How to Wash a Heart
by Bhanu Kapil
Summary
A short book with a single situation running through it. An immigrant guest is taken in by a citizen host. The host is generous, liberal, pleased with the arrangement and expects to be thanked. The guest watches, calculates and does not sleep well. Nothing dramatic happens and the pressure never lets up.
Kapil works in short unpunctuated lines with a great deal of white space, so a poem can turn on a single word placed alone. The voice is the guest's, and it moves between gratitude, fury, exhaustion and a kind of watchful comedy, sometimes inside one page. There is no argument being made. What the book does instead is put you inside the arithmetic of being someone's good deed.
It reads quickly and rewards rereading more than almost any collection of its decade. Do not expect narrative closure or a redemptive turn at the end. Expect discomfort held steadily.
The host is the achievement. Kapil refuses to make her a villain, which would be easy and would let the reader off. She is kind, she means well, she has opinions about immigration that she considers generous, and she wants the guest's gratitude to be visible. Anyone who has been on either side of that arrangement will recognise it immediately.
This is the collection to reach for if you want to understand what contemporary British poetry is actually doing, and it is unusually welcoming for something formally adventurous. The pages are not crowded, the sentences are short, and the situation is legible even when the syntax is not. Read it in one sitting, then again slowly.
Historical Context & Significance
How to Wash a Heart was published by Pavilion Poetry at Liverpool University Press in 2020 and won the T.S. Eliot Prize, announced at a digital ceremony in January 2021 because of the pandemic.
The judges, Lavinia Greenlaw as chair with Mona Arshi and Andrew McMillan, chose it unanimously and called it a radical and arresting collection that recalibrates what it is possible for poetry to achieve. Greenlaw framed the shortlist as a whole around the ways poetry was responding to profound change and around the stylistic freedom poets had claimed.
The win was widely read as a turning point for the prize. Kapil had built her reputation over two decades largely outside the mainstream British poetry world, publishing with small presses in the United States, and the award brought a body of experimental work to a much larger readership.