Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods

The poet revels in a love of language; its capacity for ambiguity, for awe, to express emotional fragility. Sometimes playful and ambivalent, this is an invariably profound and excavating experience in its search for meaning. -- Linton Kwesi Johnson, Canon Mark Oakley and Clare Shaw * Judges of the Ted Hughes Award 2018 *
Tishani Doshi’s third collection, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, chillingly conjures an uprising of dead women who refuse to be silent victims of male violence... Elsewhere, there are frank and moving poems about the experience of ageing and pressures on women to reproduce, as well as a playful imagined meeting with a young Elizabeth Bishop in Madras and an ode to Patrick Swayze. -- Sandeep Parmar * The Guardian (Poetry Books of the Year 2018) *
I've already read Tishani Doshi’s poetry collection Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods but I know I’ll return to it many times. One of the poems talks about poets ‘holding the throat of life/ till all the sunsets and lies are choked out/ till only the bones of truth remain’ - that’s precisely what Doshi does in this intelligent, elegant, unflinching collection. It’s very much a collection for this moment in history, but one that will endure long past it. -- Kamila Shamsie * The Guardian (Best Summer Books 2018) *