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Incubation: a space for monsters
Originally published in America in 2006, and out of print for the last seven years, a space for monsters is a formally innovative, hybrid-genre book that incorporates poetry and prose. Set in a shifting narrative environment, where human bodies, characters, and text are neither one thing nor another, this fragmentary-diaristic text journeys through the spaces in-between. Following protagonist Laloo—Cyborg, girl, mother, child, immigrant, settler—on a roadtrip through American landscapes, genre styles, and form, Incubation creates radical space for what is 'monstrous'. In this document there is a celebration in the cobbling together of lives; global in scope, with an intimate focus on interior voice, this landmark text evidences the early innovations and talents of this T.S. Eliot prizewinning author.
132 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2006
23 people are currently reading
1261 people want to read
About the author
Bhanu Kapil
30 books232 followersBhanu Kapil is a British-Indian poet who lives in the United States and the United Kingdom. She is the author of a number of full-length works of poetry/prose, including The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), Schizophrene (Nightboat, 2011), Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat, 2015), and How to Wash a Heart (Liverpool University Press, 2020). Kapil taught for many years at Naropa University and Goddard College. In 2019, she was awarded the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. During this time, she completed her first full-length poetry collection to be published in the United Kingdom, How to Wash a Heart (2020). Kapil received the Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry in 2020.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews
March 25, 2008
Beautiful red prose. Read red prose. The prose shifts as identity does. Have been thinking about borders, and read new idea: one girl can possess the border inside her. Bhanu Kapil sheds light on being other everywhere: India, England, America. Then sheds shadow on that which she lit. A partitioned girl.
October 26, 2009
HOLY SHITFIRE. Also,
As I was wading into Bhanu Kapil's "Incubation – A Space for Monsters" it became evident to me that I needed to read Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" in order to understand what was meant by "Cyborg" and "Monster"--terms liberally deployed and conceptually integral in Kapil's verse novel.
Obviously Haraway's theory could be an entire class unto itself – but broadly, it's a reconstitution or a reexamination of traditional binaries (male/female, work/play, public/private, technological/natural, etc). These binaries are inadequate and have led to enormous ideological fractures that have left theorists and political operatives helpless. The problem, Haraway posits, is the framing of the entire system. In a technological world the conceptions of male/female work/play etc are rapidly dissolving.
"1. Here in the house. Dear Laloo, I painted my door yellow today and pinned up a picture of a woman facing a red wall, her palms dragging the red down. Is it you? Is it blood? She's wearing cords because it's 1978 and she's painting, somewhere in Iowa.
2. Covering the scrap of paper with layers of sellotape. I mean, sticky tape, like cell function: the central space surrounded or wrapped in a transparent life-like membrane. I was writing about you (Laloo) then sticking it up there, on the door above the woman, in the most beautiful house in the world. Taping it up, like a damaged leg or knee. You're my damage girl today.
3. It's not the same when I just write it out in my notebook. I like the paper separately. Visually, a series. Then I can say to visitors, what comes next for a red girl? They don't care. They just want the tea or coffee and are happy to exchange elaborate stories of girlhood. Exhausted, we lean on our heads on the kitchen table in turn, sucking on a piece of chocolate or black Panda licorice, listening to the obvious words at the end of a girl. What a girl is. Sometimes you are fifteen years old in the stories I tell. Sometimes you are not the red of technology, but monstrous or infrared, visible through the walls of a house. "
Haraway posits that women of color are representatives of cyborg identity, a potent synthesis of many outsider identities, and so it is with Kapil's Laloo, who is a Punjabi British woman hitchhiking through the US.
Laloo comes to the US as an exchange student on a visa, then drops out and starts hitchhiking, maybe to meet up with family in Oregon, maybe to see Big Sur, maybe because she's pregnant and running away--– after a terrifying encounter in a hospital (in which the narrator and Laloo slur together, the author ducks in and out of direct consciousness almost every other word) the narrative is unclear and shifty:
"In the hospital write a suture. This is medical not special. What follows is a beautiful story of the kind I'd relate to out-of-town guests on nights when the electricity failed and we had to eat dinner by candlelight and pee in the backyard. 'Do you have health insurance? What is your social security number? She left before we could sew her back up. She won't get far. Does she have health insurance, do you know? Do you know her social security number? Are you a blood relative? Do you need a clipboard? Here's a pen.' I am writing this in a fluorescent kitchen, I mean foyer. There are magazines, elevators and women with healthy looking teeth. It must be something inside them that's made the problem. Pans beneath each chair collect the grease."
In literature, cyborgs are not entrapped by traditional narratives, and often seize and retell traditional "rebirth" and "hero's journey" narratives. It makes sense the rite of passage narrative Kapil chooses to retell is the roadtrip narrative. (It makes even MORE sense when I learn that Kapil teaches at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa.)
On a language level, high and low diction cohabit without fanfare. The text exists on the outskirts of the actual narrative, sometimes in notebooks, sometimes in drafts, sometimes in the actual moment of experience which sparks the creation of text -- sometimes the author is Laloo, sometimes the author is apart and dispensing anxiety at the presence of her audience, sometimes the author observes and sometimes interacts with the heroine – Kapil refuses a situated identity and instead shifts and reworks herself continually.
