Love Letters: Some of our favourite writers write on one of their favourite writers. Originally published in Issue 21.
To explain what Bhanu Kapil’s work means to me is like explaining why one should not attempt to cut out their own heart. I am incredibly lucky to have stumbled across her poetry ten years or so ago when I was vibrating with loss and trauma related to my own body and the mistranslation of what love is supposed to look like. I read Incubation: A Space for Monsters maybe just a few months into one of the worst depressive episodes of my life, and it is the book that got me through that. I would take it on walks with me when I was afraid I wouldn’t sleep through the night. I would recite fragments of her poems to the stars to keep me company. I would greet lights with her stanzas and was convinced it made them brighter, or redder, or blink. If I were to go into my old phone’s camera roll, I would have photos of red lights from those midnight walks to show you. Those lights, and her words, were my chaperones in the dark.
Bhanu’s writing, specifically her writing on monsters, articulated to me that not only could my loss of language be normal in my circumstances but beautiful—alive and resilient in a way I didn’t previously understand language could be. Most importantly, the checklists and tasks she sets out for her writing students and readers kept me afloat and occupied with learning what the world could look like if I slid away from my loss and explored reality with different eyes. She was also referencing teachers I worked directly under, so it felt like she was speaking to me directly: her poetry was a kind of homework from the universe, to put the things I was learning in school into an immediate perspective that helped me live through everything I was going through. In some ways it made me work harder to stay present, even when I didn’t want to.
But there are three particular things she has given me: she taught me to question how my work, how all work, is sequenced in reaction to crisis, and if it makes it cyclic, or tries to heal rather than harm. Second, she is unafraid to be gruesome and loving at the same time, in a way that doesn’t make you feel small, but seen, beloved in your own neurosis. Third, her monsters look like me, and live, and live well—and isn’t that a hero to root for? The immigrant girl who slips through history and time and survives and laughs at the void, throws flowers into it, and makes it out alive. My best friend built a poetry robot a few years ago, one that made words into colors from what you told it, and had asked me to teach it something I loved. I taught it a page of Bhanu’s work and the walls projected blood red cyborg stanzas. It felt like I was standing in my own heart, and I never loved language more. It finally looked as visceral and alive as it always makes me feel.
Long live Bhanu and all her cyborg girls. They own the future I want to survive and thrive in, and I hope we get there soon.
Arabelle Sicardi on Bhanu Kapil
Love Letters: Some of our favourite writers write on one of their favourite writers. Originally published in Issue 21.
To explain what Bhanu Kapil’s work means to me is like explaining why one should not attempt to cut out their own heart. I am incredibly lucky to have stumbled across her poetry ten years or so ago when I was vibrating with loss and trauma related to my own body and the mistranslation of what love is supposed to look like. I read Incubation: A Space for Monsters maybe just a few months into one of the worst depressive episodes of my life, and it is the book that got me through that. I would take it on walks with me when I was afraid I wouldn’t sleep through the night. I would recite fragments of her poems to the stars to keep me company. I would greet lights with her stanzas and was convinced it made them brighter, or redder, or blink. If I were to go into my old phone’s camera roll, I would have photos of red lights from those midnight walks to show you. Those lights, and her words, were my chaperones in the dark.
Bhanu’s writing, specifically her writing on monsters, articulated to me that not only could my loss of language be normal in my circumstances but beautiful—alive and resilient in a way I didn’t previously understand language could be. Most importantly, the checklists and tasks she sets out for her writing students and readers kept me afloat and occupied with learning what the world could look like if I slid away from my loss and explored reality with different eyes. She was also referencing teachers I worked directly under, so it felt like she was speaking to me directly: her poetry was a kind of homework from the universe, to put the things I was learning in school into an immediate perspective that helped me live through everything I was going through. In some ways it made me work harder to stay present, even when I didn’t want to.
But there are three particular things she has given me: she taught me to question how my work, how all work, is sequenced in reaction to crisis, and if it makes it cyclic, or tries to heal rather than harm. Second, she is unafraid to be gruesome and loving at the same time, in a way that doesn’t make you feel small, but seen, beloved in your own neurosis. Third, her monsters look like me, and live, and live well—and isn’t that a hero to root for? The immigrant girl who slips through history and time and survives and laughs at the void, throws flowers into it, and makes it out alive. My best friend built a poetry robot a few years ago, one that made words into colors from what you told it, and had asked me to teach it something I loved. I taught it a page of Bhanu’s work and the walls projected blood red cyborg stanzas. It felt like I was standing in my own heart, and I never loved language more. It finally looked as visceral and alive as it always makes me feel.
Long live Bhanu and all her cyborg girls. They own the future I want to survive and thrive in, and I hope we get there soon.