ananyagarg's review
5.0
I read this book in the Spring of 2017 for a class and while I was writing my own poetry. It didn't entirely make sense to me at the beginning of reading it, but as I read on it was apparent that it didn't matter how much I understood, and certain poems would hit me without me realizing it.
chapp010's review
5.0
I will remember this collection for its unique invitation to the female interior. Rider's text is another example of how physical and sexual confinement and abuse force the mind and heart to express. While sensing the borders of our prison, we turn inward to grasp other freedoms with an alarming specificity, a revolutionary awareness of self and other and the otherness of self.
I am still not sure how Rider composed these poems, as she admits in the opening that the book stems from her interviewing a number of Indian women. Is this poetry? Yes, I do think so, but it is altogether creepy to feel excited by these voices, in that an elation would somehow condone the entities and constructs that have for so long silenced or manipulated these women. Yet, I can praise this as art because, to me, this text does represent a common struggle. All of us, it feels, are pushed by exterior forces, some gentler than others, into certain recesses in order to maintain sanity and identity.
I'll return to this book's passages often, I imagine.
I am still not sure how Rider composed these poems, as she admits in the opening that the book stems from her interviewing a number of Indian women. Is this poetry? Yes, I do think so, but it is altogether creepy to feel excited by these voices, in that an elation would somehow condone the entities and constructs that have for so long silenced or manipulated these women. Yet, I can praise this as art because, to me, this text does represent a common struggle. All of us, it feels, are pushed by exterior forces, some gentler than others, into certain recesses in order to maintain sanity and identity.
I'll return to this book's passages often, I imagine.
dan1066's review
3.0
The giving up of, again. Over and over, isn't it? Isn't it? Can't." And then, scrawled, in his delicate colonial script: You are always pretending.
Even this sentence is suspect: indefensible; potentially, already, rewritten. It's not even that. It's the bloodiness of remembering everything. I am bored of memory. I am bored of description. (My brain is too exposed. Old jelly. Inedible.)
I'm not sure what to make of this work by Bhanu Kapil. It isn't poetry, it isn't prose poetry, it isn't prose. I don't know if it's a diary or journal or, as the introduction notes, revised and organized snippets of transcripts from strange women confined to a windowless cell for half an hour to write their gut reactions to 12 questions. And that bothers me: This work has a two-page introduction yet I haven't a clue what target she is trying to hit. She notes this in the introduction:
--The project as I thought it would be:
an anthology of the voices of Indian women.
-- The project as I wrote it: a tilted plane
And, perhaps, a "tilted plane" crashing into a beautiful mountain is an accurate description of what exactly is accomplished here. If this work is a consolidation and reworking of the experiences recorded by these interrogated women, then the work is fascinating because the disjointed narrative spirals in such a way the women's voices become a single woman within the text with a sense of history, context, etc. If the narrator is Kapil wallowing in her own personal experiences, it's tacky and narcissistic.
To provide a clear indication of what this work is like, I'll quote one of the passages at length:
19. WHAT IS THE SHAPE OF YOUR BODY?
I took notes. But once, after the first few months, he stole my notebook, tore out the pages with all the sexual sentences, photocopied them. His yellow teeth. His Nick Cave albums. His love of eggplant parmesan. And so there are gaps. A surprise ending: and then I see him again, and my whole body is full of spicy eggs. The tangles of my menstrual hair. The swell of my lower body.
I can smell myself."I knew this woman," he said, "Her vagina smelled of flowers. Have you ever considered using a douche?" I met him in the spring. Walking home along the canal bank, I'd snap off tiger buds. Lily heads, and eat them. They tasted good, but I got the shits.
This passage represents the entire lay of the book. Again, I don't know what to make of it. Is she combining the responses of a lot of interrogated women and creating these paragraphs out of it, working the original material like a collage? Or is she, as is often the case, pissed off about someone from somewhere about something?
Truthfully, if #19 strikes your fancy, this work is for you. If not, there's not a whole lot of variety here. Not sure what Kapil is achieving here.
Even this sentence is suspect: indefensible; potentially, already, rewritten. It's not even that. It's the bloodiness of remembering everything. I am bored of memory. I am bored of description. (My brain is too exposed. Old jelly. Inedible.)
I'm not sure what to make of this work by Bhanu Kapil. It isn't poetry, it isn't prose poetry, it isn't prose. I don't know if it's a diary or journal or, as the introduction notes, revised and organized snippets of transcripts from strange women confined to a windowless cell for half an hour to write their gut reactions to 12 questions. And that bothers me: This work has a two-page introduction yet I haven't a clue what target she is trying to hit. She notes this in the introduction:
--The project as I thought it would be:
an anthology of the voices of Indian women.
-- The project as I wrote it: a tilted plane
And, perhaps, a "tilted plane" crashing into a beautiful mountain is an accurate description of what exactly is accomplished here. If this work is a consolidation and reworking of the experiences recorded by these interrogated women, then the work is fascinating because the disjointed narrative spirals in such a way the women's voices become a single woman within the text with a sense of history, context, etc. If the narrator is Kapil wallowing in her own personal experiences, it's tacky and narcissistic.
To provide a clear indication of what this work is like, I'll quote one of the passages at length:
19. WHAT IS THE SHAPE OF YOUR BODY?
I took notes. But once, after the first few months, he stole my notebook, tore out the pages with all the sexual sentences, photocopied them. His yellow teeth. His Nick Cave albums. His love of eggplant parmesan. And so there are gaps. A surprise ending: and then I see him again, and my whole body is full of spicy eggs. The tangles of my menstrual hair. The swell of my lower body.
I can smell myself."I knew this woman," he said, "Her vagina smelled of flowers. Have you ever considered using a douche?" I met him in the spring. Walking home along the canal bank, I'd snap off tiger buds. Lily heads, and eat them. They tasted good, but I got the shits.
This passage represents the entire lay of the book. Again, I don't know what to make of it. Is she combining the responses of a lot of interrogated women and creating these paragraphs out of it, working the original material like a collage? Or is she, as is often the case, pissed off about someone from somewhere about something?
Truthfully, if #19 strikes your fancy, this work is for you. If not, there's not a whole lot of variety here. Not sure what Kapil is achieving here.
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