We Have Another Announcement 🗞️
A new book. A hard conversation. A publisher's reflection on why we need both.
We are reaching the halfway point of the year, and already, we are bustling with more literature, engaging events, new members, and collaborations. It never ceases to amaze me how much can be accomplished in such a short amount of time.
With that said, we are incredibly excited to announce that we have signed another book deal with the amazing Deepa Rajan. Her poetry book, Picket Fences Requires Picket Lines, is scheduled for an official launch in the Spring of 2027, and just as enticing as the title suggests, this one is bound to break societal narratives by confronting the messages we hold too tightly within our perception of identity.
(Click on the links below to view our press releases.)
About the book:
Picket Fences Require Picket Lines is a fierce call to collective action against racist and sexist beauty standards. The poetry collection critiques beauty requirements in our modern society by tackling important questions about who creates them, who perpetuates them, and who profits from women’s insecurities. Uncomfortable by design, the book names the mundane violence of everyday items we have been taught to accept, from pink razors to whitening creams, which reinforce the ideal of white hairless bodies as the default for feminine beauty. The poetry pushes beyond voicing grievance and ultimately offers a solution: the picket line of collective rebellion.
When reading through Deepa’s manuscript, I found myself questioning some of the mores around how we dress and present ourselves in the world. Why do we like particular clothing choices, or how we apply our make-up or style our hair? Is it because we really like a particular shirt, or does it make us blend in with our peers? Skinny jeans are in, then out, and sometimes it seems less of a personal stylistic choice and more a pressure into what is acceptable, appropriate, or fashionable, all of which is decided arbitrarily by someone most of us have never met.
Deepa targets bodily hair in her collection, where she unpacks the dichotomy of women removing most of their hair, whereas men roam freely in bodily manes. These contradictory sets of rules placed on gender have sometimes disturbed something inside me, but I haven’t always noticed or realised the insidiousness of the norms we follow like gospel. Personally, I shave my legs, armpits and bikini line. I pluck my eyebrows, chin hairs and the fluff around my belly button. For all the years I have removed hair, I paid little mind to why I did it, or why women are expected to, while men are not.
While reading Deepa’s poems, she suggests that while we convince ourselves that hair removal is a choice, it cannot be entirely our prerogative if we are socialised to make this choice. After reading this manuscript, I have sat with myself wondering if I am a victim of cognitive dissonance when it comes to bodily hair, and what other messages have I swallowed, telling myself they are mine when they are most likely a social condition to the societal expectations we blindly follow?
Deepa pushes this reflection further: when I think about body hair, I think of my own body, my own skin, which is light. I have never been made to feel dirty or unprofessional because of my stubble. That is not true for everyone. Deepa names what I have never experienced: that some beauty standards I have been conditioned to follow are not neutral. Some have racist and sexist undertones, and they can harm dark-skinned women most of all. I can only imagine what it is like to be a dark-skinned woman told her natural body is unattractive or unprofessional. In turn, make the consequences of our respective choices are not equal.
This has been the most defining reason I am a feminist, as while studying history, culture, psychology, politics, and more around human beings, I find myself often grappling with deeper questions about who I am and what has shaped my thinking, behaviours and personality. Learning more about our mental health does the same thing, but the subject of feminism itself speaks of society and communal relations rather than focusing solely on the self.
So much of who we are, how we think, and the way we move in this world is heavily influenced by our surroundings. Accents, for example, are picked up by those around us, and just as mine has watered down from my original, the words, phrases, and fluctuations in my speech have altered from living abroad. The same thing occurs when we immerse ourselves in various perspectives and learn more about different cultures, subjects, and ourselves. We change. We are remoulded into someone slightly different, and we don’t notice this shift within ourselves until we are either removed from our environments or look back at ourselves in hindsight.
Returning to my adopted home, I can now see how much of this culture influenced who I am, and it fascinates me with how malleable we are. But it brings me back to Deepa’s manuscript: how much of our cultural mores shape the way we exist within ourselves and around our communities? And why is there a push to be a certain way?
It is difficult for me to claim that the removal of bodily hair isn’t entirely my decision when I believe that we can take what we like from our society and use it to shape who we are or want to become. Though I do agree we need to look into the reasons we are encouraged to follow certain expectations and why there are double standards around many of them, not just with gender, but also race, religion, class, etc. It is not enough to only view the world from our perspectives, but to listen to those different from ourselves and embrace the angle from which they view the world and their roles in society, whether chosen or imposed.
There is power in learning more about who we are and societal mores, as we get to choose how to build ourselves in the future. Not only as individuals but also as a collective. Deepa’s poems are not just an invitation to question beauty standards. She does not give easy answers, but she does offer better questions, not just about my own body, but about our places in a system that can harm certain demographics more than others. The goal is not to reject everything we have been taught; the goal is to recognise what we have been taught, and then decide, deliberately and consciously, what to keep and what to leave behind. And to always ask: who does this serve? Who does this harm? That is not just feminism, that is freedom, and that is accountability, and in a social society, we are all responsible for each other.
I am excited for this poetry collection as there is so much to glean from in this provocative subject, while finding ways to make more intentional decisions that build more equity in our already too-divided society. We selected this book for publication for that reason, to provide more insight into how our world is shaped and learn more about how we can re-examine our personal choices. After all, our liberation starts with unpicking what we have been taught so that we can build our society with more intentionality that does not harm those around us.
We will continue to share more on these themes throughout the process, so do follow along to engage with the material. We can’t wait to get this book onto your bookshelf early next year.
Dr. Deepa Rajan is a scientist and writer living in San Francisco. She holds a PhD in Cell Biology from the University of California, San Francisco and is a former Fulbright Scholar at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India. Her poetry, like her science, often focuses on observations of complex behaviors, conditioning, and the corporeal nature of living things - with a strong added dose of feminism. She has also modeled for San Francisco Fashion Week, and blends this immersion into beauty standards and the body in her poetry. Rajan’s writing has appeared in numerous literary magazines including The B’K Magazine, Corporeal, The Poet Heroic, Unlikely Stories, and Toil and Trouble Lit Mag. She is an avid public speaker and has given several talks about education, feminism, and science, including a TEDx talk about the effects of music on the brain. Rajan strives towards Nabokov’s adage: “A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”
To follow along with this journey, please do follow Deepa on her socials:
Twitter/X: @DeepaHRajan
Bluesky: @deeparajan.bsky.social
Instagram: @deepaharirajan
redrosethorns is an independent press centred around mental health, self-care, gender and sexuality. In addition to our new book publishing arm, we are the home of redrosethorns journal, the redrosethorns magazine trilogy, and the quarterly Thorn & Bloom Magazines, publications that have showcased emerging and established literary talent since 2022. Our mission is to build a lasting ecosystem for writers and artists across the globe in all formats, where we can learn, connect, and grow together.
Visit our website to learn more: www.redrosethorns.com
✨️ brilliant news!