Overview

In 1996, poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha ran away from America with two backpacks and ended up in Canada, where she discovered queer anarchopunk love and revolution. Through it all, she works her way through the personal and the political of intersectionality as she comes to identify as a mixed-race person and queer femme of colour, as a disabled person grappling with chronic illness (she has suffered from fibromyalgia since 1998) and as an abuse survivor. This passionate and riveting memoir is a mixtape of dreams and nightmares.

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9781551526003

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Reviews

Dirty River is a candid and comic view from the tattooed underbelly of contemporary life. There is no syrup in this survivor's tale, yet the sun does shine through these shadows, making you cheer for the hero(ine) in her odyssey to know her true self. Jewelle Gomez, author of The Gilda Stories Dirty River will give you back the life you stole and saved: your own. In the tradition of June Jordan's Soldier, Audre Lorde's Zami, Asha Bandele's Something Like Beautiful, and Staceyann Chin's The Other Side of Paradise, Dirty River is a memoir that will make you itch all over while you read it and emerge having shed another layer of internalized doubt. You are brave enough to face this honest, transformative work, because you are brave enough to be who you are. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's newest book is the powerful, badass, and important story of a young queer femme of color's coming of age on her own terms. Intersectional and glittering and raw, this book has biteit's a kind of primal yell for all us survivors of abuse, as we pull together and howl and love and live. Randa Jarrar, author of A Map of Home Dirty River goes above and beyond being a story of survival; it is a manifesto for those of us who have also been walking, scantily clad, down dark alleys for most of our lives. Lambda Literary Dirty River is a biracial-abuse-survivor-queer-femme-working-class-immigrant-anarchist-punk bomb that explodes the myth of LGBT sameness. The Globe and Mail

The LGBTIQ community should lift its ears to receive Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Her vision stands to rearrange the ways we approach community, creating art, and loving. Every time I've heard her read, I've come away new. --Tara Hardy

Dirty River is a candid and comic view from the tattooed underbelly of contemporary life. There is no syrup in this survivor's tale, yet the sun does shine through these shadows, making you cheer for the hero(ine) in her odyssey to know her true self. Jewelle Gomez, author of The Gilda Stories Dirty River will give you back the life you stole and saved: your own. In the tradition of June Jordan's Soldier, Audre Lorde's Zami, Asha Bandele's Something Like Beautiful, and Staceyann Chin's The Other Side of Paradise, Dirty River is a memoir that will make you itch all over while you read it and emerge having shed another layer of internalized doubt. You are brave enough to face this honest, transformative work, because you are brave enough to be who you are. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's newest book is the powerful, badass, and important story of a young queer femme of color's coming of age on her own terms. Intersectional and glittering and raw, this book has bite it's a kind of primal yell for all us survivors of abuse, as we pull together and howl and love and live. Randa Jarrar, author of A Map of Home

Dirty River is a candid and comic view from the tattooed underbelly of contemporary life. There is no syrup in this survivor's tale, yet the sun does shine through these shadows, making you cheer for the hero(ine) in her odyssey to know her true self. Jewelle Gomez, author of The Gilda Stories Dirty River will give you back the life you stole and saved: your own. In the tradition of June Jordan's Soldier, Audre Lorde's Zami, Asha Bandele's Something Like Beautiful, and Staceyann Chin's The Other Side of Paradise, Dirty River is a memoir that will make you itch all over while you read it and emerge having shed another layer of internalized doubt. You are brave enough to face this honest, transformative work, because you are brave enough to be who you are. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's newest book is the powerful, badass, and important story of a young queer femme of color's coming of age on her own terms. Intersectional and glittering and raw, this book has biteit's a kind of primal yell for all us survivors of abuse, as we pull together and howl and love and live. Randa Jarrar, author of A Map of Home Dirty River goes above and beyond being a story of survival; it is a manifesto for those of us who have also been walking, scantily clad, down dark alleys for most of our lives. Lambda Literary Dirty River is a biracial-abuse-survivor-queer-femme-working-class-immigrant-anarchist-punk bomb that explodes the myth of LGBT sameness. The Globe and Mail If you've been looking for more stories about badass queer women of color, get this book yesterday. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha tells the tale of running away to Canada with what she could stuff into two backpacks and discovering queer anarchopunk while grappling with her past. She's relatable, funny, and brave; we need more of these stories. Book Riot A brilliant book ... Piepzna-Samarasinha challenges traditional narratives around gender, domesticity, and motherhood with a more specific focus on her journey to separate from her abusive mother and give birth to herself as a mixed brown, working class, disabled femme. Bitch Media In this transformative memoir, Piepzna-Samarasinha details being a queer, disabled woman of color coming of age among young queer punks in Toronto, running from the abuse of her past. This tragicomic tale is filled with what activists now call intersectionality, but in terms of literature, it s raw and passionate and wrenching -- and it belongs on shelves next to Audre Lorde's Zami or the pioneering This Bridge Called My Back. The Advocate

Author Information

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled femme writer and performer of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent. She is the author of the poetry collections Love Cake and Consensual Genocide and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home.

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