There is a strong current of pregnancy and birth and menstruation in this narrative that seems to be tied (naturally) to childhood and home, yet not much clear access to biographic details – when and whether the Laloo was born, and of whom, when and whether the Laloo was pregnant and gave birth, and if so, to whom--and those questions, also, applied to the narrator, who may or may not be Laloo.
In the second to last section, the Kapil/the narrator finally lets her main character/Laloo go, to venture independently into her roadtrip, her narrative. I don't want to say too much more about that.
As I was wading into Bhanu Kapil's "Incubation – A Space for Monsters" it became evident to me that I needed to read Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" in order to understand what was meant by "Cyborg" and "Monster"--terms liberally deployed and conceptually integral in Kapil's verse novel.
Obviously Haraway's theory could be an entire class unto itself – but broadly, it's a reconstitution or a reexamination of traditional binaries (male/female, work/play, public/private, technological/natural, etc). These binaries are inadequate and have led to enormous ideological fractures that have left theorists and political operatives helpless. The problem, Haraway posits, is the framing of the entire system. In a technological world the conceptions of male/female work/play etc are rapidly dissolving.
"1. Here in the house. Dear Laloo, I painted my door yellow today and pinned up a picture of a woman facing a red wall, her palms dragging the red down. Is it you? Is it blood? She's wearing cords because it's 1978 and she's painting, somewhere in Iowa.
2. Covering the scrap of paper with layers of sellotape. I mean, sticky tape, like cell function: the central space surrounded or wrapped in a transparent life-like membrane. I was writing about you (Laloo) then sticking it up there, on the door above the woman, in the most beautiful house in the world. Taping it up, like a damaged leg or knee. You're my damage girl today.
3. It's not the same when I just write it out in my notebook. I like the paper separately. Visually, a series. Then I can say to visitors, what comes next for a red girl? They don't care. They just want the tea or coffee and are happy to exchange elaborate stories of girlhood. Exhausted, we lean on our heads on the kitchen table in turn, sucking on a piece of chocolate or black Panda licorice, listening to the obvious words at the end of a girl. What a girl is. Sometimes you are fifteen years old in the stories I tell. Sometimes you are not the red of technology, but monstrous or infrared, visible through the walls of a house. "
Haraway posits that women of color are representatives of cyborg identity, a potent synthesis of many outsider identities, and so it is with Kapil's Laloo, who is a Punjabi British woman hitchhiking through the US.
Laloo comes to the US as an exchange student on a visa, then drops out and starts hitchhiking, maybe to meet up with family in Oregon, maybe to see Big Sur, maybe because she's pregnant and running away--– after a terrifying encounter in a hospital (in which the narrator and Laloo slur together, the author ducks in and out of direct consciousness almost every other word) the narrative is unclear and shifty:
"In the hospital write a suture. This is medical not special. What follows is a beautiful story of the kind I'd relate to out-of-town guests on nights when the electricity failed and we had to eat dinner by candlelight and pee in the backyard. 'Do you have health insurance? What is your social security number? She left before we could sew her back up. She won't get far. Does she have health insurance, do you know? Do you know her social security number? Are you a blood relative? Do you need a clipboard? Here's a pen.' I am writing this in a fluorescent kitchen, I mean foyer. There are magazines, elevators and women with healthy looking teeth. It must be something inside them that's made the problem. Pans beneath each chair collect the grease."
In literature, cyborgs are not entrapped by traditional narratives, and often seize and retell traditional "rebirth" and "hero's journey" narratives. It makes sense the rite of passage narrative Kapil chooses to retell is the roadtrip narrative. (It makes even MORE sense when I learn that Kapil teaches at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa.)
On a language level, high and low diction cohabit without fanfare. The text exists on the outskirts of the actual narrative, sometimes in notebooks, sometimes in drafts, sometimes in the actual moment of experience which sparks the creation of text -- sometimes the author is Laloo, sometimes the author is apart and dispensing anxiety at the presence of her audience, sometimes the author observes and sometimes interacts with the heroine – Kapil refuses a situated identity and instead shifts and reworks herself continually.
There is a strong current of pregnancy and birth and menstruation in this narrative that seems to be tied (naturally) to childhood and home, yet not much clear access to biographic details – when and whether the Laloo was born, and of whom, when and whether the Laloo was pregnant and gave birth, and if so, to whom--and those questions, also, applied to the narrator, who may or may not be Laloo.
In the second to last section, the Kapil/the narrator finally lets her main character/Laloo go, to venture independently into her roadtrip, her narrative. I don't want to say too much more about that.
December 2, 2010
"Will I love and be loved in return? White people are so tricky. I want that special love. I want that eager mouth, all wet and spooky with ice cream. I want that day in which, unbound, sticky, and bruised, as if from plastic surgery, I am half a woman and half something else."
