The Disability Book Archive

[ID: A book cover. The title and subtitle, “Dirty River” in large black italics, and “A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home” in smaller, regular font, are in a pale yellow strip across the top of the cover. The author’s name, “Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha”, is directly below the strip, to the left, in small, purple capitals.
The background is art of a factory scene against a yellow sky. A factory can be be seen to the right,, and a train track over a river stretches across the centre.
In the foreground, art of Piepzna. They have brown skin, long, black hair that is moving in the wind, are wearing a short, blue dress with a belt and have a cane in their left hand. Two large purple flowers can be seen at their feet, one on either side. /end]

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Content Warning:

• Child Abuse
• Incest
• Domestic Abuse
• Ableism
• Sexual Harassment
• Drug Use
• Police Brutality
• Colonisation

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Summary:

In 1996, poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, carrying only two backpacks, caught a Greyhound bus in America and ran away to Canada. She ended up in Toronto, where she was welcomed by a community of queer punks of colour offering promises of love and revolution, yet she remained haunted by the reasons she left home in the first place. This passionate, riveting memoir is a mixtape of dreams and nightmares, of immigration court lineups and queer South Asian dance nights; it is an intensely personal road map and an intersectional, tragicomic tale that reveals how a disabled queer woman of colour and abuse survivor navigates the dirty river of the not-so-distant past and, as the subtitle suggests, “dreams her way home.”

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Notes:

Piepzna-Samarasinha has written and edited ten books in total. Some of their other work includes: Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice and The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs, both of which can be found in The Archive.

If you would like more information on the author, please follow this link to their website.

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Archivist Comments:

So I’ve tagged this as “fibromyalgia” and “autism” because I believe that those are the conditions that the author lives with. However, please correct me if I am wrong.

Piepzna is a name that kept cropping up when I was first putting together this list, so I did a little research into their work and I have to say, I think I’m a fan. /lh

I have linked to their website in the notes if you want to find out more information about the author themselves and their work.

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