Incubation: a Space for Monsters
by Bhanu Kapil (2006)

At the limit of house, of loss, at the edge of language, at the exhaustion of identity and text, Bhanu Kapil brings her shadow of a girl in and out of being, making of her a structure that is relation, everything and nothing at once.

Here in the space of this radiant work of prose, the cyborg, the monster, the immigrant, the girl finds a future existence, a vibrant bleeding color brought forth by the multiple disjuncts that the book (and history) insists upon. Poised between pre-life and the notebook, between country and idea of country, in the mirror between addresser and addressee is the body that might exist in time.

Here it might be possible finally to ask:
After the heart breaks what then
After the civilizations mix and fall off
After the numbness sets in.

This is a book of refusal, of becoming, of desire, just past self. “In the café of languages” where “everything is stupid and magnificent” at once, the figure of a girl moves and is moved through the crashing waves of language, making of its movement and its own moment—existence.

A new long awaited work of global fiction, Incubation: A Space for Monsters, extends its own faltering reach to offer the other: a body, an accompaniment in language and ultimately a watery site of inscription —from inside “the damaging ocean”, elusive, overwritten, connecting everything —to touch.

Advance praise for Incubation: a Space for Monsters by Bhanu Kapil

”Incubation celebrates the cobbling together of lives – tracing the simplest desires to connect bodies, words, cultures, just as they threaten to become prosthetic, amputations. With a global body and a sharp mind, Bhanu Kapil maps the poetic, exhilarating journey between pain and insight. A true landmark.”
--Thalia Field

”Incubation: A Space for Monsters explores/creates a shiftful place for she who is neither one thing nor an other. Girl as hybrid of light and dark, of human and machine, of baby and mother, of all motherless, body-bound things. Laloo is a traveler, hitchhiking through landscapes American and otherwise. A frightening, transforming, longing book.”
--Rebecca Brown