January 14, 2019
O monstro é a radicalidade da diferença e o que Bhanu Kapil faz nesse livro é criar em cima dessa radicalidade. Não é um texto simples, como o próprio título diz, é um espaço de incubação, do que já nasceu mas ainda não sabemos ao certo se vai vingar. Vingou em forma de publicação mas segue brincando com a ideia de que nada está acabado, mesmo que tenha se tornado um livro com capa, contracapa, orelhas, etc. Nos agradecimentos a autora diz que a ideia surgiu quando seu filho perguntou: "Mamãe, quem foi a primeira pessoa que nasceu?", o que a fez pensar pela primeira vez na conexão entre o monstro e um cidadão. Laloo é quem representa no livro esse híbrido: filha de Punjabis, nascida na Inglaterra, está andando de carona pelo mundo porque acredita que só pode viajar se for de carona. Ou seja, para uma imigrante que não é imigrante, alguém que está nesse espaço entre qualquer coisa que diz respeito à identidade com uma cultura, a boa vontade alheia de abrir a porta do carro para levá-la a algum lugar é a única forma de se deslocar.
"Um monstro rechaça a própria vida, e é por isso que posso escrever apenas para você. Foi você quem disse, na sua última visita, em frente a uma bandeja de biscoitos de amêndoa e chá Assam: Quanto mais você rechaça a vida, mais escreve. Escrever é isso (...) Aqui na infância, no limite da casa, o que ela está fazendo? Vejo ela sair do próprio corpo e não gosto nada disso. Sua pele. Sua pele era perfeita e agora está toda esticada. Marcas prateadas em pele morena, como gravidez. Não conseguiria impedir que desse à luz a si mesma nem se eu tentasse".
(ajuda um bocado a fazer laço com a leitura conhecer o que Donna Haraway diz sobre monstros e ciborgues. A epígrafe do livro é um trecho de "The Promises of Monsters: a Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others" e o texto em si do "Incubation..." surgiu de um livreto que Kapil lançou chamado Autobiografia de um Ciborgue)
"Um monstro rechaça a própria vida, e é por isso que posso escrever apenas para você. Foi você quem disse, na sua última visita, em frente a uma bandeja de biscoitos de amêndoa e chá Assam: Quanto mais você rechaça a vida, mais escreve. Escrever é isso (...) Aqui na infância, no limite da casa, o que ela está fazendo? Vejo ela sair do próprio corpo e não gosto nada disso. Sua pele. Sua pele era perfeita e agora está toda esticada. Marcas prateadas em pele morena, como gravidez. Não conseguiria impedir que desse à luz a si mesma nem se eu tentasse".
(ajuda um bocado a fazer laço com a leitura conhecer o que Donna Haraway diz sobre monstros e ciborgues. A epígrafe do livro é um trecho de "The Promises of Monsters: a Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others" e o texto em si do "Incubation..." surgiu de um livreto que Kapil lançou chamado Autobiografia de um Ciborgue)
Read
August 29, 2010Well, well.. I got onto GoodReads to review this bk expecting to be one of the only people to review it &, Lo & Behold!, there are ALOTOF reviews, some of them very analytical, & ALOTOF ratings, most of them very high. A few people consider this bk to be bullshit. Interesting. I didn't expect much of a readership, I didn't expect much analysis, I didn't expect much controversy. I reckon the publisher did a good job of promoting this bk. The publisher of my bk "footnotes", Six Gallery Press, cd learn a thing or 2 (or 2,000) about promoting the work they publish. 6GP is abysmal. But that's another story.
"Incubation" was given to me by Amy Catanzano who's friends w/ Kapil. They both teach at Naropa. Perhaps many of the people who've read "Incubation" are students or ex-students of Kapil's.
In "Farren"'s highly analytical review of "Incubation" on GoodReads
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
she writes:
"As I was wading into Bhanu Kapil's "Incubation – A Space for Monsters" it became evident to me that I needed to read Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" in order to understand what was meant by "Cyborg" and "Monster"--terms liberally deployed and conceptually integral in Kapil's verse novel.
"Obviously Haraway's theory could be an entire class unto itself – but broadly, it's a reconstitution or a reexamination of traditional binaries (male/female, work/play, public/private, technological/natural, etc). These binaries are inadequate and have led to enormous ideological fractures that have left theorists and political operatives helpless. The problem, Haraway posits, is the framing of the entire system. In a technological world the conceptions of male/female work/play etc are rapidly dissolving."
&
"Haraway posits that women of color are representatives of cyborg identity, a potent synthesis of many outsider identities, and so it is with Kapil's Laloo, who is a Punjabi British woman hitchhiking through the US."
Hhmm.. I have alotof criticism's of what Farren presents as Haraway's theory (I haven't personally read Haraway's work so I'm only responding to Farren's synopsis) - esp in the 2nd paragraph. Nonetheless, Farren seems to be SPOT ON about its relevance to having a clear-headed reading of Kapil.
