Everything Begins Elsewhere

Tishani Doshi

In her second book of poetry—and her American debut—Tishani Doshi returns to the body as a central theme, while extending beyond the corporeal to challenge the more metaphysical borders of space and time. These new poems are powerful meditations born on the joineries of life and death, union and separation, memory and dream, where lovers speak to each other across the centuries and daughters wander into their mothers’ childhoods.

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ISBN: 9781556594427

Format: Paperback

Buffaloes

Impossible to imagine.
Buffaloes—a dream of them:
coats thick with rain,
bodies like continents.
A whole world thundering
through Indian laburnum.
Think of beginnings:
amusement parks at dawn,
pianos, bedrooms, gods.
Think of all the invisible
insurrections it takes
to wake a city from slumber.
In these woods, a single man
will do, armed with a stick
and a paltry collection of stones.
When I see buffaloes run
I think of love—how it is held
in the meaty, muscled pink
of the tongue; how quickly
it is beaten from us—
all that brute resolve
disappearing
in the undergrowth.

About the Author

Tishani Doshi publishes poetry, essays, and fiction. Her most recent books are A God at the Door; Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Poetry Award and a Firecracker Award; and the novel Small Days and Nights, shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the Tata Literature Live! Book of the Year Award (Fiction), and The New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. For fifteen years, she worked as a dancer with the …

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Reviews

“In structure as in sense, Doshi works to trouble fixed categories even as she sometimes seeks their aid; the result is an invigorating, thought-provoking collection which, like the dancing Doshi loves, enlivens soul and senses, sharpening responses to both ‘the music of uncertainty’ and ‘the aftertaste of rain.'” —Miriam Gamble, The Guardian