Bodymap
Finalist for the Triangle Awards, Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, 2015
Shortlisted for the ReLit Award, Poetry, 2016
In Bodymap, Lambda Award-winner Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha sings a queer disabled femme-of-colour love song filled with hard femme poetics and disability justice. In this volume, Leah Lakshmi maps hard and vulnerable terrains of queer desire, survivorhood, transformative love, sick and disabled queer genius and all the homes we claim and deserve.
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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.
"It's a collection of poems that's a testament to love--found in partnerships and within the self--and how the body can be a political entity. You'll cry through the gutsiest of poems, but will also feel renewed." --Chatelaine
"This book is pure Piepzna-Samarasinha--tough and full of desire; it needs to be flaunted in all its glory." --Chelene Knight, Room Magazine
"The poems [in Bodymap] cover a lot of ground, but they never lose the unwavering voice. They never lose the strength, the drive, the relentless pushing and scraping and grasping for more. Leah's activist spirit and tender queer heart fill the pages, every one. . . . [T]he way Leah writes let me see her, too, in all of her glory and splendor and low points. Her poems go where other poems so often can't or won't . . ." --Carmen Rios, Autostraddle
"If you read poetry, this book is a reminder why you love it. If you don't read poetry, you should read Bodymap because it's accessible and beautiful, written with deep maturity and open-hearted honesty. If you're a long-time fan [of Piepzna-Samarasinha], you won't be disappointed as she covers familiar topics with precise and vivid language. If you haven't read Piepzna-Samarasinha's work before, Bodymap is an excellent place to start." --Elinor Zimmerman, The Lesbrary
"These poems are a gift for your love for self, your love itself and everyone you love. It is rare that a poet priestess offers words that allow us to emerge reborn with dirt, glitter and tenderness . . . Revere it. Revel in it. Read it again and again!" --Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind
"Bodymap uses the alchemy of the voice on the page to transform words into an ache in the pit of me. I want what these poems demand: to be free to love & die, to be resurrected in time, & to be restored by desire. Piepzna-Samarasinha has located where this body houses the smirk learned from the sidewalk, the reason to do the difficult, and the blessings for the best worst thing." --Meg Day, author of Last Psalm at Sea Level
"Sharp, yet remarkably compassionate, Piepzna-Samarasinha knows that the poem is no place for tidy inquiry and easy answers. She offers her own tenacious guts and veins on each and every page. Only someone who understands rage and reconciliation and blood and bone can write like this." --Amber Dawn, author of How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir and Sub Rosa
