Incubation
Bhanu Kapil
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From the publisher
Incubation: a space for monsters is a formally innovative, hybrid-genre book that incorporates poetry and prose. Set in a shifting narrative environment, where human bodies, characters, and text are neither one thing nor another, this fragmentary-diaristic text journeys through the spaces in-between. Originally published in America in 2006 by Leon Works, and out of print for the last seven years, this is the first time this seminal text has been available in the UK.
Following protagonist Laloo – Cyborg, girl, mother, child, immigrant, settler – on a roadtrip through American landscapes, genre styles, and form, Incubation creates radical space for what is ‘monstrous’. Appropriating iconic American tropes, and the structure of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Incubation explores the challenges faced by immigrants in attaining such notions of freedom in so hostile an environment. In this fragmentary document there is a celebration in the cobbling together of lives; global in scope, with an intimate focus on interior voice, this landmark text evidences the early innovations and talents of this T.S. Eliot prizewinning author.
‘I read everything Kapil writes and each time am left in awe at her erudite dexterity to see the book, not as a medium of mere knowing, but of questing. Here she casts the dialectical inquiry between continuity and rupture, deploying cyborgs and monsters to overlay and amplify existential questions for the Anthropocene. The result is an ambitious work of complex yet coherent semiotic prowess I can’t wait to teach from.’ – Ocean Vuong