Description
Poetry. Cross-Genre. Asian American Studies. In this new prose document, Bhanu Kapil follows a film crew to the Bengal jungle to re-encounter the true account of two girls found living with wolves in 1921. Taking as its source text the diary of the missionary who strove to rehabilitate these orphans—through language instruction and forcible correction of supinated limbs—HUMANIMAL functions as a healing mutation for three bodies and a companion poiesis for future physiologies. Through wolfgirls Kamala and Amala, there is a grafting: what scars down into the feral opens out also into the fierce, into a remembrance of Kapil's father. The humanimal text becomes one in which personal and postcolonial histories cross a wilderness to form supported metabiology. "Lucidly, holographically, your heart pulsed in the air next to your body; then my eyes clicked the photo into place. Future child, in the time you lived in, your arms always itched and flaked. To write this, the memoir of your body, I slip my arms into the sleeves of your shirt. I slip my arms into yours, to become four-limbed."
Author Bio
Bhanu Kapil is a British American poet of Indian heritage. She developed a childhood interest in writing and cites Salman Rushdie as an early influence. She earned a BA from England's Loughborough University and, after moving to the United States in 1990, an MA in English Literature from SUNY Brockport.
Kapil's collections include How to Wash a Heart (Liverpool University Press, 2020), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize; Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books, 2015); HUMANIMAL: A PROJECT FOR FUTURE CHILDREN (Kelsey Street Press, 2009); Incubation: a Space for Monsters (Leon Works, 2006); and The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001). Kapil's books, often referred to as "prose/poetry," tend to be hybrid forms integrating narrative, prose, and verse in different combinations. They also deal with strange, mythological plots-HUMANIMAL, for instance, tells the story of two girls in Bengal who were supposedly raised by wolves, and Incubation follows the journey of a cyborg girl across America.
Author City: ENG