The whole Cyborg/Monster play w/ identity in "Incubation" was an irritant/stimulus for me. Given that I read alotof SF, I'm accustomed to such terms in SF contexts - particularly CYBORG. I once dated a girl named Gail Litfin that I called a cyborg b/c she had a pump attached to her abdomen for the dispensation of insulin. She was a severe diabetic. A cyborg, to me, &, as far as I 'know', in conventional usage outside of Haraway's usage, is a being that's partially organic, partially machine. Since neither Kapil or her alter-ego Laloo fit this description [again, as far as I 'know':], the references to both/either as such kept me a bit off-kilter. Wch is fine & wch is one of the things that made this bk interesting.
As for "monster"?: Of course, "monster"'s meaning is much more various in society-at-large. It's most common meaning is probably something like "a creature of extraordinary properties negatively defined" - such as Frankenstein's Monster - & if we reiterate Farren's excellent "Haraway posits that women of color are representatives of cyborg identity, a potent synthesis of many outsider identities, and so it is with Kapil's Laloo, who is a Punjabi British woman hitchhiking through the US." & substitute "Frankenstein's Monster" for "cyborg" then we come up w/ people being 'monsters' who're 'patchworks' of different cultural influences & conditions.
But the weakness of this is that Frankenstein's Monster is a patchwork of dead human parts reanimated. Kapil is alive & is a product of multiple cultures that're also alive. As for "outsider identities"?: "Outsider" is a relative term & there're an infinite variety of ways that a person can be "outside" something that have nothing to do w/ gender or ethnicity. I have no idea whether Haraway privileges (to use a word overused by academics) gender & ethnicity as 'outsider'-making elements but Farren's statement that "Haraway posits that women of color are representatives of cyborg identity" implies this to me.
REGARDLESS, Kapil's bk does seem to be, indeed, largely focused on the experience of a British girl of Indian descent hitchhiking in the US & the feelings of fracture involved in that experience.
So where is my fucking REVIEW?! The reader will notice that I haven't rated the bk. This can be taken as a compliment, as an avoidance, as a statement on the futility of the rating system. One of the things that I like about "Incubation" is that it falls outside easy categories. I wdn't call it a poem, I wdn't call it a novel, I wdn't call it a travelogue, I wdn't exactly call it a memoir - but it falls closest, perhaps, to the latter.
I've called Laloo, the main character of this text, the alter-ego of the author, Bhanu Kapil, b/c at least part of her narrative seems to parallel Kapil's own. What I don't 'know' is just how far the parallel goes: Did Kapil hitchhike across the US alone? If she did, as a girl, I know from personal experience, as a boy, that can be, but isn't necessarily, quite dangerous.
One of the things that strikes me as the most remarkable about "Incubation" is, once again, the way it exists as writing outside of genre. Kapil seems to've written in a sort of stream-of-consciousness motivated by underpinnings of diasporic sociology & psychology w/o confining herself to any particular method of how-to-go-there. This bk is apparently contextualized by some as "experimental" but I wdn't even call it that! I think she writes, it flows, it spouts from ideas & theories & experiences but I don't exactly think it 'experiments' in the sense of creating a structured situation to test a hypothesis - to initiate a situation to study the outcome. Maybe I'm 'wrong'.
It's further noteworthy to me that the cover art is the most 'lubricious' I've seen in a long time, w/ fluid possibly flowing from the vagina, but may not even be perceived as sexual by the casual perceiver b/c the figures copulating are multiple armed gods/goddesses presented in a somewhat stylized manner. I have to wonder whether such a potently erotic image wd be on the cover if it weren't so contextualized as Hindu mythology. This, in itself, seems very appropriate to the writing. Do readers get so caught up in the ethnicities of the bk that they don't notice the coming-of-age hero(ine)'s-journey?
To return to not rating this: I'm not even sure I LIKED THIS bk &, yet.. I will definitely read more by Kapil. Not rating it is a way of saying that the experience of reading it is somewhat beyond such things as 'like' & 'dislike' - such ideas are probably irrelevant to what I get or don't get out of the bk. My hypothetical not-liking has more to do w/ how-much-is-actually-being-sd-here? & am-I-as-stimulated-by-&-satisfied-w/-the-technique-of-saying-it-as-I-prefer?.
"Incubation" was given to me by Amy Catanzano who's friends w/ Kapil. They both teach at Naropa. Perhaps many of the people who've read "Incubation" are students or ex-students of Kapil's.
In "Farren"'s highly analytical review of "Incubation" on GoodReads
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
she writes:
"As I was wading into Bhanu Kapil's "Incubation – A Space for Monsters" it became evident to me that I needed to read Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" in order to understand what was meant by "Cyborg" and "Monster"--terms liberally deployed and conceptually integral in Kapil's verse novel.
"Obviously Haraway's theory could be an entire class unto itself – but broadly, it's a reconstitution or a reexamination of traditional binaries (male/female, work/play, public/private, technological/natural, etc). These binaries are inadequate and have led to enormous ideological fractures that have left theorists and political operatives helpless. The problem, Haraway posits, is the framing of the entire system. In a technological world the conceptions of male/female work/play etc are rapidly dissolving."
&
"Haraway posits that women of color are representatives of cyborg identity, a potent synthesis of many outsider identities, and so it is with Kapil's Laloo, who is a Punjabi British woman hitchhiking through the US."
