About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherLiverpool University Press

ISBN-101789621682

ISBN-139781789621686

eBay Product ID (ePID)5038500511

Product Key Features

Book TitleHow to Wash a Heart

Number of Pages58 Pages

LanguageEnglish

TopicWomen Authors

Publication Year2020

GenrePoetry

AuthorBhanu Kapil

Book SeriesPavilion Poetry Ser.

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height0.4 in

Item Weight2.8 Oz

Item Length7.3 in

Item Width0.8 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2020-416528

Dewey Edition23

Reviews' 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, 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, ' 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, 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, '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, "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 "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 "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 is a major writer, producing works that make you think and feel differently about the world, that end up wiring your brain differently. She explores racism, violence and the psychological effects of diaspora and uncertainty on the body of the immigrant in a poetry that is at once innovative and relatively comprehensible.' Steven Waling, Magma Poetry, 'This book speaks of the wider experience of the refugee or immigrant. Notions of home and love change over time and become distorted so that the narrator becomes alienated both from their current situation and their own past. The poems capture perfectly the loneliness of being a guest in someone else's home and in a country that is not your own. The conflicting emotions of such a situation - gratitude, indebtedness, confusion, discomfort, anxiety, fear, anger. [...] This is a beautiful, furious heart-rending book - utterly compelling.' Julia Webb, Under the Radar, 'A brilliant and complex book, urgent in its message, How To Wash A Heart deserves (and requires) a wide and attentive readership.' Seán Hewitt, Irish Times, '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, 'Kapil's words slice through strange intimacies; they get underneath the longings and losses of immigrants and unravel the fragments of memory and experience with greater precision than many scientific methods seem to do.' Suparna Choudhury, Rain Taxi Review, '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, "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, '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, ' 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, '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, '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, 'It is noteworthy, then, that How to Wash A Heart began its life in the UK, published by Liverpool University Press's Pavilion Poetry. This represents a pivot in Kapil's practice: after decades of living and working in the United States, she has also returned to the UK, a move that has coincided with her receiving greater recognition in her home country. [...] How to Wash A Heart speaks deliberately to the specifics of Britain: its racism, and its reception of immigrants. [...] What I love about Kapil is her concision, arrived at through processes of sifting which refuse to be rushed, which challenge us all to fully answer the question: What do you inherit, and what do you reproduce? The power of Kapil's writing lies in her ability to evoke violence with a gentle touch. [...] Her books are spaces to rest, to lay down your armfuls of things. Now that she finds herself back here, on the near ground of Britain, it will be a joy and a wonder to see what she makes of it and our barrage of inheritances.' Stephanie Sy-Quia, The White Review

Dewey Decimal811/.6

SynopsisWinner 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., Part horror, part comedy, this poetry collection considers the changing relations between a citizen white host with liberal political views, and an immigrant guest whose visa status is precarious. Looking at the limits of charitable acts, the breakdown of a social relationship, these poems are written for a raw voice., Bhanu Kapil's extraordinary and original work been published in the U.S. over the last two decades to create what she calls in Ban en Banlieue (2015) a 'Literature that is not made from literature.' During that time Kapil has established herself as one of our most important and ethical writers, whose books often defy categorisation, as she fearlessly engages with colonialism and its ongoing and devastating aftermath. 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 U.K., 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.

LC Classification NumberPS3618.I39