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 ... Disparate though they may be in terms of theme, tone and approach, the poems nevertheless sit brilliantly together, the effect achieved akin to that of a single long narrative. Doshi doesn’t given in to the temptation of taking shortcuts, of saying the trite, politically correct thing. Everything is held up to the light so that we arrive slowly, by gradual steps, at a way of looking at the world ... Doshi has an eye for the incongruent—it is on this that the poems rest ... Another equally striking aspect of Doshi’s work is her pitch-perfect awareness of a poem’s performative life ... Doshi can be deadly serious and funny at the same time ... The world is a mess and there is no way to square it all. But Doshi’s poems help us sit with all that is incongruent and awry.

In A God at the Door, Tishani Doshi etches incisive, luminous portraits of humanity into landscapes where the grim and the comforting are frequently interchangeable ... These poems delve into the conflicts between disaster and renewal and between past and present. They are tender enquiries rather than resolutions ... The natural world lends a canvas of spectacle to the collection, where even the eruption of a volcano is understood as a sign of birth. There are remarkable, if brief, moments of splendour in these poems. They swear allegiance to the marvels of the world without dwelling for too long on their meaning.

An ambitious and exploratory book about the contradictions of aging, feminist archetypes, and historical and contemporary ruins. Doshi’s poems encompass multiple registers of language, at times shifting abruptly from prophetic...to rhetorical...to cheeky ... At its best, the effect of this tonal scaling is wonderfully surprising ... Doshi’s careful portraits of women complicate popular culture’s fetishization (or neglect) ... There are moments when a poem’s reliance on shifting registers can begin to feel a bit formulaic ... But, my feeling about Doshi is that she is good at many things and therefore has choices and has to make choices about what word suits the mood, what voice suits the volta. Few are able to write with such range of sensibilities, which are, in a sense, nomadic and voraciously searching ... The route of her future work has me curious. And waiting.

With irony and compassion, Tishani Doshi takes on so many of the calamities of our modern world in this truly comprehensive collection ... The poems that address the treatment of women feel like Doshi’s most personal, the issue that strikes closest to home. Sometimes they are actually funny ... Like all of us, Doshi is looking for strategies for survival. Everything is tentative, provisional; she doesn’t claim to know the answers. But she’s an illuminating guide ... Tishani Doshi is a real pleasure to read for the casual sarcasm with which she considers the absurdities of existence.

Doshi’s fourth volume of poetry...marks a transition in her exploration of growing and aging as a woman ... A God at the Door reinvents the ancient equation of femininity and the natural world in order to address the intersections of female experience and a larger set of issues, including aging and mortality, war and poverty, environmental disasters like climate change and the pandemic, and legacies of racism and genocide ... By invoking the mythic associations of femininity, fertility, and the environment, Doshi imbues her meditations on modern-day devastations with a sense of wonder ... Doshi strikes a delicate balance of tone ... As Doshi cycles through repeated images and ideas in the book, she is after more than just documentation. She endeavors to recognize the women victimized by systemic violence, but she also seeks to turn the epidemic nature of their disappearance into a possibility for power ... In 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 understanding of poetry is obvious and she chooses to play with the format of her pieces using shape poems ... she incorporates a form of playfulness in pieces with difficult topics ... Readers not seeking to do extra research may not find this the best book to read, especially if they have no interest in dead artists or in contemplating the downward-spiralling state of this world, the problems of which seem fixable but which, for some reason, we are choosing not to fix. There are also multiple references to Hinduism and South Asian culture, but for readers with an interest in looking beyond the conditioned Eurocentric perspective, Dr. Doshi has been kind enough to create a note section so that readers can understand what events or stories inspired particular pieces. This collection of poems seeks to help us reexamine the lens through which we view the world and find some room for hope to grow 'as an organism inside us', even if it’s 'a noose around [our] neck.'

The illuminating fourth collection from Doshi...wrestles with the anxiety and existential despair of environmental peril, the pandemic, and the oppression of marginalized peoples. A native of India, Doshi writes with clarity and melodic language ... With her finger firmly on the pulse of the zeitgeist, Doshi crafts vivid poems that are a balm for a fraught world.