Overview

Surveying the first three years of Lebanon's economic crisis, from October 2019 to October 2022, Body Tectonic is an experiment in news poetry, exploring what it is like bodily when the ground shifts beneath your feet daily and ongoingly. Since October 2019 Lebanon has been a country in freefall, with devastating currency inflation, political instability, and social tension and unrest. The structural nature of the catastrophe makes it both more bizarre and more normal. Body Tectonic compiles voices from news coverage, combining these verbatim testimonies with anecdotes, data from reports, memories, and stories. Exploring instability, longing, and the paradox of hope, the poem attends to what happens to the body - of a country, of a people - in conditions of continual emergency.

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9781916938304

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Reviews

Emily Abdeni-Holman writes with humane clarity about the ways we embody physical, geographic and emotional states: 'how we put our body in places / where nothing happens, places for signs and wonders'. The body of which she writes is simultaneously multiple and singular as she examines bodily need in Lebanon (while inflation rises and rises), or interrogates the body-focussed wellness industry. Formally, too, her poetry is inventive: words are shared across gulfs; the conversation is picked up by other times and selves, entangled and interconnected. The stanzas of the poem become tectonic plates which collide with - and drift from - each other, finding parallels and mirrorings between cultures and voices. Bodies override others or meet in understanding, the potential for earthquakes and ruptures rumbling underneath. Body Tectonic is wise, urgent, and deeply resonant. As moving act of witness and finely wrought work of art, I have read nothing else quite like it. - Penny Boxall Abdeni-Holman's Lebanon is both violent and poignant. The poems capture the dehumanising nature of the ongoing crises engulfing a suffocating nation in freefall. Emily deftly pieces together headlines, testimonies, anecdotes and reports in order to tell the story of a devastating economic collapse, physical and mental carnage, power cuts, fuel shortages, migration and a pervasive sense of loss. Body Tectonic, to roughly translate a Lebanese expression, has its finger firmly 'in the wound' and refuses to let go. - Naji Bakhti Body Tectonic presents an unsettling poetry of witness and open-ended inquiry into the lived experience of Lebanon's troubled recent history. The body - both physical and politic - becomes the focus of social, material and economic crisis, as a site of shock, loss and suffering, but also 'resilience' - a word interrogated with sensitivity throughout the book. This in turn leads, implicitly, to what is at stake for the soul - the inner life, no less actual for its bafflement in the face of onrushing circumstances - and the source of what (if anything) lives, and what carries on, despite disaster. Combining reportage and contemplation in its inventive use of language, organising its sense through ruptured syntax, this humane and intelligent work examines at first hand matters laid within our history that 'cannot be undone' - and the ways in which, in the face of crisis, the human body 'knows all over again what's real'. - Gregory Leadbetter Body Tectonic is an extraordinary poetic narrative. Emily Abdeni-Holman charts the disintegration of a seemingly stable society, showing how the underlying fault lines resurface in the face of a major incident that the west took an interest in for perhaps a week, and has probably now forgotten. A timely reminder that we are only a careless act away from a cascade of consequences that can undermine a whole country, no matter how sophisticated it might seem on the surface. - Cherry Potts

Author Information

Emily Abdeni-Holman is a British-Lebanese writer. She grew up in Warlingham (UK) and Jamhour (Lebanon), and worked as an arts and culture writer in Beirut before pursuing a doctorate in literature in the UK. She currently lives in Cambridgeshire.

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