At 22, Kapil moved to the United States, where she earned an MA in English Literature from SUNY Brockport. It was during this time that she began to write seriously, developing an experimental and politically charged voice. Many of her early biographical experiences - migration, cultural dissonance, and otherness - feature prominently in her work. 

Her writing rejects conventional literary forms, blending poetry, autofiction, philosophy, and performance. Kapil’s signature stream-of-consciousness prose is driven by what she describes as a “desire to metabolise social, institutional and cultural experiences that had lodged in my tissue”. These physical, mental, and sensual experiences are transmuted into a polyphonic written form that resists categorisation. Her semi-autobiographical prose piece Text to Complete a Text offers a fantastical and corporeal insight into Kapil’s inner world and early cultural settings. Elements of physical performativity and installation frequently accompany her public readings and events, enhancing the dimension in her work. 

Kapil’s first book, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, was published in 2001. Subsequent titles include Incubation: A Space for Monsters (2006), Humanimal: A Project for Future Children (2009), Schizophrene (2011), Ban en Banlieue (2015), and entre-Ban (2017). Her most recent collection, How to Wash a Heart (2020), won the T. S. Eliot Prize. She has also published three chapbooks: Autobiography of a Cyborg (2000), Water Damage: A Map of Three Black Days (2008), and Treinte Ban: A Psychiatric Handbook to Accompany a Work Undone (2014). Kapil holds the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellowship at the University of Cambridge and has received the Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. 

Central to Kapil’s work are explorations of identity, embodiment, intergenerational trauma, and displacement. These themes often intersect with questions of race, sexuality, and selfhood. She views writing as “the place where an interoceptive nervous system is tracked”, drawing on her work with somatic trauma theory and the body - an approach she developed during her time teaching at Naropa University. 

In Incubation: A Space for Monsters, Kapil constructs an experimental narrative following a cyborg girl on a road trip across the U.S. Drawing on her own experiences as a female immigrant, she blends science-fiction tropes with lived bodily experiences in a narrative she describes as “a feminist, post-colonial On the Road.” The book reflects her enduring interest in hybridity, transformation, and liminality. 

The theme of animality and its relation to human identity is another thread in her work. In Humanimal (2009), Kapil documents the story of Amala and Kamala, two girls reportedly found living with wolves in Bengal in the 1920s. In this poetic reconstruction, she blurs the boundary between human and animal, imagining “the bloodstream of a child as intermingling with that of an animal."

Raw, sensuous, and deeply experimental, Bhanu Kapil’s work is a poetic dialogue that engages the reader not only intellectually but viscerally. Through her bold experimentation with language, themes, and performance, Kapil confronts complex issues of identity, trauma, and transformation, creating work that resonates on multiple levels. By embracing the visceral and the intellectual, she continues to reshape the landscape of contemporary poetry and performance.