Tigress

by Jessica Mookherjee

Jessica Mookherjee, highly commended in the 2017 Forward Prizes, presents her second collection of poems, Tigress. Mixing myth, magic and migration, these poems explore the impact of choice upon our lives and concentrate their magnificent, kaleidoscopic imagination on the intricate and often fraught nature of childhood and family, selfhood and womanhood. Fierce, often funny, always charged and revealing, Mookerjee's acute attention to detail tracks lives lived between Bengal, Wales and London. In exploring the intense displacement and loss that marks the experience of migration, the poems move into territories of danger and safety, illness and heartbreak, and ultimately into self-discovery; a rich and sensual moonlit menagerie of bears, big cats, wolves, and forest mothers. At every step, Tigress is wildly inventive, elegant and utterly distinctive.

Genres: Poetry

70 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2019

Reviews

[Natasa Sears]

The honesty with which Jessica writes is deeply moving. The pain of broken lives seeps out but touches you only gently, just enough to make you look in at the characters' lives. If you read it in one sitting, this book almost reads like a novel, where the reader fills in the gaps, adds colours, furniture, and patterns, and that completes the book that so often reveals the depth of Indian culture that goes well beyond the average person's knowledge of it.

[Dela Bela]

I heard about this book from a friend and I wasn’t disappointed. The startling poems are fierce and honest. There is a startling weirdness and yet accessible at the same time. I love the poems Ursa Minor and Burst the best.

[Claire]

‘Long ago, in the Mumbles, my mother wore saris,
all flowing and veiled like the Marys in the giant
picture Bible I’d saved up for.’

(The Truth)

I love how Jessica Mookherjee explores her intersecting identities.

Identities - like Bengali, Welsh, woman, Christian - do not form hierarchies but interplay with each other and grow, transform - and most definitely do not cancel each other out.

Tough luck to the overculture and its aversion to complexity and multiplicity, eh?