How to Wash a Heart

by Bhanu Kapil

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.

Genres: Poetry, Contemporary, Feminism, Adult, Post Colonial, Indian Literature, Nonfiction

52 pages, Paperback

First published March 26, 2020

About the author

Bhanu 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.

Reviews

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

'I was born feet-first beneath a Lebanon cedar
At 10.23 a.m.
On a November morning
So long ago
That many people who were alive that day,
Flinching from a sudden rain,
No longer walk upon this earth.'

(p17, Reviewed 2022)

--

(Previous Review 2020)

Early on, the speaker in How to Wash a Heart declares: 'It’s exhausting to be a guest / In somebody else’s house'. This sentiment captures the cautious, icy heartbeat that underscores Bhanu Kapil's brilliant first full-length collection in the UK. Inspired by the photograph of a white, liberal couple in California who had taken in an asylum-seeker, Kapil creates an understated long-poem interrogating the embodiment of an immigrant guest and their citizen host. These lyrics explore the vagabond travel of those who are subject to 'host logic'; in their transgressions, these poems speak to that violence which threatens to 'evolve / Beyond the limits of the human', of the radical care and hospitality that can be found, and lost, as a consequence of forced migration or voluntary travel, creativity or survival. The book is tender, comic, surreal, Kapil's most personal even if the speaker is definitively non-autobiographical: 'What happens to the memory / Of other languages, / Carried in the body as poetry, / When everyone on the periphery, / The people who memorise / These poems / On their long journeys / To other lands, is gone.' So Kapil links the precarity of travel with dreams and nightmares of detention, repatriation, Partition, contemporary immigration policy: the ice that surrounds the red, beating heart the guest must wash in someone else's sink sublimates into the symbol of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Like so many of Kapil's previous works, How To Wash a Heart masterly hones in on conditional forms of belonging, on the vulnerable body arriving but never the arrival, asking readers to reconfigure their poetics about migration, 'Because living with someone who is in pain / Requires you to move in a different way.’

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"How do you live when the link
Between creativity
And survival
Can't easily Be discerned?
The answer to this question
Brought me here.
My fingerprints bloom
On the cream-colored
Card. Can you
Delete it?
And with a click,
A sideways glance,
The name a lover murmured
At 3 a.m. Is groomed.
I remember when I
Was a treasured pet.
With casual greed, How I licked
That salty cream."


This book grew out of a performance piece, part of a Kathy Acker exhibit in 2019 at the ICA. Kapil was also intrigued by a piece she came across about a couple who had opened their home to someone with a precarious visa status. The white couple and their adopted nonwhite daughter's photo struck her and the poems are her way to work out a similar hypothetical relationship in verse.

All around the same length, they aren't titled or numbered and are discretely divided into five sections. Narrative poetry spanning an entire collection where the whole is more than the sum of the parts, isn't my thing so I didn't fully warm to this but Kapil has truly done a marvelous job, even though I frequently ound the phrasing a bit too colloquial and awkward, too on the surface perhaps.

Hospitality and hostility is at the centre of the collection and there's such a bone-deep weariness to the narrator from the beginning: "It's exhausting to be a guest / In someone else's house / Forever." It is a quotidian existence of careful living, stepping on the eggshells and keeping the peace in the face of constant aggressions, both micro as well as macro. She explores how this strained relationship slowly unravels amidst mounting humiliations and increasingly complex negotiations, laying bare "an outward facing generosity" that rarely matches the actual lived experience in such inherently prejudicial places.

[Helen McClory · Rating 5 out of 5]

slender wonder

[Bart Van Overmeire · Rating 4 out of 5]

How to wash a heart:
Remove it.
Impressive poetry collection.
Sadly, the only decent book I read in September.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

really very good !! I like her very much it's one of those much-lauded (winner of the TSE) which doesn't seem to be widely read, so far as poetry goes. Perhaps that's partly down to the author's lack of online presence? I hope that's not the reason anyway Bhanu Kapil did a fantastic job here it's incredibly sparse and the form she's using I'd have to describe as fragile though she works in ways to be witty with it. Would read moreit's a collection hitting buttons and numbers. immigration here along a similar vein, surprisingly, to Selima Hill's Bunny - the lodger/host threat inverted. Just an avenue I'm thinking of

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

This slim collection is Bhanu Kapil's first collection of poetry published in England. It's about what it means to be a guest in someone's home. But, that is just a veneer because it is about the relationship between an immigrant and the nation that takes them in. Between the fear and the falsehoods.

