The Way Disabled People Love Each Other

Lambda Awardwinning 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.

'Leah is our most fearless chronicler of crip life, which means they've got one of the biggest hearts alive in a body that also wields the fiercest pen. Their work has been a lodestar for so many of us who have had our hearts broken by ableism's insidious and rampant effects, and this book is yet another shining pinnacle to follow arriving, as Leah often does, at exactly the right moment.' Johanna Hedva, author of How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

'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

'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.' Cyree Jarelle Johnson, author of SLINGSHOT and WATCHNIGHT