Bhanu Kapil, _The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers_

REASONS TO BE cheerful: I had not heard of Bhanu Kapil until about a year ago, when a poet who often has good recommendations mentioned her to me. I bought this online. It's from a small press--Kelsey St Press--and is very sparely presented; it bears no blurbs, no descriptions, not even an author photo. As I do, I checked to see what year it was published (2001), and then noticed that my copy was the seventh printing, from 2018.

Seven printings!

Not too shabby.

And the book is astonishing. In the 1990s, Kapil undertook a project to interview as many Indian women as possible all over the world, asking them all the same twelve questions (e.g., "How will you begin?", "Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?", "Describe a morning you woke without fear"--the whole list is on page 9). This book contains her own answers to the questions, ninety-eight prose poems in all (each question gets several answers), all but one contained on a single page.

Reading the book, one accumulates a rich sense of Kapil's parents, work, and love life, but not so much by straight exposition as by a mosaic method, each poem dazzling in its discontinuities, clear and often independent images, startling juxtapositions. For a short example, here is number 46, an answer to "Describe a morning you woke without fear':

I've followed you as far as I can. To this ribbon of silver plastic, fluttering from a tree: innards of a tape you gave me: madrigals, etc. I threw it out the window last winter, at night, when the bone stars were rising in the trees.

So we have an ending--"I've followed you as far as I can"--then the precise but inexplicable image of the plastic ribbon in the tree. Tinsel? No, a heaved cassette, suggesting anger, displaced violence, but when the bone stars (bone stars) enter the scene, a serenity gathers, and we have a sense of why this was a morning without fear.

Each poem is in a kind of membrane like that, its own city-cell, but the membranes are permeable, so as one reads the book, recurring elements combine and recombine, making a world.

What a great book.