Hhmm.. I have alotof criticism's of what Farren presents as Haraway's theory (I haven't personally read Haraway's work so I'm only responding to Farren's synopsis) - esp in the 2nd paragraph. Nonetheless, Farren seems to be SPOT ON about its relevance to having a clear-headed reading of Kapil.
The whole Cyborg/Monster play w/ identity in "Incubation" was an irritant/stimulus for me. Given that I read alotof SF, I'm accustomed to such terms in SF contexts - particularly CYBORG. I once dated a girl named Gail Litfin that I called a cyborg b/c she had a pump attached to her abdomen for the dispensation of insulin. She was a severe diabetic. A cyborg, to me, &, as far as I 'know', in conventional usage outside of Haraway's usage, is a being that's partially organic, partially machine. Since neither Kapil or her alter-ego Laloo fit this description [again, as far as I 'know':], the references to both/either as such kept me a bit off-kilter. Wch is fine & wch is one of the things that made this bk interesting.
As for "monster"?: Of course, "monster"'s meaning is much more various in society-at-large. It's most common meaning is probably something like "a creature of extraordinary properties negatively defined" - such as Frankenstein's Monster - & if we reiterate Farren's excellent "Haraway posits that women of color are representatives of cyborg identity, a potent synthesis of many outsider identities, and so it is with Kapil's Laloo, who is a Punjabi British woman hitchhiking through the US." & substitute "Frankenstein's Monster" for "cyborg" then we come up w/ people being 'monsters' who're 'patchworks' of different cultural influences & conditions.
But the weakness of this is that Frankenstein's Monster is a patchwork of dead human parts reanimated. Kapil is alive & is a product of multiple cultures that're also alive. As for "outsider identities"?: "Outsider" is a relative term & there're an infinite variety of ways that a person can be "outside" something that have nothing to do w/ gender or ethnicity. I have no idea whether Haraway privileges (to use a word overused by academics) gender & ethnicity as 'outsider'-making elements but Farren's statement that "Haraway posits that women of color are representatives of cyborg identity" implies this to me.
REGARDLESS, Kapil's bk does seem to be, indeed, largely focused on the experience of a British girl of Indian descent hitchhiking in the US & the feelings of fracture involved in that experience.
So where is my fucking REVIEW?! The reader will notice that I haven't rated the bk. This can be taken as a compliment, as an avoidance, as a statement on the futility of the rating system. One of the things that I like about "Incubation" is that it falls outside easy categories. I wdn't call it a poem, I wdn't call it a novel, I wdn't call it a travelogue, I wdn't exactly call it a memoir - but it falls closest, perhaps, to the latter.
I've called Laloo, the main character of this text, the alter-ego of the author, Bhanu Kapil, b/c at least part of her narrative seems to parallel Kapil's own. What I don't 'know' is just how far the parallel goes: Did Kapil hitchhike across the US alone? If she did, as a girl, I know from personal experience, as a boy, that can be, but isn't necessarily, quite dangerous.
One of the things that strikes me as the most remarkable about "Incubation" is, once again, the way it exists as writing outside of genre. Kapil seems to've written in a sort of stream-of-consciousness motivated by underpinnings of diasporic sociology & psychology w/o confining herself to any particular method of how-to-go-there. This bk is apparently contextualized by some as "experimental" but I wdn't even call it that! I think she writes, it flows, it spouts from ideas & theories & experiences but I don't exactly think it 'experiments' in the sense of creating a structured situation to test a hypothesis - to initiate a situation to study the outcome. Maybe I'm 'wrong'.
It's further noteworthy to me that the cover art is the most 'lubricious' I've seen in a long time, w/ fluid possibly flowing from the vagina, but may not even be perceived as sexual by the casual perceiver b/c the figures copulating are multiple armed gods/goddesses presented in a somewhat stylized manner. I have to wonder whether such a potently erotic image wd be on the cover if it weren't so contextualized as Hindu mythology. This, in itself, seems very appropriate to the writing. Do readers get so caught up in the ethnicities of the bk that they don't notice the coming-of-age hero(ine)'s-journey?
To return to not rating this: I'm not even sure I LIKED THIS bk &, yet.. I will definitely read more by Kapil. Not rating it is a way of saying that the experience of reading it is somewhat beyond such things as 'like' & 'dislike' - such ideas are probably irrelevant to what I get or don't get out of the bk. My hypothetical not-liking has more to do w/ how-much-is-actually-being-sd-here? & am-I-as-stimulated-by-&-satisfied-w/-the-technique-of-saying-it-as-I-prefer?.
April 28, 2015
"I am writing to you, as always. This is the story about a girl who went too far. There were consequences, but I like to think of her, the girl who left hearth and home, as re-established in a town or city central to your country, washing dishes like a robot or falling in love with a needy, cool robot." (88)
October 9, 2008
Now that I no longer have the live presence of Bhanu Kapil around me, I find myself going back to her school of hard knocks via her prose - this book makes me feel my heart pound through my whole body.
