Body Tectonic

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.