Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods
In the opening poem in this collection, Tishani Doshi addresses her reader: “I agree to turn my skin inside out, / to reinvent every lost word, to burnish, / to steal, to do what I must / in order to singe your lungs.” In the pages that follow, she makes good on her promise, with monsoons and sweltering heat, mud and bones and skin, and the testimony of dead girls. In the titular poem, she warns, “Girls are coming out of the woods. / They’re coming. They’re coming.”