January 31, 2014
Soooo compared to other well-informed reviews this one is going to sound a little Neanderthal. I read this for a writing class in school and we talked about it and such, but mostly sections and I came away with the feeling "WHAT did I just read...." But there was something I liked about it. I know that sounds kinda stupid, but I'm not really an avid reader of experimental writing, specifically because it makes me feel like a slobbering idiot. I should clarify: the teacher that had us read this taught it well. I just didn't learn it well (I tried lol).
However, even though I didn't always get it (I saw in another review that it would be good to read Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Harraway along with this book, which might clear some things up for me), this book "spoke" to me on an inspirational/creative level. That, at the very least, was reason enough for me to keep it in my library.
However, even though I didn't always get it (I saw in another review that it would be good to read Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Harraway along with this book, which might clear some things up for me), this book "spoke" to me on an inspirational/creative level. That, at the very least, was reason enough for me to keep it in my library.
May 8, 2011
This text choked my sensibilities - made me breathe through some lungs other than my own. I finished it in a light rain which bounced off the pages, the book hidden in its own blood. I await more books from Bhanu Kapil, with urgency.
June 5, 2024
It's been a while since I've read poetry other than the poems that are in the New Yorker, and so maybe I was extra grateful for Eunsong Kim's foreword and Emgee Dufresne's "afternotes", both of which were helpful in providing context/points of orientation for Kapil's text. In the foreword, Kim writes about the book as "a migration narrative that contends with histories of the colonized, in which an immigrant ignorant to the violence that is the United States, arrives to give birth to a monster"; Dufresne, in the afternotes, mentions "Kapil's appropriation of On the Road's structure." These are useful reference points to keep in mind when reading this book, which follows Laloo, "a Punjabi-British hitchhiker on a J-1 visa," on a journey to and through America. Kapil's text explores what it might mean to be a "cyborg," what it might mean to be a "monster," what it might mean to emigrate from one country/to immigrate to another, to be someone who can say "I came here to complete a thing I began in another place."
Near the start of the book, there's a description of final scene of the film Inside Daisy Clover, in which Natalie Wood's character is walking away from a house that then explodes, followed by this: "I wanted to write that. Continuance. As it related to loss." Later: "The removal of a person, abruptly, from a set of conditions, is complicated for the soul." We get bedtime "stories of complex deities" and scenes from a childhood swim meet; I liked these more realistic moments in the text, but realism is not the point. There are striking images: a girl driving to America, under the Atlantic, emerging in New Jersey; a baby rolling out of bed and out of the house and through London, being carried across the ocean by a swan. "A monster is always itinerant," Kapil writes. And: "A monster refuses its future." The allure of the road, meanwhile is "a beautiful hazard: to go and keep going." After which you can say, as Laloo does, "I wanted to go and did."
Near the start of the book, there's a description of final scene of the film Inside Daisy Clover, in which Natalie Wood's character is walking away from a house that then explodes, followed by this: "I wanted to write that. Continuance. As it related to loss." Later: "The removal of a person, abruptly, from a set of conditions, is complicated for the soul." We get bedtime "stories of complex deities" and scenes from a childhood swim meet; I liked these more realistic moments in the text, but realism is not the point. There are striking images: a girl driving to America, under the Atlantic, emerging in New Jersey; a baby rolling out of bed and out of the house and through London, being carried across the ocean by a swan. "A monster is always itinerant," Kapil writes. And: "A monster refuses its future." The allure of the road, meanwhile is "a beautiful hazard: to go and keep going." After which you can say, as Laloo does, "I wanted to go and did."
November 18, 2024
“I can get you out of the car, but I cannot do more than this. You are darkness in a dress. You are kneeling in a church and opening your mouth for the delicate paper that dissolves on your tongue.”
“L is for Laloo, darkness in a dress. Her body is very vulnerable tonight, there in the forest next to the highway. Only children on road trips notice her and wave. In her red dress, she is like a girl in a fairy tale, geographically. (All the branches behind her have begun to stir.) This is what a girl does in stories: she walks slowly, almost meditatively, along the perimeter of a forest...
Is it a tree or trees? Yes. A red girl goes into this yes and is never seen again, which will break the hearts of her parents when they receive the shoe. It is always a shoe on the asphalt, recovered from the scene then wrapped in paper and placed in a zip-lock bag. Is this a scene? L is for Laloo kicking off her shoes and breathing deeply from her toes to her head, allaying her deep fear of the gathering dark. Is it dark yet? Yes. Quite dark. I can’t see her anymore – just a shiver, moving through the trees. ”
“The red of the landscape, west of Kansas, is the opposite of the silvers and greys she was bred on, in the United Kingdom. Each morning it rained and now she is travelling smoothly across a plateau of sunlight, counting colours. It seems to Laloo – does it? – that she’s been removed from a place (West London) with great force.”
[Rule #4 of The Essential Ten Rules Of Hitchhiking] “Murderers can smell fear on your breath. This is not the time or place to regulate your emotions.”
[Rule # 10 of The Essential Ten Rules Of Hitchhiking] “I love you; please don’t die.”
Try to get the Kelsey Street Press edition, if possible.
