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Bhanu Kapil is a fantastic performer I saw her at the London Review Bookshop in 2019 She had with her an orange Sainsbury’s carrier bag, a large jar filled with red glitter (she assured us it was ‘dolphin friendly’) and a bottle of water She also brought a circular stainless steel tray, like the kind a cater-waiter might wield She tipped the contents of the bag – compost, moist-looking, a rich, cacao brown – onto the tray She tipped in the glitter She poured the water over the lot She mashed it all up with her hands    Before Kapil did this, she invited the new cohort of Ledbury Critics – a programme founded in 2017 to increase the number of poetry critics of colour in the UK – of which I was one, to stand up from our seats in the audience ‘And so I ask’, she said to us: ‘What do you inherit? What do you reproduce?’ Kapil then invited us to come up and be anointed by the mud-glitter-mush She smoothed it over the skin of our forearms I was last To me, Kapil said: ‘This is spa treatment and exorcism in one’   After she had smoothed the mud over us, she took the tray outside and tipped its contents into the street    *   Kapil’s win of the 2020 TS Eliot prize for How to Wash A Heart (2020), a long, halting poem which uses the host/guest dynamic as a parable of ethnonationalist immigration policies, brought greater attention to a career of reverberative experimental poetry Her ways of writing about girlhood, the body, trauma and its transferral, violence – the horrific and the subtle – have rippled far and wide Over twenty-odd years, she has attracted a devoted cult following, mainly in the US where her early books were published, and where she taught for just as long    ‘Since moving to the US’, wrote the poet Jay Gao in an email to me (he recently left the UK to study at Brown University), ‘I have discovered that Bhanu Kapil is, perhaps, the only contemporary British poet who is regularly