Tonguebreaker by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Tonguebreaker Reviews

• 
  Hannah

  tonguebreaker is another expansion & precision of a distinct poetics. leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha has been defining & teaching femme poetics since at least 2015 & has been part of a cresting wave of disability justice & qtbipoc creative practice for even longer. they have been teaching disability/dream time & queer ancestral practice for about as long as i can remember being queer.
  
  bodymap was their first collection writing disability explicitly & publicly, and tonguebreaker continues this lineage, riding the borderlines wider, making explicit an autistic poetics & femme ancestral lineage. this volume is a love work & possibility model for trauma survivor / neuroweirdos / disabled babes all over, especially qtbipoc & femmes. we look chronically for guidance from queers past 40, past 60, past 90 & this is one thread weaving these lineages together gracefully & impactfully.
• 
  BookishStitcher

  These poems will break your heart, empower you, inspire you, and heal you. I loved this poetry collection by the brown, queer, disabled, femme poetess Leah Lakshimi Piepzna-Samarasinha.
• 
  Aolund

  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.
• 
  Jess

  beautiful amazing work. cw for specific/named mentions of femmes who committed suicide 2014-2017.
• 
  Oma

  cried a lot with this one, on the train, en route to the TM memorial, trying to keep my weight off my “bad” ankle. the remembrances-embraces, especially.
• 
  Eli

  This book is fucking stunning!!!!!!! I couldn’t believe how much I loved it when I started reading the first few poems. This is honestly the first time I’ve read poetry about disabilities in a way that is so refreshing and empowering.
• 
  honeybean

  Touching and powerful work of art. I am appreciative to have read this. These parts/poems particularly stuck out:
  
  "When I hear my femme say, When I'm old and riding a motorcycle with white hair down my back.
  When I hear my femme say, When I'm old and sex work paid off my house and my retirement.
  When I hear my femme/myself say, When I get dementia and I am held with respect when I am between all worlds.
  When I see my femme packing it all in, because crip years are like dog years and you never know when they're going to shoot Old Yeller." (Femme futures)
  
  
  "Most of all there's this:
  they will forget you
  You have to know this, they will forget you,
  over and over again." (Crip fairy godmother)
  
  
  "My love says femme is a beautiful knife, warm in the hand.
  My love sleeps with a boxcutter on the windowsill, machete under their bed
  They used to put a knife under the bed to cut the pain of birth
  Femme, I see our work." (boxcutter beloved)
  
  Prayer ghazal for Orlando
  
  "I want to be monsters with my femmes
  Our monster is how we lived through this.
  ...
  I love us, born broken blade,
  our love languages we half know celebrating each other's birth" (birth day)
  
  The obituaries in the end, especially Nicole Demerin (although really all of them), are beautifully worded and heartbreakingly sad. Happy to remember/commemorate
• 
  Elizabeth

  This really knocked my socks off. As a disabled woman, I've been trying to read more books that I fully connect to in regards to being disabled and my own experiences. While the author and I do not have a ton of life experiences in common, I connected to these poems incredibly deeply on the disability front.
  
  Reading something so open and raw, especially from some disabled and queer like myself, just felt... I don't even know. I feel connected and like other people understand my experiences and like the poetry has reached parts of myself that poetry doesn't usually reach. I think my favourite poems were Crip Fairy Godmother, I Know Crips Live Here, and Crip Magic Spells, but I feel like they all had something incredible to offer.
  
  I definitely have a new favourite here. I will be reading more from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Highly recommended.
• 
  Mae Eskenazi

  Like any book that Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes, I just feel so incredibly grateful to have stumbled across her word in this lifetime. Her work feels like a lifeline for so many and truly continues to do so. I want to reread this over and over again just to sit with it in a plethora of ways. What a powerful writer. I truly cannot recommend this book (or any of her others) enough.
• 
  max

  This is a truly glorious book
• 
  Charlott

  One hundred forty pages and every single one moved something in me, hit some spot, made me think. This book dedicated to all femmes who struggle is a collection of poems and performance pieces. Here disabled working-class queer brown and Black femmes are centred; their dreams, futures, relationships. This is a book about suicidal ideation and surviving – and also the ones who did not survive. It is a book about queer and disabled ancestors; and a lineage drawn from the ones passed away decades ago to the newly disabled finding their place. This book is a love letter and a prayer.
  
  “Disability is adaptive, interconnected, tenacious, voracious, slutty, silent,
  raging,
  life giving”
  
  The texts are sorted in six chapters: femme futures, sacrum, bedlife, rust will cut you, ritual payers: performance texts from mangos with chili, cripstory. These chapters sing to each other and echoes can be found throughout the book. And I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that this book is so slim but I could write many, many posts about it. I will certainly go back to this collection again and again, rereading different texts.
  
  “When I hear us dream our futures,
  believe we will make it one,
  We will make one.”
  
