Poetry Club: Tishani Doshi, Asmaa Azaizeh & Isabelle Baafi

June’s edition of Poetry Club is an evening of readings from three compelling voices in contemporary poetry: Tishani Doshi, Asmaa Azaizeh and Isabelle Baafi. Moving between questions of conflict, identity and belonging, intimate histories and acts of personal transformation, their work explores how language bears witness to the pressures of our time. Doshi will read from her new collection Egrets, While War, Azaizeh will present recent unpublished poems in Arabic with English translations read by Doshi, and Baafi will read from her award-winning debut collection Chaotic Good.

In Tishani Doshi‘s Egrets, While War, birds become messengers and witnesses, from mythic creatures of ancient epics to the everyday city pigeon, navigating environmental loss, ancestral memory, ageing, and the devastations of war. With lyric precision and emotional breadth, Doshi’s poems turn intimacy into a form of radical presence, offering a meditation on survival, of species, history, and the heart.

Palestinian poet Asmaa Azaizeh will read a selection of recent, unpublished poems exploring genocide and witnessed war, as well as the quieter, often overlooked struggles over identity, history and language. Written from her perspective as a Palestinian born in the 1948 territories, the poems also reflect on recent migration and the experience of motherhood. Azaizeh will read in Arabic, with English translations read by Tishani Doshi.

Winner of the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, Isabelle Baafi’s Chaotic Good is a piercing debut about how we are made, how we get lost and how we find new selves. Framed by the story of escape from a toxic marriage, the collection traces the shifting dynamics of power within both home and community. Incisive, formally inventive and deeply humane, Baafi’s poems explore self-determination and the search for renewal in the aftermath of rupture.

Tishani Doshi

Tishani Doshi publishes poetry, essays and fiction. Her most recent books are Girls are Coming Out of the Woods, shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for poetry, and a novel, Small Days and Nights, shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. For fifteen years she worked as a dancer with the Chandralekha Group in Chennai. Her fourth full-length collection of poetry, A God at the Door, has just been published by Bloodaxe Books. She is a visiting associate professor at New York University, Abu Dhabi, and otherwise lives in Tamil Nadu, India.

Doshi was part of Coronet Inside Out in 2021. You can watch her video, where she reads from A God at the Door, here.

ASMAA AZAIZEH

Asmaa Azaizeh is a Palestinian poet, writer, performer and editor based in London. She is the author of four poetry collections and a memoir, A Year of Small Museums (2024). Her 2018 collection Don’t Believe Me If I Talk of War has been translated into several languages and formed the basis of an audio-visual performance that premiered at the Avignon Theatre Festival in 2022. She previously served as the first Director of the Mahmoud Darwish Museum in Ramallah and has worked as a journalist, broadcaster and cultural organiser.

Isabelle Baafi

Isabelle Baafi is a poet, editor and critic. Her pamphlet Ripe won the Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Her debut collection Chaotic Good (Faber, 2025) won the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, The London Magazine and Oxford Poetry.