When we talk about immigration and 'fitting in' we never really ask what damage we create trying to force immigrants to 'fit in'. What gets lost culturally. Kapil makes us - well, me - think about those questions. Do we diminish people by forcing our culture on them? A culture that, in a lot of cases, we spent centuries trying to force on people in their own lands. We now wish to escape the responsibility that comes with our Empire and pretend it never happened or that, if it did happen, it was a force for good.

Bhanu Kapil makes you see what is lost and what the cost of that loss is.

Bravo.

[Gill Bennett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Further forays into contemporary poetry: this collection won the T. S. Eliot prize and was performed at the ICA. It was suggested by a friend who enjoys poetry and writes as well . The poems are searing and affecting mainly around themes of colonialism; being a guest in an unknown country; memories of lost places and lost people; sexuality.
I found this book more challenging to read and interpret than previous books, but I’m learning to appreciate the cadences of modern poems. For me I find some older poems with rigid rhyming structures less enjoyable I have decided. A convert?
Overall recommended.

[Nanna Else Johansen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Super god og virkelig interessant. Jeg forstod nok desværre bare ikke det hele, hvilket med al sandsynlighed skyldes, at jeg ikke selv har stået i en sådan situation.

[Jack Mckeever · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is collection is phenomenal. One of those that makes you feel all loose limbed and watery because of how beautiful it is.

UPDATE: here's my full review of this incredible piece of work - https://worldbookhistory.blog/2021/02...

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is one of my favorite collections for sure- kapil writes so beautifully and simply ❤️

[Jim O'Loughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great collection that interrogates ideas with vivid language and great understanding. Stylistically, the ends of Kapil's poems are like body blows. It's not that she uses twist endings. Rather, her conclusions upend what you thought you understood to show the poems to be even more involved that you thought.

[Oliver Shrouder · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5
Far, far better than her 2015 text, which left me emptied after a clearly talented writer Joyced her way out of a coherent narrative. Here the narratives are far clearer, the images pop and dazzle, though at many times throughout it is easy to lose track of the overall narrative voice, and the lack of direct pronoun means it becomes difficult to draw conclusions to the text as a reader without about multiple attempts to read. As it stands, I’m still waiting for the author to write a text that is accessible as it is haunting, as at the moment the moments of brilliance here are buried in form and style

[Marina Montero · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una colección de poemas sobre lo que es ser inmigrante, para mí entendiendo la ciudadanía a la que se llega como una casa que te "invita", y comprendiendo cuáles son los precios de esa invitación.
Me ha gustado mucho, y me hubiese encantado ser capaz de leerlo en el idioma original.

[Seb · Rating 5 out of 5]

“in the pouring rain
we are both
poets
or one of us is
it doesn’t matter to me”

i’m broken

[Ali Hendy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, short, wistful. I’ll try and read more poetry in 2023.

[Teodora Muresan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is titration
A few moments to feel like
A complete human being.

[Anisha]

ate this on my rest breaks sweating on the way to unislam (why did I choose to walk) image after image..I liked the notes about the heart and shock after.
line break wow:

the children who were children
like me
fled.

Domestic & home, wet towel on the bannister.
as a performance I can SEEE visual.very.

[Dré Zvikomborero]

p12, 16, 17, 35, 38, 39 <3 <3 <3

I don't know how to feel after reading this. There are a few moments where my mind sinks in (pages mentioned above), and I feel so familiar with the host-guest theme she carries throughout the book. Replace her mother's okra and caramelised onions with sadza and sour milk.

