Launch reading by Tishani Doshi and Jennifer Lee Tsai
Tishani Doshi and Jennifer Lee Tsai joined us for this launch event for new May 2026 titles. Patricia Smith was originally advertised as taking part but was unable to due to a family emergency. Both Tishani and Jennifer celebrated the publication of their new books by reading selections from them and discussing their work with each other and with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley.
This free Bloodaxe launch event was streamed on YouTube Live on this YouTube page where it can still be viewed: https://youtube.com/live/4x0gzWrAClU
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links.
Tishani Doshi: Egrets, While War
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/egrets-while-war-1396
Jennifer Lee Tsai: Melete
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/melete-1395
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Tishani Doshi: Egrets, While War
Egrets, While War is a lyric field guide to grief and resilience, where attention becomes a form of devotion, and intimacy, a quiet resistance.
The poems in Tishani Doshi’s fifth collection navigate the deep entanglements between environmental loss, ancestral memory, the slow transformations of ageing, and the devastations of war. Birds appear throughout these pages, not simply as subjects but as symbols and messengers, witnesses to war, extinction and exile. Mythic birds from the Ramayana fly alongside city pigeons and wild peacocks, forming a living archive of flight and disappearance. Here, love and desire emerge not as consolation, but as a form of radical presence – one of the last ways we remain tethered to the world. With lyric clarity and a gaze both wide and precise, Egrets, While War becomes a meditation on survival – of species, of history, of the heart.
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Jennifer Lee Tsai: Melete
Jennifer Lee Tsai’s first full-length poetry book explores family history, intergenerational trauma, love, loss and belonging through the perspective of a second-generation British Chinese identity. Melete interweaves dual cultures and heritages through narratives of memory, migration and mysticism across Liverpool, China and Hong Kong.
The mythic structure of the book relates to the three original Boeotian Muses – Melete, Mneme and Aoede. Named after the Muse of meditation and contemplation, Melete navigates the boundaries between life and art, personhood and subjectivity, states and places of spiritual transcendence and ecstasies. This expansive collection establishes a powerfully distinctive lyric voice in British poetry.
[14 April 2026]
