Breach

by Lisa Samuels

Breach by Lisa Samuels performs a vital palilalia of lockdown. Starting with the dead, with Li Wenliang, who was the first to raise the Covid alarm, the book pitches and surges in deflections, hungers, and political feeling through pandemic-as-ordinary-life. The forced changes in relations we've all suffered derange the lines, chopped like

threats of
groceries
hands on techno
maps and wild-type
host societies

there’s a mask
between you and
every tangi-
ble growth

Breach is a song of lockdown: its tragedies, absurdities, non sequitur linguistic hilarities, and nightmarish lexical distortions, presented at a perfect moment for reflection, as we each continue adjust our bodies, lives and breaths...

80 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2021

Reviews

[Taylan Harman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Breach absorbs COVID-19 as an isolating experience. Language breaks like our social links: We were only able to justify our necessity to go outside, and thus, each sentence must justify only itself. Our next move, like every next sentence in Breach, does not follow from the previous. You left your isolation for a loaf of bread: who said you are justified in going for a stroll downtown? The world becomes fragmented

'we're hungry all the time recollecting what
shared breath that donnish spiritual kitsch
on a plate all about presentation
movies taught us everything we know
how to falter accentually
how to give hugs"

Since the onset of certain social media platforms, our focus has fragmented. Covid was not a deviation from our norm but the more obvious emanation of it. So, Breach isn't just about a particular virus but our slow decline into fragmentation and the potentially dangerous urges to re-unify things, to make sentences and words make sense to us again, even when they are illusions.

As a reminder of our developing schizophrenia and the potential danger in our reaction to prevent it, it is a must read.