“L is for Laloo, darkness in a dress. Her body is very vulnerable tonight, there in the forest next to the highway. Only children on road trips notice her and wave. In her red dress, she is like a girl in a fairy tale, geographically. (All the branches behind her have begun to stir.) This is what a girl does in stories: she walks slowly, almost meditatively, along the perimeter of a forest...
Is it a tree or trees? Yes. A red girl goes into this yes and is never seen again, which will break the hearts of her parents when they receive the shoe. It is always a shoe on the asphalt, recovered from the scene then wrapped in paper and placed in a zip-lock bag. Is this a scene? L is for Laloo kicking off her shoes and breathing deeply from her toes to her head, allaying her deep fear of the gathering dark. Is it dark yet? Yes. Quite dark. I can’t see her anymore – just a shiver, moving through the trees. ”
“The red of the landscape, west of Kansas, is the opposite of the silvers and greys she was bred on, in the United Kingdom. Each morning it rained and now she is travelling smoothly across a plateau of sunlight, counting colours. It seems to Laloo – does it? – that she’s been removed from a place (West London) with great force.”
[Rule #4 of The Essential Ten Rules Of Hitchhiking] “Murderers can smell fear on your breath. This is not the time or place to regulate your emotions.”
[Rule # 10 of The Essential Ten Rules Of Hitchhiking] “I love you; please don’t die.”
Try to get the Kelsey Street Press edition, if possible.
March 30, 2024
Proveniente de um processo de escrita criativa, como citado nos "Agradecimentos". Acredito que Laloo, personagem principal, retrate a vida. Afinal, essa analogia responderia a complexidade do fluxo de consciência do livro, as definições e dualidades de monstros e Ciborgues e como ela consegue representar ambos em diversos momentos. Como se na nossa própria existência não pudéssemos ser apenas uma coisa, sendo, portanto, ora monstros e ora meio-robô.
É uma leitura que nos faz questionar nossa identidade e a ideia de pertencimento. Quem eu sou? Se não sou totalmente alguma coisa. E será que serei feliz longe do que, por convenção, deveria ser meu lar? Não é uma leitura linear, mas vale a pena para quem quer sair um pouco da zona de conforto.
É uma leitura que nos faz questionar nossa identidade e a ideia de pertencimento. Quem eu sou? Se não sou totalmente alguma coisa. E será que serei feliz longe do que, por convenção, deveria ser meu lar? Não é uma leitura linear, mas vale a pena para quem quer sair um pouco da zona de conforto.
August 19, 2025
not since dictee have i read something so aleatorically frenetic and voracious in its sense of speculative energy and space/time, switchbacking between perspectives and geography with a paragraph break.
January 20, 2018
I not only hate this book but I hate every single person who has ever liked this book.
August 18, 2019
blood.
September 8, 2020
This book. She's in my head. It's almost too intimate. And at the same time she's so aware of all she's probing. Takes my breath.
September 26, 2023
🥀📍🏞️🚗⛽️❤️🔥🩸🫂🌫️🛤️
picked this up because the epigraph was a snippet from donna haraway
picked this up because the epigraph was a snippet from donna haraway
October 12, 2023
3.5 stars
August 29, 2025
"this slow, too-dark softness, of the light-coming-into-things."
May 23, 2024
Gorgeous language. Not always sure what was going on. Felt fine about that.
"Sometimes I think I am at my best when everyone has left for work, or the shops. In those quiet hours, I climb back into bed with a cup of tea."
"Sometimes I think I am at my best when everyone has left for work, or the shops. In those quiet hours, I climb back into bed with a cup of tea."
July 20, 2008
Would you like to participate in a blog project for Kelsey Street Press based on the work of Bhanu Kapil? Visit us here
http://www.kelseyst.com/news/index.ph...
to find out more or see detials below.
Send Us Your Vertical Answers
In the years since Vertical Interrogation for Strangers was published, Bhanu Kapil has received dozens of letters and emails from readers who have taken the questions that foreground the book’s structure and answered them in their own way. Listen to Bhanu say more about this here.
One such reader is the poet Jean Valentine. A section in her recent collection, Little Boat (Wesleyan University Press, 2007), offers poems in response to the Vertical queries. Here are a couple of my favorites.
What is the shape of your body?
Staunch meadow for the children
reservoir
Reservoir
your thin ghost-body
Whatever kind of eyes
you have now, lend to me—
How will you/have you prepare(d) for your death?
quiet ready
the wires inside the walls
and when no wires
and when no walls
—with you it wasn’t flesh & blood, it was under:
I know you brokenheart before this world,
and I know you after.
Kelsey Street press invites you to send us your answers to the Vertical questions.
Tell us how they have let you in to your own questions. Use them to interview someone else, as a tempate for a new investigation, as a writing assignment for youself. Teachers, have you used the questions with your students? How?
To be clear, I should mention that KSP publishes books by women, but we hope to have readers/bloggers of all genders contribute to this engagement.
For me, the questions will be one of several ways into a study of disability culture and aesthetics. The questions will serve as a thrid surface, something neutral (not made by me) between a body’s investment (my own and those I will talk with) in such a study and the body of work that might be arrived at. I hpe to present some of the questions to clients and staff at the LigtHouse for the Blind and teen girls at an annual Juvenille Arthritis retreat, among others.
