A God at the Door

Tishani Doshi’s A God at the Door is 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 (“The point of hunger / is to remind you to live”) to rhetorical (“So what’s a few small wounds to the forehead? // What’s a needle the size of your life?”) to cheeky (“Even if we use hashtags and refuse to cry”). At its best, the effect of this tonal scaling is wonderfully surprising. For example, the prose poem “Postcard to my Mother-in-Law Who at Sixteen Is Chasing Brigitte Bardot in Saint-Tropez” begins: “At sixteen we are a rare species. Rocks share our secrets. The gap between who we are and who we want to be is epic,” and moves through the whimsy and bittersweetness of mother-in-law as teenager, “unmoored in the streets of Saint Tropez.” Doshi’s careful portraits of women complicate popular culture’s fetishization (or neglect) of Bardot, Frida Kahlo, and Margaret Mascarenhas, as well as the women affected by a shooting at a maternity clinic in Kabul. Doshi understands the way women are made both iconic and expendable. 

There are moments when a poem’s reliance on shifting registers can begin to feel a bit formulaic. For example, phrases like “There is always,” or “Let us assume,” read like performative shortcuts to epiphany. 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. There are lines that are so pleasurable to the ear (“Drum up a feast of rain”) and so leveling in their brutal intelligence (“The dog is an epistemologist / even though she cannot spell the word. / She knows what she knows”) that the route of her future work has me curious. And waiting.