redrosethorns, an independent feminist press, is proud to announce the acquisition of Picket Fences Require Picket Lines, a debut poetry collection by Deepa Rajan.
The manuscript is a fierce call to collective action against racist and sexist beauty standards. The seeds of this book were planted when Rajan was ten years old and bullied into her first waxing appointment. The work has since grown into a sharp, lyrical, and unflinching collection of poetry that critiques beauty requirements in our modern society and tackles 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 book pushes beyond voicing grievance and ultimately offers a solution: the picket line of collective rebellion.
“Deepa Rajan’s work is electric. She writes about beauty standards not as personal insecurity, but as systems of control. This collection is a weapon and a witness, angry, tender, and utterly necessary,” says Kirsty Anne Richards, Founder and Editorial Director of redrosethorns.
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, observes 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.”
Picket Fences Require Picket Lines is scheduled for release in the Spring of 2027. Further details, including cover art and pre-order information, will be announced in the coming months.
