Customer Reviews

The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I highly recommend this wonderful book. If you enjoy work that challenges and breathes, then pick this book. Amazingly gentle and deliciously tender.

This book is a lovely cycle of poetic exchanges between women. It is structured creatively as a type of philosophical dialogic touching upon the intersections of word, flesh, and spirit. A beautiful read, very worthwhile. VERTICAL INTERROGATION OF STRANGERS will make you think about life, womanhood, the world, and language: pretty much everything in one gorgeous collection.

This book is sublime. Partly psuedo-biographies, partly essays, partly survey, partly poetic prose or prose/poem. A most wonderful and strange mash-up of many layered stories. Post-modern in the best sense of the word.

Vertical Interrogation of Strangers presents itself as a project in which its author, Bhanu Kapil, speaks to various Indian women from America, England, and India, and asks them to write in response to 12 basic questions. Sounds interesting enough, however this book has become the bane of my college English Class. The biggest problem with this book is that nearly all the texts, that were supposed to be by other women, sound exactly the same, and (as a person who, unfortunately, had to read another Bhanu Kapil book, Humanimal)all the writings sound in the exact same style as Kapil. The questions are never answered, instead are written in a very odd experimental/poetic sense, however, this book pushes the limit on what can be considered experimental literature, and not in the good sense of the statement. I found this book immediately forgettable and uninteresting. Unless you are a literature professor you very well may like it, but this is simply a book that is completely unrelatable with the vast majority of readers and one will be lost within the first few sentences of this book.

Unfortunately I can not give this book a positive review. I bought the book based on a recommendation from a friend who knows my tastes in Poetry (Trackl, Jorie Graham, Kinnell). There was a great disparity in the comparisons to say the least. On the surface the language seems poetic. The connections seem deep. It seems as if she has done her homework. However, after the second and third readings it soon becomes apparent that this writer puts on a good front but lacks the depth of a true poet. She begins with an image, a thought, place or concept. By the end she twists it into nothing but a series of words that sound like they might have meaning but in reality they are the words of a writer who couldn't keep it together long enough to finish the connection and insteads just glosses it over with some fruity words. I don't care what anybody says, poetry means and simply because someone strings a few words together this does not make meaning. She writes, "The distances between my body and the bodies of the ones I love: grow. They are limited by coasts. I have a few questions to ask, but I do not know how to break the growing silence. I breathe in the salty mist, walk back along the wild, shifting edge of everything." She does this over and over again. She sets up the reader with something concrete then the flowery language starts with no meaningful connections. She does this over and over again. A true poet holds it together until the very end. She can not.

-George