For the launch of Bhanu Kapil’s Incubation: a space for monsters, we are very excited to present a special evening of readings and performances at The Horse Hospital. There will be readings from Sarona Abuaker, Sandeep Parmar, Azad Ashim Sharma and Stephanie Sy-Quia, and a new performance by Bhanu Kapil and the dancer & choreographer Blue Pieta, featuring musicians/performers Yasmin Rai & Nina Harries. This performance, specially choreographed for the event, continues the pair’s frequent collaborations, which have included presentations at Stone Nest, London, as part of Queer Earth and Liquid Matters, part of Serpentine’s Back to Earth project, and at Queens’ College, Cambridge.
Originally published in America in 2006, and out of print for the last seven years, 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. 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’. In this 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.
Bhanu Kapil was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022. Her most recent book, How To Wash A Heart (Liverpool University Press), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. The recipient of a Windham- Campbell Prize and a Cholmondeley Award, both for poetry, Kapil is the author of six full-length collections. For twenty years, she taught creative writing, performance art and contemplative practice at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Currently, she is based in Cambridge as a Fellow of Churchill College. She also teaches for the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, as part of a practice- based Ph.D. in Transdisciplinary Leadership and Creativity for Sustainability.
Blue Pieta is a director, writer, choreographer, dramaturge and dancer. Their practice is informed by their research on ritual sacrifice, ancient mythology and embodied poetics. They studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and the History of Art at Cambridge University and underwent performance training at: Sadlers Wells, Impulstanz Vienna, Siobhan Davies and the National Youth Theatre. Their first play VOID debuted at the Royal Court Theatre, followed by a regional tour. Blue regularly collaborates with Bhanu Kapil, their recent collaboration HUMANIMAL debuted at the Serpentine Gallery. Blue was also the dramaturge for the contemporary Chinese Opera Nine Songs which debuted in the AlUlah desert Saudi Arabia, directed by Farooq Chaudhry, with musical direction from Jocelyn Pook.
Sarona Abuaker has been published in Berfrois, MAP Magazine, the 87press’ Digital Poetics series, KOHL, Ludd Gang, Senna Hoy. Her debut poetry collection, Why so few women on the street at night, published by the 87Press, is a queer phenomenology of collective Palestinian futurisms and memory building.
Sandeep Parmar’s books include two books of poetry published by Shearsman: The Marble Orchard and Eidolon, winner of the Ledbury Forte Prize for Best Second Collection. She is also the author of Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern, an edition of the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees (Carcanet, 2011) and she edited the Selected Poems of Nancy Cunard (Carcanet, 2016). Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Statesman, the Financial Times and the Times Literary Supplement. Sandeep is Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool where she co-directs Liverpool’s Centre for New and International Writing.
Azad Ashim Sharma is the director of the87press and the author of Against the Frame, Ergastulum, and the forthcoming Boiled Owls. He was awarded The Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award 2023 by the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is currently a PhD Candidate in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College.
Stephanie Sy-Quia is a writer, printmaker and teacher based in London. Her debut Amnion (Granta Poetry), won the 2021 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her writing has appeared in The White Review, The Guardian, The Boston Review, Granta, and others.
