Break the Habit

In her collection, Break the Habit, Tara Betts captures the compromised living of Black lives, the lives of Black women, an unravelling relationship, reclaiming self, and spooling spiders. It is an intimate telling of lives cut short, "the slip downward" of marriage, and a "spark" that resuscitates. Her writing breathes life into words with imagery that sweeps across a spectrum of emotions just like the bullet at a crime scene that "went through the air/past the trees" to reappear with two lovers charging "toward the bullet." Themes in Betts' collection range from the public to the private to the infinitesimal delicacy of a spider's web. They trace the path of finding self and asserting agency by "kissing change on its mouth." Break the Habit is a candid conversation animated with the possibility of hope, and incandescent with honesty that shows readers what it means to break free.