The Way Disabled People Love Each Other

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 cherished friends and comrades 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 QTBIPOC 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.

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; Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (all Arsenal Pulp Press); and Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement (AK Press), co-edited with Ejeris Dixon. A Disability Futures Fellow, Lambda and Jeanne Cordova Award winner, five-time Publishing Triangle shortlister, and longtime disabled QTBIPOC space maker, they are currently building Living Altars, a cultural space by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers. They live in Philadelphia, PA.