"Her style is simultaneously humorous, ironic and confrontational. This is especially effective and welcome in How To Wash a Heart, the first of her books to be published in the UK, where she was born (she now lives between the UK and the US). It comprises a sequence, written in rare lineated verse, recounting the experiences of an immigrant with precarious visa status living in the home of a white host." Dominic Leonard TLS "A prolific artist and writer, and the recipient of numerous awards (most recently the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry, 2020), Bhanu Kapil is undoubtedly an important figure in contemporary poetry. I first came across her work in 2013; The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (2001) was recommended to me after I lamented my own gap in knowledge of poetry written by South Asian women. Even as a South Asian woman myself, it felt sometimes impossible to retrieve such work back then, particularly given the pervading whiteness of the industry and even within my own private writing circles. For me, the collection’s long lines of imagination, how it associated and dissociated between continents, between voices, opened a world of possibility." Alycia Pirmohamed The Scores

---