Indian poet and professional dancer Tishani Doshi's latest collection explores violence against women and girls by giving abused and silenced bodies a chance to speak at last.
Doshi’s use of language and imagery is dense, complex and stylistically clever ... The grim reaper stalks the pages of this book, with a determination which verges on the gleeful, to make us stare him in the face; to examine who called him up and who called time on time. Doshi calls the unaccountable to account ... Yet there is much that is joyful and even humorous in these works. And the juxtaposition of words and images which in the hands of a lesser writer might clash like armies in the night somehow work for Doshi ... Doshi’s work is like the music of Shostakovich; it gives no quarter but compels you to listen anyway and sometimes there is a beautiful lyricism to chase away the scary bits ... There are words and phrases that will stay with you long after you close the book.
...Doshi resumes her conversation in this startling collection with the body, its corporeal limits and inclinations towards the strange. The reader is taken on a surreal and often violent journey ... a sensibility that is alternatively ecstatic, enraged and ominous in nature ... The references to waterlogged roads and cortèges of flowers...invoke a sense of foreboding and decay that underscores the entire collection. Desire and sexuality are also expressed, in terms which are intimately connected with death and aging as well as humor ... Despite its obvious register of defiance and anger that swells with each line, the poet enters here into territory of truly the absurd and macabre ... With what other language may one speak of such unspeakable things?
In her third collection, Indian writer and dancer Doshi...takes a simultaneously lyrical and documentary approach to violence against women ... 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 ... Doshi’s searing imagery and high lyrics are bound to take readers’ breath in equal measure.