  Books I also read by Piepzna-Samarasinha and absolutely loved: “Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice” and “Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement” (edited with Ejeris Dixon)
  
• 
  Sana Kohistani

  3.5/5
  
  
  This book is a collection of poems, performances and not surprisingly enough, eulogies. In the preface Leah describes this process as a map of “wending, winding creative process of being a working class, disabled femme of colour artist who is awake, living and noticing in these times”. This part about being awake and noticing these times, times that are full of disability justice moments, and gaining consciousness, are the core of this collection. I really liked reading certain poems. My favourite was “Burning house”. I really enjoyed that piece.
  
  I find that the authors use of specific words seemed more like a trigger, as if they wanted to be provocative. It was off putting and made me kind of uncomfortable because it seemed unnecessary. The overuse of enjabments with no connective thought process also took away from certain poems. The style of writing was not something I could get behind, it was repetitive in a sense, and it seemed like there was soo much packed into one. I know I’m not the intended audience so Maybe that could be it, but I found it easy to understand but frustrating to read.
  
• 
  meghana. s

  I have apparently given myself the tradition of reading the most obscure book in my TBR as my first book of the year. I picked this up at the first indie bookstore I went to in Dallas. It sat on my bookcart for a year and I have aptly picked it up for the new year.
  
  Tonguebreaker is the kind of collection that reminds you of how human you are. You read the poet scream and cry and tear at their skin. Break themselves and pour their heart onto the pages. It is painful and hurts and you have to put the piece down for your sake but you will not look away.
  
  This collection gives me hope for creative feminist, for the artsy desis, that my life is not the best but things will be okay. Things will get better. You might not share the same experiences of poet but I think it’s honestly a must read!
  
  TW: Sexual assault, mentions of self harm and suicidal ideation. (confirm and check for others triggers these were just the ones I remembered)
• 
  Dev

  Wow. This one is intense. And hard. Don't expect to read it in one sitting. Or two. Or three. Read it in small doses. There’s pain. And abuse. And struggle. And so much disability. But there’s also friendship and love and so much more. I love that Piepzna-Samarsinha included the performance pieces where she purposefully brought disability into queer spaces. I love that she brought it into those spaces in the first place. (BTW - My favorite pieces are "I know crips live here" and "the amethyst room.")
  
  (3.7 stars, if you're being exact.)
• 
  Laura Sackton

  There is so much grief, fire, love, and beauty in this book. I couldn't really connect with the poems themselves (on a structural, not a content, level). Actually my favorite parts of the book were the introduction, and the sections where they describe the various performances pieces that are transcribed in the book. I put their book of essays onto my TBR immediately, and I'm really looking forward to reading their prose. This is a writer whom I desperately want to read more from.
• 
  Jake

  Coming to terms with a society that doesn't want you based on your body...and creating your own space instead...has to be a challenging thing. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha bares her soul to the world in this collection of poems and one-act plays. Her use of language to lecture gripped me and her exploration of what it means to live in this world, to choose life amidst death, despite being close to death, is hauntingly beautiful.
• 
  Laura

  I tend to rebel against things that I feel I am supposed to like. This is how I always feel when I pick up Leah's work - however I cannot help but eat up the words, I like it despite my attempt to resist - to take the journey, to embrace the language. pain and resilience - honoring ourselves and our ancestors.
• 
  OK

  Tender, grieving, sharp-toothed.
  
  4.5
• 
  Bek MoonyReadsByStarlight

  4.5 stars
• 
  Madeleine

  So much to think about here. I love her writing always but this challenged me and made me uncomfortable in ways that her other collections haven't (which is a good thing).
• 
  Virginia Kennard

  *cries*
  the best performance text collection
  thank you leah
  
• 
  Kim

  I can't translate the colour movement I have/am experiencing while/after reading this amazing book. I need to process and then maybe conventional language will work.
• 
  Hannah Bevis

  4.5 stars. Really, really beautiful writing that just got better as the book went on. I found so many sparklets that jumped out at me.
• 
  Erin

  Especially adored “Lightskinned for beginners,” “daughter of kali and oshun,” and “The burning house.”
• 
  Wyrd Witch

  3.5 stars
• 
  Kaitlynn Cassady

  In keeping with my pride month mission, I grabbed this one off the shelf that I purchased from Deep Vellum some time ago. Tonguebreaker is a series of poems and writings by Leah Lakshmi Peipzna-Samarasinha, a queer disabled femme poet of color. Tonguebreaker is a collection about surviving even when the world is orchestrated against you. The collection focuses on the intersections of disability, queerness, class, and race. It’s an absolutely incredible collection and some of the poems are contextualized for further understanding of the space, community, and collaborating that inspired the work. I think my favorite poems from this book were Femme Houses, Bad Road, and All the Femmes Come Back. Leah hones in on the many QTPOC activists, creatives, and writers who have been lost to violence or suicide, penning stunning poems in their honor. I cannot recommend this collection enough to you - these poems helped me examine the ableism rampant in some of the conversations happening with today’s political movements. This collection also challenged me in what is often ableist-thinking and action on my part. Further it calls into question the accessibility of many public spaces and jobs, and the harm this does to disabled people. In other words, not only is the collection beautifully and elegantly written, but it also pushes back on the norm narrative of today and questions why the world is so uninhabitable for certain communities.