Description

Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2020.
Poetry Book Society Choice, Summer 2020.
Bhanu Kapil’s extraordinary and original work has been published in the US over the last two decades. During that time Kapil has established herself as one of our most important and ethical writers. Her books often defy categorisation as she fearlessly engages with colonialism and its ongoing and devastating aftermath, creating what she calls in Ban en Banlieue (2015) a ‘Literature that is not made from literature’. Always at the centre of her books and performances are the experiences of the body, and, whether she is exploring racism, violence, the experiences of diaspora communities in India, England or America, what emerges is a heart-stopping, life-affirming way of telling the near impossible-to-be-told.

How To Wash A Heart, Kapil’s first full-length collection published in the UK, depicts the complex relations that emerge between an immigrant guest and a citizen host. Drawn from a first performance at the ICA in London in 2019, and using poetry as a mode of interrogation that is both rigorous, compassionate, surreal, comic, painful and tender, by turn, Kapil begins to ask difficult and urgent questions about the limits of inclusion, hospitality and care.

Publisher Review

'How to Wash a Heart with its urgent salutory lessons about ways in which immigrants are unhoused and unmade punches above its weight of 44 pages.' Gail Low, Dundee University Review of the Arts 'Bhanu's book is kind of like walking into a kaleidoscope of heritage... It's not like other books this year, subtle, nuanced and in the astro-plane only really wild poets get into. If the book was in a pub it would be the lady with the trolley full of black bags, you always wondered what was in them and now you can find out. Go on, go have a peek, let the words wash over you, let them roll through you and when you come out you will have the stench of something new and precious.' Arji Manuelpillai, Out-Spoken 'The book's final pages, both the end of the sequence itself and the paratextual material, are devastating. How To Wash A Heart confronts "the link / Between creativity / And survival" - arguing that creativity is necessary for survival, but sadly not sufficient - more skilfully and innovatively than anything else I have read this year.' Dominic Leonard, The TLS 'How to Wash a Heart asks extremely difficult and delicate questions that open a space for dialogue. It is also a beautiful book to hold and read. If only our public debates had Kapil's subtlety, refinement, and distinction. How to Wash a Heart has already won an award in my heart, by merely beating, striving, pumping blood.' David Morgan O'Connor, RHINO Poetry 'How To Wash a Heart brilliantly dissects power, both ethnic and economic... It is a wise, thought-provoking collection which burrows under the skin.' Katrina Naomi 'These books [How To Wash A Heart and The Olive Trees' Jazz and Other Poems by Samira Negrouche] are gems. Both authoritative in the best sense of the word; stridently reflecting worlds of their own - that we know, and yet have never read described in this particular way, according to the contours along which our hearts move.' Khairani Barokka, The Poetry Review 'A brilliant and complex book, urgent in its message, How To Wash A Heart deserves (and requires) a wide and attentive readership.' Sean Hewitt, Irish Times 'In this emotionally-complex, lyrically-innovative, and thematically-rich collection, hospitality becomes a way of exploring the classical literary themes of arrival and departure, forcing them into a space where the question of belonging is perennially unanswered.' Devina Shah, The Poetry School 'Bhanu Kapil's brilliant and formally innovative How To Wash A Heart is a bold singular work... that lays bare the struggle of the immigrant... Kapil does this with a quiet brutality and stylistic flair.' Juliano Zaffino 'Bhanu Kapil's work exceeds beyond the page; it is felt somatically, it moves and it pulses and tremors and it tears... the collection's raw, understated tone draws attention to the harmful systematic and clinical processes of immigration.' Alycia Pirmohamed, The Scores 'Lots of the books are forgettable. This one isn't. It sounds like nothing else I've read. Initially disorientating, it soon clarifies into a novelistic tale about charity and hypocrisy, the story of an immigrant welcomed as a "guest" into the home of a woman who grows resentful of this new arrival's friendship with her adopted daughter.' Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph 'How to Wash a Heart addresses the world of lockdown with uncanny prescience, capturing its fragmented texture and vectors of distraction, and the constant intersection it reveals between personal and political precarity.' Dai George, Wales Arts Review 'Responds with brilliant acuity to the prolonged stress of the immigrant experience... In this series of precise, destabilising poems, Kapil skilfully amplifies the pressured immigrant heart, showing how precarious it is to exist in colour in a white space.' Joanna Lee, The Guardian 'Brilliantly relentless... Kapil's words sit brilliantly between the intellectual and the bodily. The eponymous phrase of this book returns again and again, to be held up to the light in different ways. Violence, exile, love and the world of literature drip out in the answers to the opening question.' Andrew McMillan, Poetry Book Society 'This joyous, occasionally furious, collection explores the limits of hospitality... Kapil establishes an astonishing presence, emphasising process over product, welcoming the reader to participate in the ritual of her poems' making.' Sammi Gale, i Reviews 'Bhanu Kapil's How to Wash a Heart catches the thinning smile of that ancient human ritual: hospitality. In a time of increasing hostility against migrants, Kapil demonstrates how survival tunes the guest to its host with devastating intimacy: 'It's exhausting to be a guest / In somebody else's house / Forever.' In these lines an ancestral trauma pours from the heart of the unwelcome across a warzone, a threshold, into a spare bedroom edging its occupant out. Ultimately what Kapil teaches us is that although the heart might be where desire, gratitude, even love exist, it is an organ to which, like a country, we may never fully belong.' Sandeep Parmar