How to Wash a Heart

Summary

This formally experimental sequence imagines the relationship between an immigrant guest and a liberal host, probing the hidden power dynamics, condescension, and emotional labour that structure even well-intentioned hospitality. Kapil's work is spare, ritualistic, and charged with a quiet anger that accumulates across the sequence into something close to a political manifesto written in lyric form. The collection is one of the most distinctive and uncompromising poetry collections to have won the prize.