Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
The Way Disabled People Love Each Other
Book Release with Cyrée Jarelle Johnson

Please join us as we celebrate the publication of the latest poetry collection by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, the award-winning author of Tonguebreaker, Care Work, and The Future Is Disabled.

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.

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.

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.

“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, cannot be answered without touching this inquiry's twin: 'Who celebrates disabled life?' Every bloody, intimate, elegiac page of The Way Disabled People Love Each Other is an offering to the gods of disabled vivacity and a bullet launched another centimetre closer to that which seeks to kill us."
—Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, author of SLINGSHOT and WATCHNIGHT

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.

Cyrée Jarelle Johnson is a poet from Piscataway, New Jersey. He is the author of SLINGSHOT, winner of a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and WATCHNIGHT, winner of the 2023 James Laughlin Award by the Academy of American Poets. Johnson was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and served as the inaugural poet-in-residence at the Brooklyn Public Library. He is a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow.