Reviewed by Justin D Goodman
Women In Marigold
by Mansi Dahal
Stillhouse Press
Sept 2026, ISBN: 978-1-945233-34-0, Paperback
Everywhere the self tries to excuse itself from the chain of creation, the world—its politics, maternities, romance—intrudes. Mansi Dahal’s debut poetry collection, Women In Marigold, is one poet’s search for equipoise and intimacy within the ambivalence of such a world. “The boatman asks me to move closer to you to maintain the balance. I do,” as the collection opens in a poem of that name. While Dahal’s poetry career formally began at the prompting of poet Diane Seuss, she’d already discovered poetry as one of the Word Warriors, a Nepali spoken word group whose QC Award she won in 2017. In that space, Dahal developed a love for spoken word poet Sarah Kay, who ran workshops and intensives for the Word Warriors. While Women in Marigold is dense with intense feelings towards matrons (be they her Aama, Hajurama, Nepal’s first woman president Bidya Devi Bandhari, or motherland) Dahal’s debut has an equally complicated sense of place within the two worlds of its poetic maternities. At times dour, unremitting, and snub-nosed in the Seussian vein; at times almost naïve with affection and unrestrained with its sentiments a la Kay. The struggle over maternity gives to the collection a rough, whiplashing quality befitting a debut, albeit at times to the detriment of individual poems, which ultimately speaks to her sensitivity towards the instability of any “you” or “me.” But who is the “you” the mythic-feeling boatman asks the poet to move closer to?
To a mythic figure, a mythic answer. You is the poet herself trying not to “surrender to your becoming” in the diaristic covid lockdown of “Nakedness Is A Truth, Not The Truth”; you is an America that in “Dear America,” becomes a “grave with wi-fi” and a Nepal that in “The Performance of Decaying” transforms Divya Devi Bhandari into a traitor in “a garland of marigold” at the Jankapur Temple “extend[ed] a ritual of reverence” by a “girl dressed up as a goddess,” even though Bhandari “could deny her citizenship, her children, her belonging, depending on who she marries”; you is the titular Dalit child Angira Pasi in “In Rupahendi, A Twelve-Year-Old Girl Hangs In The Mango Tree”; you is the reader who turns to the explanatory end note for that poem, as well as the one who from the first poem is indicted and invited back into the collection, “I understand for each time/you will leave, I will remain”; you is most explicitly Dahal’s Aama and Hajurama, the former being the focus of the “On Saturdays” poems that act as the centerpiece of Women in Marigold, the latter intimately layered into Nepali itself in “घ्यु/Ghyu/” and “गुन्द्रुक /Gundruk”; yet, as “Everything In The Universe Is Made” opens with “of the same thing,” that poem lays out the shape of romance, of power, in which “once a guy read”:
The definition of manipulative to me
From his phone at Sakura Park. I sat
On a bench and listened to him calling
Me manipulative. A woman
With the subject and object of Dahal’s poems fluctuating so often, it’s impressive how consistently she remains grounded in them. Her preference for plain assertions carries the firmness of an Oriana Fallaci interview, oratory with bite. Just as the line breaking into “me manipulative. A woman” summarizes the exhaustion of this poem, summarizing single images abound in others. “I noticed the loosened skin in Aama’s neck” she observes in “Birthing Room,” “she is no longer a young woman//but I am one. I am no longer a girl but Kaya is one.” This connection through the body is the discovery of a “you” already built into embodiment. For each despair at social distance or the disembodied voice, dozens of mouths turn into refuges: “Cold Manjari water in her mouth//reminded me of distance as fear” (“Location”), “I wanted to give/you love in a form you could bite” (”Girl-Sad”), “Chewing this rare-done piece/of red meat reminds me of Hajurama” (“Scallions”). A former spoken word poet with an oral fixation is poetic in itself. The more so when it displays the liminality of diasporic life generally, and Nepali life specifically. In “Malekhu Ko Macha,” a travelogue poem of sorts, Dahal summarizes the experience in a “roadside restaurant”:
…no matter how
smelly The mouth or how full of fragrance,
the same fried prawns go inside and all of our holes
smell like an ocean in a landlocked country.
These patient, direct stories become effective analogies by their restraint. They introduce the reader to a clarity that belies the tension of being in between (China-India, away-home). But this restraint grinds against an expressive intensity that works better in performed poetry. Beginning with a breakdown of rules around Nepali citizenship, you could easily imagine “The Performance of Decaying” having been an essay in the spirit of her essay on the Gen-Z revolution for Brown History: “As a Nepali man if you marry a foreign woman..” and “As a Nepali woman, If I marry a foreign man…” Lines such as “I obtained my citizenship through Abbu and not Aama” hit precisely because it removes the distance the reader might experience from another’s “I.” Even as the “I” arrives, “when I got my period for the first time, I wasn’t allowed to see or/touch Abbu,” the “I” isn’t interrupting injustice. It contextualizes it. It breaks the line at “touch,” at the body’s betrayal. Then it continues—“or sunlight.//I had the power to decay the whole sun.” This gesture to remain inside the story in order to express an ecstatic disempowerment defrays the mood, weakens the gesture. When the poem closes on the official state visit of Bidya Devi Bandhari, whose refusal of an amended citizenship bill “contribute[d] to the status-quo of at least half a million stateless individuals,” we experience yet another metempsychosis of ecstatic, feminine rage. Dahal imagines herself re-writing the constitution, “the jewelry I am wearing on my neck jingles louder and my scream pours out of the veil.” This fury sits oddly beside an otherwise forward politics of implicit poetry.
In that sense, the “you” Dahal is speaking to is perhaps too broad. Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony came to mind when reading “The Performance of Decaying,” yet that steeliness doesn’t quite match Dahal. She is funny and light, invoking Bollywood music or conversations with her sister. Other times Fahmida Riaz came to the forefront, but, no matter how impassioned, Riaz’s cynical lyricism and satirical bent is not as direct. Nor does it exactly align with Carolyn Forche’s poetry of witness, being more immediate, of the moment. The obvious comparison is to poets like Ocean Vuong and danez smith. They share the formal precocity, demand for a page-exceeding poetry, and restless frustration that deepens to despair. This is the 21st century search for a language that transmigrates wounds how the old words seemed to. “Poem”: “I do not/want this to be a poem. I want this to be angry.” This is one and the same problem; those who mourn for relevance mourn for an audience. And Dahal is torn on who she is addressing. Is she an observer of community or is community a vehicle for expression? That’s perhaps why the “On Saturdays” poems, despite their seeming plainness, elegantly flow together. The plainness is the point, in fact. In “What The Eye Chooses To See” she writes “I understood ducklings/are an extension of the mother duck’s/body”—to write about her Aama, these Saturdays of curry and sleep and scolding, is to write about herself. Which is the great mystery of love, perhaps. The chain of being. Hideous as the world gets, as in Malekhu, we eat and eat and “we will not stop numbing our tongues” because, even landlocked, our mouths unfeeling, there is an ocean between us, and it the distance is delicious.
About the reviewer: Justin D Goodman (they/them) is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY and a member of the New Haven Writers’ Group. Their work has been published, among other places, in Cleaver Magazine, Prospectus, and Prairie Schooner. You can find more of their work at JustinDGoodman.com