"The language Bhanu Kapil uses is unstable: you never know where you are with it – any more than the guest knows how to situate herself – and this defines the work’s uncomfortable atmosphere, swivelling between compliance and resistance. There is a poem that begins by describing the “host’s gleaming hair” that “responds beautifully to the shampoo / She has set out for us. / What’s mine is yours, / She says with a sweet smile.” So far, so glossy. But sweetness sours when the guest is banned from going out with the host’s adopted Filipino daughter. And the poem then slides into obscenity (the host’s thoughts, it would seem): "I can smell your vagina. / Are you wearing your genitals / As a brooch?" You might reasonably object that much of this writing is too perfunctory to be poetry, only that objection quickly starts to be frivolously beside the point. For Kapil’s memorable protest depends upon her ability to overturn poetic expectation." Kate Kellaway Observer

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