In a month-long act of resistance, poets remind us that poetry can push back against forces that marginalize voices, erase stories, and impose control over how we live and imagine.
An interview with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
All Lit Up: How would you describe The Way Disabled People Love Each Other to someone picking it up for the first time?
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: So maybe you’re a sick sad disabled queer trans BIPOC (some or all or any) and everyone you loved died during high early COVID, or not everyone but even one beloved was too many. And maybe you’re also a survivor who was waiting for the people who hurt you to turn around and say, hey, I fucked up, I’m sorry, but it’s getting to closing time and it looks like…they won’t. And you have to figure out how to mourn. And in the middle of that you live with other disabled/ sick/ grieving/ queer/ trans/ BIPOC and you have these big lives and resistances and loves that stretch through generations and beyond time. And in the middle of all that there’s a global pandemic that doesn’t end but you find a way to keep most of you alive. And you bury your parents and your beloved dead. And you find a way to leave the grief house (even though the grief keeps unfolding). So—this is a book about all of that.
ALU: How do you see poetry as an act of resistance?
LLPS: June Jordan defined poetry as “Poetry: a means of telling the truth.” She also said, “You cannot write lies and write good poetry.” She’s right. You can bullshit with poetry, I guess, but it won’t be very good. People go to poetry because when it’s right, it hits you right on the bone of truth—the truth you know but have not yet heard spoken or expressed, the truth you didn’t know yet. In a world increasingly in love with institutionalized bold-faced lying—Trump makes up shit all the time, it’s fact checked but who cares what’s real?—being honest and writing it down—the facts of our lives, our dreams, our real uncomfortable truths, our mourning wails, our questions—is an act of resistance to that lying. The right wing doesn’t make a lot of great poets for that reason.
ALU: What does poetry allow you to say or refuse that other forms don’t?
LLPS: It’s wild coming out with my fifth book of poetry because I began as a poet, I came up in spoken word and performance poetry and that’s how I was known for years and decades as a writer—being a memoirist and a nonfiction writer who dipped their toe into journalism was a sideline. Then Care Work really blew up and now people are surprised I’m a poet—they think of me as a disabled nonfiction writer and essayist. But I’m still a poet. I love writing nonfiction and essays but sometimes I’ve had to resist pressure to become like a short order cook of that form—something bad happened, write a straightforward essay about how to fix it!
The thing about poetry is that you can write it with low spoons, on the bus, in five minutes on a napkin. It also doesn’t have to “make sense” or be rational—I’m not talking about incomprehensibility (when people are like, what does this even mean, I don’t like poetry because it’s so abstract and obtuse) but that it doesn’t have to operate from “rational” left-brain thinking. It can make sense because it just does not, in a not straightforward way. It can come from the crazy/mad brain, the dark, the dream space, the underworld. It says things and holds and honours knowledge that the “sane” mind doesn’t and can’t. I return to my maestra teacher Suheir Hammad’s poetry all the time as an example of this, particularly the poems she has been writing over the past two and a half years of enhanced genocide in Gaza—she has done an incredible job capturing that exact mind-breaking nature of death, brutality loss in Gaza in a way that only poetry can do. Similarly, I hope my poetry has captured intimate spaces of disabled and survivor grief, loss, and life that I couldn’t in a “straight form.”
You can also read it with lower spoons! Along with many other people, my capacity to read long, super dense nonfiction has gone to shit between perimenopause, COVID, and permagrief. But poetry? Yeah I can read that on the toilet, in ten minutes before sleep takes me. It’s a disabled/accessible word technology.
ALU: Is there a line (in your own or someone else’s work) that you return to?
LLPS: “at the end of the world, let there be you // my world”- danez smith
“& how many times have you loved me without my asking?
how often have I loved a thing because you loved it?
including me”- also Danez Smith
“I don’t want to write a record, I want to reflect the times”- Kimmortal
“Interviewer: What question do you always wish an interviewer would ask? Could you answer it now?
Dorothy Allison: Has it been worth it—being so naked in the world—to accomplish what you want to do in the writing?
Yes.”
ALU: What role does community—readers, poets, teachers—play in your writing?
LLPS: I write for myself, but I also write as an act of service and wonder to my communities. I want to give you something really good. I want to give you the thing you need. That doesn’t mean I write with community putting a gun to my head so I give them a simple, easy story where it all works out—I am in service to my communities by writing the complexity, the broken, the monstrous, the question. I was taught as a young writer by poets like Sekou Sundiata, a master of the Black Arts Movement tradition, who told me that the written word was the score, the live performance was the articulation of it and the viewer/listener/reader was an equal part of the artwork, inseparable from me as the writer—that together the performer/writer and audience/community make the work. I try to write from this place, even as it evolves—from writing when only a handful of people were reading or listening to my work so risk was different, to gaining the blessing and complexity of more of an audience, to going on six years of almost solely performing online, not live in-person performance because of COVID safety and access, so having to shift how I relate to the audience, the community, that one moment of truth on a stage.
Read “elegy for a soldier“ from
The Way Disabled People Love Each Other
elegy for a soldier
Disabled queers find each other.
Go to the military cemetery where you’re buried
with your grandmother on an unseasonably
rainy-ass Memorial Day
go without a plan, forget that the liquor stores
are closed on Sundays in the South,
are running late so
it’s too late to buy flowers.
We have a back-up plan for if your
biofam shows up, but they’re all probably still in church.
Lex brought me pralines but I
have a nut allergy, but then we were like
oh you know what, I think we know somebody
who would just loooove these!
Jess was out of bourbon & we couldn’t find soju in all of North
Carolina
but there still managed to be whiskey
I
have spent
the last three years hating
that you are buried
in a military cemetery
but standing there
I realized you were a soldier
just in a different kind of army.
Yashna said you know she’s probably
definitely organizing all those disabled vets
missing a limb getting something else
resting next to you
casualties of America.
Disabled people don’t forget each other
even when everybody else obliterates
or never cared to know in the first place
Disabled people use our autistic
hacker skills and complete batshit wild-assed
grief derangement to find cemetery row 3A3
even when the bio fam says who are you queers again?
Jess says hey, I found her and there she is:
fucking of course, in the most accessible
part of the cemetery right by disabled parking
and I say oh
I’ve been running in place, gnashing my teeth
clawing at my sheets
keening for you
for years
because one day, we texted every day,
the next, I never saw you again
But here you are. Here we are.
Disabled people don’t forget
each other, we love each other
forever-ever.
They tried to lose you from us
but you are always and forever
found to me
A nation of brutal forgetting:
We, surviving America
Reprinted with permission from Arsenal Pulp Press.
Watch Leah read “elegy for a soldier”
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LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA (they/them) is the author or co-editor of ten books, including The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs; Tonguebreaker; and Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (all Arsenal Pulp Press). A Disability Futures Fellow, Lambda Literary and Jeanne Cordova Award winner, five-time Publishing Triangle Award finalist, and longtime disabled QTBIPOCspace maker, they currently live in Philadelphia, PA.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is going on tour with their new poetry collection The Way Disabled People Love Each other in spring 2026. Learn more about The Way Disabled People Love Each Other: The Speak/Easy Tour—featuring in-person and virtual events in Canada and the USA—by visiting https://brownstargirl.org/news-events/
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Thanks to Leah for answering our questions, and to Arsenal Pulp Press for the text of “elegy for a soldier” from The Way Disabled People Love Each Other, which is available to order now (and get 15% off + FREE shipping Canada-wide with the code POETSRESIST until April 30!).
Follow our NPM series all month long to discover new poetry or connect with old favourites, and visit our poetry shop here.