There are dually a lot of moments my mind passes over any possible meaning or emotion. Definitely, this isn't my last go - for this book or Bhanu's other works, because above all else her writing is beautifully sentimental.

[Mattea Gernentz]

"This is what I need: / The light and heat and the yesterday / Of my work. / A candle on the wonky table at dusk. / How thyme migrates. / The chalky blue flowers. / I need something that burns slowly / As that" (8).

In this explosive text, Kapil explores the link between creativity and survival, US and UK immigration rhetoric, and how it feels to be a perpetual guest when home becomes a ledge ("It's exhausting to be a guest / In somebody else's house / Forever"). As the ice melts, poetry meets performance art.

"I want to wake up / in the arms of the person / I love / And drink coffee with them / On a balcony / That opens up to a forest / Where the moss / Glows green / In the pouring rain. / We are both / Poets / Or one of us is. / It doesn't matter to me" (43).

#TheSealeyChallenge

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not often I would read a book of poetry, then start at the beginning again once I had finished it. By the end I had a feel for the point of view the authorial voice was coming from, helped by the explanatory notes at the end. Re-reading it opened up much more understanding of the situation, the issues being raised. Excellent book, but requires your input to give it the chance.

[alexindreamland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kapil writes about a fictional experience of an immigrant living with a british host family and describes the toxic hospitality, prjudices against her. There are a lot of parallels between living with the host family as an immigrant guest and being a child living with toxic parents, and Kapil also cleverly weaves in women's lived experience in the patriarchy.

[Dylan Drongesen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kapil frames “how to wash a heart” as an impossible task: you can rinse a surface, but not the interior. That impossibility is staged through the host–guest dynamic: the speaker does not belong in “someone else’s house,” and the poem sequence (“on the fourth day… on the fifth day…”) tracks how hospitality shades into control. On Day Four (p. 22), sacrifice shifts from communal ritual to personal loss. First: “villagers cooked bread / with sugar then threw it / in the river,” voluntary, collective. Then: “they burned my dolls / and all the hand-made dolls / of girls in the village.” The “they” matters; others decide what the speaker must give up. The next line: “What will you sacrifice / for rain?” Ties ritual to power: rain is sustenance and tradition, echoed earlier and later by bowls on the sill with the adopted child (the refugee).

The use of color marks creativity and loss. The dream-image—“Imagine a heart… moody-blue sky… orange clay”—is cut off “with a bright voice, a voice / that was too loud” (p. 22). The repetition signals habitual interruption of interior life. Later, color returns where something is taken from a community: “Pale blue and a buttery / Yellow… either we dumped it off / Or it was taken from us / In a great boiling wave / Of human gain” (p. 35). The italics—“you broke my trance. / is she really still asleep?” (p. 22) and “There’s no such thing / As skin” (pg 35) read as a household chorus monitoring the speaker: no privacy, no room to dream.

Dreams tie creativity to survival. Page 42 stacks “I dreamed” into two tracks: ancestral harm (“grandmother… face down / in a cave,” “grandfather… without a head”) alongside idealized, immediate wishes (“my father… pouring me a glass / Of white wine,” “my mother… crocheting… a dress of copper, blue and yellow”). The snap back, “Smiling and nodding / Even as a man… / Span my body / From a rusted hook” reasserts constraint. The collection names the problem directly: “How do you live when the link / Between creativity / And survival / Can’t easily / Be discerned?” (p. 30).

The recurring palette, blue, copper, yellow, tracks concrete losses: toys burned (p. 22), communal goods taken “for human gain” (p. 35), and even modest wishes rerouted into compliance (the rusted hook after “I dreamed,” p. 42). Dreams stage what survival would look like, privacy, leisure, a dress in copper/blue/yellow, then the chorus snaps it shut. The book’s claim is clear: in this house, survival is granted on the condition that creative autonomy is surrendered; “washing” names that standardization—removing the very colors that mark a life.

[TIFFANY GLENN · Rating 5 out of 5]

In her 2020 book, How To Wash A Heart, Bhanu Kapil interrogates the experience of being an immigrant in another nation through the intimate lens of a guest in a home. When is one welcome, when/how is one allowed to exist as one is? How does one live when constantly being asked to create the beautiful fantasy of one's own belonging, one's own survival? The questions aren't always direct, rather they are the entire atmosphere the work grows within.

Compared with earlier works like Incubation: a space for monsters (2006), and humanimal [a project for future children] (2009), HTWAH adopts a more traditional poetic form which allows her gift for creating atmosphere through image and emotion to take root in the reader with an aching precision. As the text unfolds, Kapil gathers her strands—history, memory, dream, a story—into the lattice of the breathing moment. The dead are never far. The wolf in love's disguise seeks blood, everything vital. The citizen/host tries to bend the guest to her own gleaming image, the very one she isn’t even aware that she hates. The conditions of accepting grace, the soft hand pressing the eucharist to the tongue to keep the wild away.

It is clear that: 1.) this is intimate territory, and 2.) this is the kind of work that a long-lived interrogation produces, teeming with beauty, insight, and horror. It is the precarious position of the guest—asked to consume herself in order to survive—which imbues her gaze and her voice with their grounded power. What Bhanu Kapil gives us is her vision. A mirror in which we each can, if we are brave enough, see ourselves.

[Rhi Croker · Rating 3 out of 5]

🌎 👣 I don't know how to describe this poetry collection... 💚 Kapil, a British poet, was inspired by the tale of a California couple who shared their home with a migrant and subsequently examines the nature of hospitality. In this collection, I feel as though trauma is amplified by displacement - forever being a visitor in your new home. Imposter syndrome to the highest degree!! There is a deliberately uncomfortable sense of breaking a taboo in being critical of hospitality, of seeing its self-serving complexity in an Era of neocolonialism. It reminded me a lot of 'The Ungrateful Refugee' by Dina Nayeri. Importantly, in light of the famous Ukrainian hosting scheme, this collection establishes that real hospitality should not be merely about food and shelter, let alone about a hosts self-congratulation, rather it should be about creating the conditions in which a guest can feel free to live an autonomous life without feeling like charity. 🌟
Some of the collection I did not understand at all, but within these poems, I found small sentences of utter beauty. Even reading poetry you might not fully grasp helps see the world in poetic hues. ✨️

'Because living with someone who is in pain.
Requires you to move in a different way.'

'the link
Between creativity
And survival...'

'And so I left,
Never to return
Intact.
Or to a home
That was intact.' 👣 🌎

#book3of2024

PS. Can I retire and read/write poetry forever? ✍️ 🔮

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspired by the story of a California couple that took in a person with a precarious visa state, Kapil considers the compliance and defiance of hospitality, especially when it is not a choice. Is the generosity conditional? These poems say yes. Kapil shares in the book that she was working through these ideas as the attempts at inclusion in small liberal art colleges also felt like tight-lipped smiles.

I’ve been a fan of Kapil’s writing for years. When I happened upon the newish (2020) collection, I gasped at the title. How To Wash A Heart. It’s instructional and questioning in one. She is working out this hostile hospitality in all the poems, hitting you hard immediately in the second poem with the opening line, “I don’t want to beautify our collective trauma”, followed a few lines later with “As your guest, I trained myself / To beautify / Our collective trauma” (2).

Whether more narrative or experimental, Kapil’s gorgeous syntax and imagery drive her poems. “How to wash a heart: / Remove it then pack it / In ice” (34). You cannot relax while reading Kapil, and I love her work for it. Poetry should excite, inspire, shift your thinking.

The poems were written in 2019. She closes the book with this haunting message: “What else? In the US and the UK, as I wrote this book, anti-immigrant rhetoric amped up. Perhaps, by the time you are reading these words, it is worse.” (50)

[Karolina · Rating 5 out of 5]

How to Wash a Heart is a great example of an immaculately curated contemporary collection, consistent in its entirety.

Bhanu is concerned about a woman’s belonging, walking in spaces onthers place you as an outsider, stranger; there is evidence throughout of the speakers racial exclusion, sexism. Her imagination is light and free-flowing in her symbols and interpretations - no unnecessary farse, it read effortlessly, which is very rare.

