In a 2017 interview with Rohini Kejriwal for Scroll.in, poet Tishani Doshi describes the woods in her collection Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods as a place of sacredness, disorientation and imaginative possibility. She also discusses how travel reshapes her sense of place, why sound matters in a poem, how she selected the collection’s poems, and why a poem’s speaker should not automatically be read as the poet herself.
What do the woods mean in the collection?
Doshi calls the woods “a version of Dante’s selva oscura”: a dark forest that is at once primordial and sacred, but also unsettling. It is a place of wandering, intuition, danger, imagination, and losing and finding one’s way. As she puts it, “Writing the poem is a way of traversing those woods.”
That metaphor describes her own experience of writing, rather than a single key meant to unlock every poem. The forest suggests movement through uncertainty: the poem is made by entering a difficult imaginative terrain, not by simply reporting a settled conclusion.
How does place shape Doshi’s writing?
Doshi says travel can dislodge her ideas of place, self and hierarchy, giving her the chance to discover who she is again. Madras—now commonly called Chennai—remains the nucleus and prism of her vision. Leaving and returning, she says, lets her see both the city and herself anew. Her compact formulation is: “Language is landscape.”
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These are Doshi’s reflections on her own relationship with geography and poetic language. She does not present travel as a universal formula for writing; she explains how movement changes her perspective on a city that remains central to her work.
Why is sound important to her poems?
Doshi says she needs a poem’s text to have musicality. She describes envying musicians who can make sound without carrying the burden of language. In the 2017 interview, she said she had worked with the Gundecha Brothers for 15 years and named Nina Simone, Sheila Dhar, Leonard Cohen and Jacqueline du Pré among the musicians she listened to repeatedly. The 15-year figure is Doshi’s own account in that interview.
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- Newbery medal winners
- Language: english
- Book - the girl who drank the moon
How did she choose and arrange the poems?
Doshi describes the selection process as rigorous but organic. She began with a central core of poems and considered others at the edges; some were wild cards. She says she is open to editing and takes advice from editors. In her account, the poems are not bound by a sequence, so the collection should not be treated as a continuous narrative simply because its poems appear together.
Are the poems autobiographical?
Doshi cautions against treating a poem’s speaker as a straightforward stand-in for the poet. “You mustn’t trust the person in my poems except for the integrity of her emotion,” she says. Life can supply material, but imagination transforms it: “I certainly stand in the mud of life and take from it, but between life and the poem, there is a large lake called imagination.”
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Her distinction does not rule out biographical readings. It asks readers to leave room for the craft and invention between lived experience and the voice on the page.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Which editions of the collection are documented?
The U.S. and UK publisher records refer to distinct editions, so their dates and bibliographic details should not be combined.
| Edition | Documented details |
|---|---|
| Copper Canyon Press, United States | Paperback; ISBN 978-1-55659-550-9; 112 pages; cataloged in October 2018. The publisher’s catalog listed a $16 price at that time, not a current price. Copper Canyon Press |
| Bloodaxe Books, United Kingdom | Paperback; ISBN 9781780371979; dated May 24, 2018. Bloodaxe’s page shows conflicting page counts in separate sections, so no page count is stated here. The publisher identifies it as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and says Doshi was shortlisted for the 2018 Ted Hughes Award for the collection and its accompanying dance performance. Bloodaxe Books |
Bloodaxe also links a video of Doshi performing the title poem. MATWAALA’s biography notes that the collection headlined the All About Women Festival at the Sydney Opera House and also records the Ted Hughes shortlist. MATWAALA biography
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