'Women in Marigold,' Debut Poetry Collection by Mansi Dahal '24, Out This Fall with Stillhouse

"My time at Columbia unsettled my sense of certainty," said Mansi Dahal '24, whose luminous debut poetry collection, Women in Marigold, is forthcoming from Stillhouse Press this September.

The book, which arose from Dahal's thesis for the Writing Program, travels between Kathmandu and New York, and across lyric and narrative modes, to explore a life rooted in betweenness: between languages, geographies, and selves. At its center is a single, impossible wish: "Imagine being able to live / in one place at one time."

When Dahal arrived at the Writing Program, she thought knew what she wanted to write. But her professors—from her first workshop with Adjunct Assistant Professor Emily Skillings '17 to her thesis workshop with Associate Professor and Concentration Head of Poetry Dorothea Lasky—encouraged her to stay "in the discomfort of not yet knowing."

Not-knowing is central to Women in Marigold: "To live between places is also to live between forms of coherence," Dahal told me in a conversation about the book over email. "Sometimes you can tell the story through narrative poems, and other times the lyric poems interrupt that very impulse, resisting the explanation because all you have is flashes of return."

Dahal's poems are both forthright in their emotion—one poem is titled "Are All the Heartbreaks in Your Poem Real?"—and deceptively simple. Her opening poem, "The Boatman Asks Me to Move Closer to You to Maintain the Balance. I Do," closes with a single subject-verb-object clause that stands in for the feverish physical and emotional dislocation referenced throughout the poem: "The oar touches the water." 

Girlhood is visceral, commonplace: "Girls who will buy an ounce of blood / to make sausages for their lovers. They will clean the intestines / and stretch them like chewing gum." America is called, by one of the book's many correspondents, "a grave with Wifi."

"Women in Marigold formulates the devastation of scale as a condition of diasporic presence," said Bhanu Kapil, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and author of The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001) and Schizophrene (Nightboat, 2015). 

Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets (Graywolf, 2021), which won the Pulitzer in poetry in 2022, and Modern Poetry (Graywolf, 2024), understood this devastation as an embodied experience: "These poems reawaken my openness to sensation and allow me to recall those days in which the intensity of desire is in equal measure to the impossibility of its fulfillment."

A poet from Biratnagar, Nepal, Dahal was awarded the Waletzky Fellowship from the School of the Arts for her distinguished work. Her writing has been featured in POETRY, New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Southeast Review, Colorado Review, Tupelo Press, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere. Her poem "What the Eye Chooses to See" was nominated by Copper Nickel for inclusion in the Best New Poets anthology, and Poets & Writers selected her as one of their poetry fellows for the 2026 "Get the Word Out" publicity incubator program. Dahal served as the editor-in-chief of Some Kind Of Opening and splits her time between New York and Nepal. 

Women in Marigold is now available for preorder from Stillhouse Press.