The Way Disabled People Love Each Other

By (author): Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

The latest poetry collection by the award-winning author of Tonguebreaker, Care Work, and The Future Is Disabled

Lambda Award-winning poet, memoirist, and disability justice movement worker Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha returns with their long-awaited fifth collection of poems, written over five years of pandemic lockdown, during which time they lost a cherished friend and comrade and met their estranged parents’ end of life.

The Way Disabled People Love Each Other is a fierce crip reckoning with all the ways disabled people love each other, in all our complexity. A book that will speak to any kind of griever, but particularly disabled BIPOC queer trans ones sitting with the endless mass grief and possibility of this time, and those with violent family from whom we still yearn to claw out beauty from the trauma rubble. It’s a road map for survivors looking for something that’s neither a happy Hollywood ending nor a transformative justice fairy tale – not the healing we wished for, but the healing we find anyway.

This collection is a rigorous, rueful documentation of a specific time of pandemic fascist grief and possibility. Brimming with odes, elegies, and mourning songs, these poems sparkle like switchblades and offer new possibilities for love, grief, and memory.

AUTHOR

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Winner of the 2012 Lambda Literary Award, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled femme writer, teacher and performer of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan, Roma and Irish ascent. The author of Bodymap, Love Cake and Consensual Genocide and the co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities, her writing has been widely anthologized. She is the co-founder of the queer people of colour arts incubator Mangos With Chili, a lead artist with Sins Invalid and co-founder of Toronto’s Asian Arts Freedom School. In 2010 she was named one of the Feminist Press’ 40 Feminists Under 40 Shaping the Future. Her first memoir, Dirty River, was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in fall 2015.

Reviews

With adept, hard-won magic, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha transforms the endlessness of disabled grief into an endlessness rooted in remembering (celestial, earthly, everywhere), loving (fiercely, wordlessly, imperfectly), and surviving (while howling and breaking). The Way Disabled People Love Each Other is what poetry is meant to be, a photobook, an altar, and a composite of community crip wisdom you return to over and over when nothing feels real and you need something that is. This is a collection where the pages sizzle, ancestors cackle and dance with you, smoke lingers in the room, and you know you’ll never have to fight alone. -Jane Shi, author of echolalia echolalia

This is Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, who always saves our lives, always steals us back to ourselves, always insists on the gritty everyday of survival. But in this particular collection of elegies, laments, spells and witness is Leah at their most June Jordan, their most generous, offering the grieving heart our grieving hearts need. -Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s The Way Disabled People Love Each Other hinges on the question Who mourns when disabled people die?” This

as Piepzna-Samarasinha knows