at eighteen), came to form the backbone of our days. Our rule became: It’s okay if we talk to the dogs, but once the dogs start talking back to us, it’s time to go to the city."
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"Small Days and Nights is about disjunction, dislocation and the failure to meet impossible ideals of nationhood, womanhood and parenthood. The title is surely ironic, because this is a concise novel of staggering depth...In its vivid setting, the novel is not exactly a paean to modern India so much as a piercing Munchian howl of grief." THE OBSERVER
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Doshi’s coastal map is current, with its sea an “exhausted gray tongue.” And, most impressively, her focus never wavers. Starting with a corpse in a freezer box, “Small Days and Nights” turns a fragmented family into an overflowing one. An estranged father and deceased mother end up creating a legacy that includes a house, sisters, husbands and lovers, a village headman and his wife and those ever-breeding dogs --- NYT
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"As much about national as it is about familial belonging, this is a beautiful and angry book that challenges assumptions about what it means to be a woman, part of a family and part of a nation." - The Times Literary Supplement
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"Radiantly written, with a couple of interludes in Venice where Grace's father lives, this superb novel from Doshi (Orange-prize longlisted for The Pleasure Seekers) ranges over family secrets, trying to do the right thing, and the sheer contingency of life in all its richness and uncertainty."
THE SUNDAY TIMES
"Each page of this novel bears testament to her skills as inequality, secrecy and unhappiness harden into menace. Through a cycle of visits, returns and memories, Grazia must weather huge unease and bruising conflicts. Eventually, she finds strength and acceptance in this disturbing, deep and utterly extraordinary novel."
THE OBSERVER
As much about national as it is about familial belonging, this is a beautiful and angry book that challenges assumptions about what it means to be a woman, part of a family and part of a nation."
THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
THE SUNDAY TIMES
"Each page of this novel bears testament to her skills as inequality, secrecy and unhappiness harden into menace. Through a cycle of visits, returns and memories, Grazia must weather huge unease and bruising conflicts. Eventually, she finds strength and acceptance in this disturbing, deep and utterly extraordinary novel."
THE OBSERVER
As much about national as it is about familial belonging, this is a beautiful and angry book that challenges assumptions about what it means to be a woman, part of a family and part of a nation."
THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Her first “proper” public poetry reading – as opposed to bookshop audiences swelled by “blood or friendship”, as she once put it – was at the Hay festival in 2006. She was on stage in front of 1,200 people, reading alongside Seamus Heaney and Margaret Atwood. “It was pretty stellar,” she laughs. “But that is the great thing about poetry. One minute you’re doing that and the next you’re reading to five people in a basement. And both events are always worthwhile.”
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Small Days and Nights is a novel about contemporary India in the best sense. It’s not a literary Lonely Planet guide to inequality, women’s experience of public space, or the challenges of caring for a person with disabilities in the “third world"—even though all these concerns are at the heart of the story. Instead, Doshi’s writing is lit by palpable rage as well as visceral affection, often for the same things. Raw injustice is not always harnessed into forgiveness and if situations jolt us into questions, we do not always have the comfort of answers.
MINT LOUNGE
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'Tishani Doshi brings all her skills as one of the world's best poets to this lovely, beguiling, brilliant novel. Run, don't walk to your nearest bookseller.'
GARY SHTEYNGART
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‘This is a glorious book of immense power and beauty. I can’t stop thinking of Grace and Lucy and their band of dogs.’
KAMILA SHAMSIE
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'Every sentence in this achingly beautiful book carries multiple meanings that resonate across the pages. Tishani Doshi uses language like a blade, cutting through our defenses to illuminate what it means to love, and forgive, and truly exist in the life we have.'
MAAZA MENGISTE
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'A beautiful gem of a book full of heartbreak and joy. A deep exploration of what it is to be within family and what it is to occupy your own skin and the ebb and flow between the two.'
NAYOMI MUNAWEERA
Small Days and Nights has a beautifully restrained voice. I found myself reading it compulsively, drawn through the book on a knife edge. She manages humour in the saddest of moments, and tension in the quietest.’
EVIE WYLD, Jury of Ondaatje Prize
‘An astonishing novel that is beautifully written but underpinned by a quiet simmering anger about injustice and unrealistic expectations of a family – and of life in contemporary India.’
PETER FRANKOPAN, Jury of Ondaatje Prize
GIRLS ARE COMING OUT OF THE WOODS
PORTRAITS BY CARLO PIZZATI
DANCER IN A BOX
PORTRAITS BY RICCARDO CAVALLARI
PORTRAITS BY RICCARDO CAVALLARI