I have realised that poetry is most effective when it is curated intentionally and tastefully, balancing thematics with purpose and what this collection really set out to achieve. This is truly the case for How to Wash a Heart. I was also pleasantly surprised by the written notes at the end giving the readers more context in the creative process of the poems but also the larger ideas.

I could say How to Wash a Heart was significant, poignant and to the point. I loved the fresh feminist tone is some poems as well as Bhanu pulling lots from the collective conscious processes and her words standing as mirrors to the reader, quite ambiguous but shedding light on darkened parts of yourself. Her trying to descend lower within the psyche and finding ways how to become more friendly with these many shadowed parts, how to make sense of their symbols.

[Tutankhamun18 · Rating 5 out of 5]

“This is the voice of this book: an immigrant guest in the home of their citizen host.”

Really beautiful, uncomfortable and eerie poems about being a guest and also an intruder, about being a guest and also a burden, about being an immigrant.

“ I come from a country
All lime-pink on the soggy map.
Destroy me,
My soul whispered.
Eat me, bones and all.
Crush me in a vise.
Stop me
From walking out
That door.
The balloon deity
I made from the condom
On the floor
Was purgative, revolting, Brilliant.
Her lips were pursed.
It doesn't matter
That you made so many mistakes,
She said.
Violence rots the brain.
Go.”

“How to wash a heart:
Remove it then pack it
In ice.
Remove it then paint it
In the course of one afternoon,
Like Edvard Munch, An artist in transit
Between loves, colors, afternoons.
The taste of lemon rind
Mixes
With the Norway of dried blood,
A country
I visited once.
The linearity required of immigrants
Ebbs.
There's a cost
To that refusal.
A small voice pipes up
To ask me what I need
Before I go on,
But I have no time
For babies.”

[Anagha Sreevals · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.5 stars) This was shorter since it's a poetry book, but even so, I was invested enough to get through it in one sitting! I haven't read poetry in a LONG time so it was definitely different and I had to reread many parts to really understand certain lines. I think I still missed a lot of hidden meanings and symbolism but I really enjoyed reading this and would recommend!

The ending wasn't unpredictable but it's realistic and drives a lot of emotion in you. I also have very different experiences with immigration compared to the "guest" in this book. However, I can still understand some of the nuances of the immigrant guest and a citizen host, as it's relevant and similar to being in an immigrant in a Western country (at least regarding my experience). The feelings of pain, anger, not belonging etc.

Favorite part (or at least most emotion-evoking part for me):
"How to wash a heart:
Remove it then pack it
In ice.
Remove it then paint it"

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I don’t want to beautify our collective trauma.” Bhanu Kapil’s brilliant and formally innovative How To Wash A Heart is a bold, singular work, a collection of poems about “an immigrant guest and a citizen host” that lays bare the struggle of the immigrant and the total power — often exploited — of the supposedly progressive, developed nation. Kapil does this with a quiet brutality and stylistic flair that makes it constantly alive even as it successfully resists aestheticising trauma and turmoil. “There’s a bright caul of fire / And cream / As I write these words”, she declares from the perspective of the weary lodger: “It’s exhausting to be a guest / In somebody else’s house / Forever.” Each sparse verse illuminates such universal and timeless truths, so that the ill treatment of the immigrant — and the tension between immigrant and host — is as illogical and inhumane in writing as it is in practice.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

The opening sequence of poems that tell the story of a romantic breakup really sets the context for the book overall. The characters in the scene (poet, man the poet is living with, daughter the man adopted) feel so human and realized. So much so that even as the book pushes at a more allegorical reading for the man as "host" and the poet as someone who is stuck between countries, I still want to fit the characters into these human characters from the beginning. I appreciate this, because I think it establishes the complexity of being an immigrant, the pressures that are felt in the new country or community, and how personal all of it feels. Even if the feelings around immigration involve abstract entities (like country and home), these poems communicate to me that difficult and personal and intimate influence.