Anything you send (writing, visual art and sound welcome) will be archived on this page. This project will be ongoing.
-Amber
http://www.kelseyst.com/news/index.ph...
to find out more or see detials below.
Send Us Your Vertical Answers
In the years since Vertical Interrogation for Strangers was published, Bhanu Kapil has received dozens of letters and emails from readers who have taken the questions that foreground the book’s structure and answered them in their own way. Listen to Bhanu say more about this here.
One such reader is the poet Jean Valentine. A section in her recent collection, Little Boat (Wesleyan University Press, 2007), offers poems in response to the Vertical queries. Here are a couple of my favorites.
What is the shape of your body?
Staunch meadow for the children
reservoir
Reservoir
your thin ghost-body
Whatever kind of eyes
you have now, lend to me—
How will you/have you prepare(d) for your death?
quiet ready
the wires inside the walls
and when no wires
and when no walls
—with you it wasn’t flesh & blood, it was under:
I know you brokenheart before this world,
and I know you after.
Kelsey Street press invites you to send us your answers to the Vertical questions.
Tell us how they have let you in to your own questions. Use them to interview someone else, as a tempate for a new investigation, as a writing assignment for youself. Teachers, have you used the questions with your students? How?
To be clear, I should mention that KSP publishes books by women, but we hope to have readers/bloggers of all genders contribute to this engagement.
For me, the questions will be one of several ways into a study of disability culture and aesthetics. The questions will serve as a thrid surface, something neutral (not made by me) between a body’s investment (my own and those I will talk with) in such a study and the body of work that might be arrived at. I hpe to present some of the questions to clients and staff at the LigtHouse for the Blind and teen girls at an annual Juvenille Arthritis retreat, among others.
Anything you send (writing, visual art and sound welcome) will be archived on this page. This project will be ongoing.
-Amber
December 21, 2024
from Notes on Monsters (1-3)
'Damaged from her travels in some sense—unsettled, enormously anxious—a girl does it anyway: gets up and goes. It's as if the day has a memory of her and not the other way around.' (10)
from Notes Against a Cyborg Preface
'The body hangs its memory on itself.' (22)
'A cyborg is an iridescent pleat.' (23)
from Text to Complete a Text
'Get up and go. The destiny of my body as separate to my childhood: I came here to hitchhike. I came here to complete a thing I began in another place. Removing wet pages from my rucksack, I lay them on the shore, securing them with beautiful shells and pebbles.' (35)
from Some Autobiographical Information About Cyborgs
'I want to cut myself out of the future.' (65)
from The Chrysalis Breaks Apart to Form the Wings
'How will you collect the detritus? Then make something. From that.' (113)
'Damaged from her travels in some sense—unsettled, enormously anxious—a girl does it anyway: gets up and goes. It's as if the day has a memory of her and not the other way around.' (10)
from Notes Against a Cyborg Preface
'The body hangs its memory on itself.' (22)
'A cyborg is an iridescent pleat.' (23)
from Text to Complete a Text
'Get up and go. The destiny of my body as separate to my childhood: I came here to hitchhike. I came here to complete a thing I began in another place. Removing wet pages from my rucksack, I lay them on the shore, securing them with beautiful shells and pebbles.' (35)
from Some Autobiographical Information About Cyborgs
'I want to cut myself out of the future.' (65)
from The Chrysalis Breaks Apart to Form the Wings
'How will you collect the detritus? Then make something. From that.' (113)
February 14, 2008
If you're going to read this--and you have no reason to, what with all those thousands of really good, interesting, compelling books out there--it helps to read it as poetry rather than as a novel. Because its not a novel. Just a bunch of words in prose form. That said, I didn't hate it as much as I wanted to or as much as I probably should.
February 14, 2008
I gave this book four stars, because Dustin only gave it two and I want to disagree with him. My only reason for being on goodreads is to heckle Dustin Heron. No but seriously. I really liked this book. I don't know if it's necessarily supposed to be read as a novel. Cross genre. It has the author's phone number in it. I think. I sent it a text message but was afraid to call.
January 6, 2016
There are many lovely, eerie, visceral, true moments in this book. I connected more with the introduction to the story more than the story itself, which was sometimes so fractured I had a hard time following it.
March 9, 2009
I'm reading Bhanu Kapil because she's judging a poetry contest that I plan to enter. Although I think she's wonderful, I don't think she'll like me very much. But, with a book like this, who cares? Rumor has it she wrote this in like two weeks. Very impressive.
August 24, 2015
not my favorite of hers-- while I enjoyed the hitchhiking portions immensely I was less impressed with the birthing parts. I guess babies are little hitchhikers too but if you read it you will understand which sections I'm referring to.
July 28, 2007
my professor's book (but totally being unbiased)...a wonderful prose story asking the question.."what is a girl"...
January 28, 2008
brilliant and mesmorizing...
April 7, 2008
confusing, but beautiful writing
Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews