I first met Mansi Dahal in a graduate class dedicated to writing the body. It was a fitting introduction — while our work varies in topic, theme, and form, we share a habit of writing about sensory intimacies, small tactile details that reverberate across the psyche. As our friendship has blossomed over the years, I’ve been fortunate enough to become tipsy on the epiphanies revealed in her poems.
Dahal’s debut poetry collection, Women in Marigold, forthcoming September 2026 by Stillhouse Press, immerses readers in these tactual details, in quiet, domestic scenes unfolding across the physical and emotional topographies of New York and Dahal’s native Nepal. Dahal’s collection is about leaving family and country behind in the pursuit of artistic fulfillment in America, about creating beauty out of longing, or perhaps finding beauty in that longing.
I recently sat down with Dahal at her home in Queens to discuss Women in Marigold, to discuss that sense of longing, as well as the role of matrilineal relationships in her work and how to distill the ache of dislocation into verse.
*
Ana Hein: What made you choose Women in Marigold as the title for this collection?
Mansi Dahal: When I think of the color marigold, it reminds me of warmth and also of my childhood, because I grew up around a really big garden, and the flowers in the garden change according to the seasons. There’s also the marigold season, the festival season in Nepal, and that period always reminds me of chilling, and having a good time with my family, and a sense of warmth and comfort. It also reminds me of my grandmother, because she makes a lot of garlands from the garden. I think of marigold not just as a color, but also as the flower. I liked the multiplicity of it.
Marigold in Nepali is called sayapatri, which translates into “hundred petals.” The layers of meaning, and the question of “What do those layers hold?”— the complex nature of the word is what drove me to title the collection after it.
AH: There’s a strong sense of longing in this collection, but the objects of that longing are very diverse. There’s longing for home, for creative fulfillment, for stability, for family, for contentment, for love. How did you go about constructing that feeling, that ache, through these different valences?
MD: When I started the collection, I wasn’t fully aware of everything I was longing for. It started with writing a poem and writing another poem and writing another poem, and I was tracing it backwards to see these patterns. I was not intentional about it at all. That’s also the fun part of writing poetry — I’m not going there knowing the answers or what I will write about, and I think the potential of where you can go when you reach the corners of your own wants and desires is so exciting.
You don’t even have language for what you’re longing for until you start writing about it. I felt like I was writing so much about longing — I wrote a sentence which will maybe be in an essay someday: “I’m now longing to not long anymore.” It was interesting to me to reach that point of being a little desperate to see what it would actually look like to reach what I’m grasping for and for that feeling to end.
AH: Something else I find very striking in these poems is how you move between broader political commentary and domestic intimacy, with some poems collapsing these distinctions entirely. For example, the poem “Where Will You Keep Dwelling?” begins by focusing on a speaker who “appl[ies] soft toffee-nut lipstick and weep[s] quietly” on the subway, then transitions into reflecting on Prem Prasad Acharya, who self-immolated in front of the Nepali parliament building, citing large-scale political corruption as his motive. What is your process in striking the right balance — and overlap — between the political and the intimate in your work?
MD: When I started constructing that poem with “toffee-nut lipstick,” I did not think I would reach that direct commentary, but it went from longing for home to thinking about other Nepalis who left and who also long for home, asking, “What does that look like for them?” There’s the romantic part of missing home, but there’s also the reality and the dark side of missing home and what happens when you actually go back.
Though I was dwelling around the romantic part of longing, somehow my brain or my writing took me to the other side: the political, which I think is intertwined with the domestic. I’ve secretly always had a desire to write about the political, though whether I thought I lacked the capacity, or the words, or the knowledge, there was always a hesitation to do it.
I’ve realized the more I write about it that our thoughts about these bigger political things are not just facts. There’s so much feeling, so much observation, so much opinion attached to the political. There are no concrete lines that some scholar is going to tell me that I have to learn, and I’m not writing a [definitive] declaration of “This is what’s happening in Nepal.
Growing up, I also heard political discussions in very intimate spaces like the dining table or the kitchen where my mom was cooking. Home for me is the intimate movement of my grandmother making a garland, but she’s also cursing a corrupt politician. She’s uneducated, she can’t read in English, but she’s watching these videos about Nepali politics and being like, “What is happening?” That’s how I’ve soaked up both information and feeling.
