Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2020
Poetry Book Society Choice, Summer 2020

How To Wash A Heart, Kapil’s first full-length collection published in the UK, depicts the complex relations that emerge between an immigrant guest and a citizen host. Drawn from a first performance at the ICA in London in 2019, and using poetry as a mode of interrogation that is both rigorous, compassionate, surreal, comic, painful and tender, by turn, Kapil begins to ask difficult and urgent questions about the limits of inclusion, hospitality and care.

‘Stunningly unique.’ Time out New York

‘The book’s final pages, both the end of the sequence itself and the paratextual material, are devastating. How To Wash A Heart confronts ‘the link / Between creativity / And survival’ arguing that creativity is necessary for survival, but sadly not sufficient more skilfully and innovatively than anything else I have read this year.’ Dominic Leonard, The TLS

‘Brilliantly relentless Kapil’s words sit brilliantly between the intellectual and the bodily. The eponymous phrase of this book returns again and again, to be held up to the light in different ways. Violence, exile, love and the world of literature drip out in the answers to the opening question.’ Andrew McMillan, Poetry Book Society