Laynie Brown has written a feature on voice in the work of Bhanu Kapil. Of Humanimal, a Project for Future Children, she says,

What is the opposite of feral? Feral: “Latin, from ‘fera’ a wild beast. Relating to, or having the nature of, a wild beast; uncultivated; undomesticated; barbarous; wild.” The question is deliberately not answered. Would one say civilized? Hardly, considering that the violent treatment of the two feral girls by the “civilized” is not at all civil:

“A girl is a dot arising in space, and then the girl after that, and the next. Viral, schizophrenic, the two girls shook in the garden, and then in their beds like photographs. In the first days of their captivity, they screamed for their mother, then stopped. Dehydrated, they sucked tea from rags. Accepting nourishment like this was a primary act of human culture. Hopeful, their Father brought them home. No. They were home and then they got sick, unable to tolerate the food they were given.”

This book gives voice to “monsters”—to those who are unnamed, uncounted, unclothed, unemployed, uninsured, represented only in the margins—and provides another way to approach subjects often explored only under the guise of anonymity. Kapil searches out voices not often heard, because of either invisibility or the opposite—a type of gawking that is not seeing at all, as if at an animal.

Read the entirety of the article at the Poetry Foundation.

Humanimal will be on sale from Kelsey Street by mid-June 2009.

June 08, 2009 update: Humanimal is now on sale in our online store!

Also, visit A Voice Box to hear Bhanu reading from her work-in-progress, Schizophrene, at  Aggression. A Confreence on Contemporary Poetics and Political Antagonism held by  Small Press  Tress Traffic last May (2008).