Tonguebreaker

Tonguebreaker by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

This book is a soft, wild, aching spell. It is glitter and guts. It is relentless...and restful. It is unapologetic, yearning towards the future, and also deeply meditative upon and informed by the past. After reading Piepzna-Samarasinha’s work for years in various magazines, zines, and collections, it was incredibly satisfying and enriching to read an entire book of their poetry and performance pieces—I felt extremely moved emotionally and also moved (politically) to action, expansion, and deeper listening and consciousness as I eagerly read these personal, communal, generous, and unflinching poems.

This book is aching with grief and loss, particularly the loss of BIPOC femme disabled/crip/crazy elders who made so many ways for revolutions both intimate and massive. This grief and loss is bound together with other traumas and pains experienced by Piepzna-Samarasinha personally, and magicked into something powerful and transformative: “At 42 I make a beautiful dress of all my scars / Scar tissue is the strongest tissue in the body / Maybe you are unlucky if you do not have a card to its library” (85). I felt opened, reading this book. I felt Piepzna-Samarasinha asking more of me and the world, a call to devote our energy and love towards a more creative, inclusive, and caring future. I felt opened to the simultaneous possibilities of always seeking to avoid causing harm and remembering that harms, struggles, pains, and traumas can also bring us great strength, be beautiful, honored, celebrated, and help connect us to others in a web of sparkling interdependence.