AH: This collection is principally centered on the speaker’s experience of immigration from Nepal to America and the way she feels she is simultaneously in both places and neither. Often, the poems contain moments from the speaker’s life in both countries, sometimes placed in juxtaposition, sometimes simply held side-by-side as coexisting realities. How did you cultivate this fluidity of location across these poems?
MD: I knew there was going to be a back-and-forth in the collection. I have a tendency to go on a lot of different tangents and move around a lot of different feelings.
My writing started to show this more when I came here to study for undergrad, but then I would go home every summer and winter break. Every time I went home, there was this transition period of being like, “I was away for so long, and now I’m back, and things have changed, and what is going on?” And I would come back to America, and there would be a transition period of, “Oh, okay, I’ve left home again.” How is that even psychologically possible, to think of and be around such different people and mindsets, and leave that so fully, to uproot yourself and root yourself again?
Even now, I go home once a year, and there’s always the sensation of: “What does home look like?” And it’s slowly changed from feeling like I don’t belong in America — the first year I went home, I was like, “Being back is so good!” — to now going home to people telling me things like, “You’re not gonna get it. You’re American; this is a Nepali system.” When did that even happen?
There’s a lot of what you said — being in both places and being in neither of them — in the collection.
AH: The speaker’s family is a recurring cast in these poems: Hajurama and Baba, her grandparents; Aama and Abbu, her parents; her brother, her much younger sister, Kaya. They simultaneously ground the speaker in Nepal while also amplifying the dislocation she feels as an immigrant in New York. How did you decide the role each family member would play within individual poems and throughout the collection as a whole?
MD: It starts with a moment of awe or being flabbergasted by things my sister or my mother or my grandmother say in random, casual moments, and then I just sit with it, and I’m like, “What do you mean?” There’s so much profundity in my family, and it’s important to me personally to have it documented somewhere. As a writer, I interrogate a lot of larger questions through these family dynamics.
When my sister was younger — [I included] this in a poem — she told me, “Ewww, you are a soft girl,” and for her to say that to me, I’m like, “What do you even mean?” For her to be like, Ugh, you just don’t have it together. First of all, what gives you that impression? What gives that away? What about me makes you feel that or made you make that comment? She goes on about her day, but I sit with that question for days, and hours, and months.
I’m interrogating myself through these statements. I’m also trying to understand what they mean through my writing, because I can’t always ask my mother or my grandmother, “What do you mean?” We don’t explain things like that; they need to go do things with their hands, hold things, do concrete things.
It’s my way of sitting with it, giving more time to it, interrogating it. I think it comes from their gestures, feelings, words that open up a whole different universe, and trying to find the meaning in that.
“I feel like when you think about your motherland,
you automatically think about your mother.“
AH: The “On Saturdays” sequence in the collection is a series of prose-poem vignettes of the speaker and Aama, her mother, enacting, across time, a series of domestic tasks like cooking, or braiding hair, or doing yoga. There’s this sense that these aren’t just daily occurrences for the speaker, but almost revered rituals. There’s also a lot of tonal variance in this sequence, with some poems being more humorous, or tense, or tender. What was your intent behind this poetic sequence?
MD: I started this series with “On Saturdays, Aama Looks Gorgeous” because I was missing home. Growing up, Saturday was the only day of holiday, which was exciting because you’re sitting at home and you’re eating mutton, and that mutton cooking ritual stretches across everybody’s house. Saturday morning, everyone gets these good mutton pieces and you cook, and that’s Saturday’s lunch. When I thought of Saturdays in America, it would be so boring, and I would think about how exciting it would be to have a Saturday where my mother cooks mutton curry, and I’d get to taste it. That feeling was above everything else in the world — I was missing that feeling.
One of my friends in a group hangout asked the question, “If there was only one person you could spend your entire life with, who would that be?” and she said, “My mother.” I think my answer would also be my mother, though I think we would also have a lot of fights, and I don’t know how we would coexist together. But I think this vast, profound love for your mother — the complication of this relationship, but also the tenderness, the softness — that mother-daughter relationship has always intrigued me.
[In another recent hangout], somebody asked a similar question: “What is one thing you would want to inherit from your mother, and what is one thing you don’t want to inherit from your mother?” This was a bunch of women who left home and are staying abroad, and our mothers are going about their own thing, in their world in our [home] countries, but here we are really thinking about our mothers. I feel like when you think about your motherland, you automatically think about your mother. There’s some sort of fascination in me about my mother, and also exploring where this intense love comes from, since our relationship is very fraught.
Looking at your mother and being like, “She’s the most beautiful woman in the world” — where does that pure emotion even come from in a child? In one of the poems, I mention that somebody said, “Regardless of where you go, your mother has to be your role model.” And the kid in me, in the poem, is like, “This woman is so stupid — why would I leave my mother?” That certainty when I was a kid that I’m never leaving my mother, and now reaching this point where I’ve actually left — that contrast and contradiction, that’s what pulled me to write this series.
AH: There is an emphasis on matrilineal relationships in this collection, on the relationships the speaker has with Hajurama, Kaya, and Aama in particular, but also on the political and cultural significance of such relationships in Nepal.
For example, in the poem “The Performance of Decaying,” the speaker discusses how Nepali citizenship can only legally be passed down paternally. There are these powerful lines in the poem: “How will we still be women and not containers for the nation. / Empty or emptied, they will decide.” How did this understanding of matrilineal inheritance inform the way you approached these relationships on the page?
MD: Growing up as a woman in a patriarchal society, you tend to notice things from the time you’re small. I’ve talked about how, when I got my period for the first time, there’s this idea of “You’re impure,” and you have to be in a room. It’s still crazy to me to think, “Oh, you can’t look at the sun [while on your period], or you can’t do this and that.” It starts from questioning, “What are these rituals? Why do they exist?”
Growing up, I would see a lot of autobiographies of Nepali men; these writers would be mostly men, the women would barely be seen, and even in media, women would do a couple of films, and then they would disappear. It just felt like women in creative, artistic industries just rarely happened. I would really pay attention to all these sexist rituals and women navigating different relationships.
Even in my home, my grandmother did not go to school; she had to raise her cattle. And now she’s here, and she’s super proud to know I’ve done my master’s. I think the thing that makes me the saddest is that there are women with dreams and ambition as young girls, and somehow that just fizzles out. Why is that the case? Why do they have to get married, and have kids, and forget about their dreams, and aspirations, and desires? That led me to interrogate women, femininity, womanhood, the matrilineal dynamics, like you said. It has led me to ask myself, “Who are we?”
It’s all rooted deeply in patriarchy, and for them to not be able to see it in this day and age just shocks me.
AH: One of the driving forces in the collection is this speaker’s ambition, her desire to be a writer, be a poet, make art, but also to seek out that beauty in the daily life around her that she is documenting. What role do you see beauty playing within the text as this ambitious force? Why is that underlying her ambitious force?
MD: I think being around beauty, we don’t often think about what it can do to you psychologically, whether it’s visual beauty, smelling something that feels beautiful to you, or reading something that’s beautiful. It can be a powerful force. I think a lot of the time, beauty is taken as this softer, more feminine thing, but beauty can lead to obsessions, and obsessions can be so powerful, especially in writing.
There is a certain kind of beauty I seek when I write sentences in a poem, when I line-break something. Also, at the center of poems, there is always an image that comes to me. In the first poem, I talk about how this guy who holds the candy—
AH: —the line is, “When the sun sets in Pokhara, I wait / for you like the cotton-candy man.”
MD: When I was in Pokhara, there would be this man carrying big packets of cotton candy. From a distance, I would look at the pink shining, and I would be so stunned by that image. I think that is beauty. That image is able to grasp me and able to hold me, to make me so steady. The beauty in images, the beauty in how you craft a sentence, the beauty in how you move through a sentence, those things are important for me in poetry.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
*
Mansi Dahal is a writer from Biratnagar, Nepal, and a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program, where she 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, Copper Nickel, 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, while her poem “Doll-House” was recognized as a finalist for Palette Poetry’s 2022 Sappho Prize. Poets & Writers selected her as one of their poetry fellows for the 2026 “Get the Word Out” publicity incubator program. Dahal holds a BA in English with a concentration in Media and Film Studies from Kalamazoo College. She served as the editor-in-chief of Some Kind Of Opening and splits her time between New York and Nepal.