Thom Donovan has written an excellent essay on the work of Bhanu Kapil.  On his blog, he gives a sneak preview.

To mark such a space Kapil “put[s] [her] knib on the page” (Humanimal, 38) to “let motion wreck the line” (38) producing written “arrhythmias” as “record[s] of travel.” (38) Through an arrhythmic writing—a writing paced by quickened heart rates—Kapil’s own body leaves the traces of its lines of flight through writing. The form of the writing—the sentences which stutter with commas, hyphens, and periods; the syllogistic/constellative movements of the sentences and paragraphs—chart intensities rather than represent where Kapil has ‘been’. Here, form becomes an extension of physical travel in space intermittent with writing as a form of travel—the “crossing of thresholds,” a “flight of intensities” —without moving. Making the body in-transit a site of autobiography (a la Thoreau’s “Walking” or Kerouac’s On the Road), Kapil’s body also extends writing as a means of mourning, where mourning is successfully negotiated through itinerancy. “In the quick, black take of a body’s flight, a body’s eviction or sudden loss of place, the memory of descent functions as a subliminal flash.” (Humanimal, 26) Although travel and motion result in perpetual loss, in Kapil’s work they also accomplish an unforeclosed work of healing.

This work of healing,  Donovan offers, has its form in the body of the animal, the monstrous, or the othered human as in the schizophrenic. He reaches back through autobiographical pieces of Kapil’s previous books to arrive here:

As the anthropological project of Modernity coughs its last gasps on account of the shrinking, if not already exhausted, resources of our planet and the incomprehensible greed of the rich and powerful, the human must embrace the non-human as that by which it may transform its current condition. This transformation would not be regressive, but ideally an evolution, which is to say an act of transcendence within phylogenetic immanence; a movement that will produce a new means of being beyond our challenged human condition. Can a poetics help to accomplish this? If Kapil demonstrates nothing else it is precisely this.

Look for the rest of this essay in the forthcoming issue of ON Contemporary Practice.