‘Exuberance is beauty’, said William Blake, and ‘Energy is eternal delight.’ Read rapidly, Tishani Doshi’s A God at the Door is an exhilarating treat. Easily straddling the author’s Eastern and Western heritages and high and low cultures, its breadth of reference is unusual in itself, but what’s truly remarkable is the agility with which Doshi dances between different poles.  However, individual poems don’t invite the sustained lingering over that many in her previous book Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods do. In the end, it comes down to the kind of reading that means most to the individual … Continue Reading

Tishani Doshi can be uneven but she’s a highly talented, accomplished author who writes memorably in both passionately engaged and humorously detached modes.

Various poems respond to misogyny and the horror of sexual violence. One such, ‘Everyone Loves a Dead Girl’, shows how strength and weakness can be intertwined in her work. The title ripples with multiple suggestions, some sad, some bitingly ironic. The first two lines combine narrative drive with lingering reflectiveness:

They arrive at parties alone because they are dead
now and there is nothing to fear except the sun.

The delicate placing of ‘now’ after the line-end pause puts … Continue Reading