← Back to discovery

Dirty River

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

2015240 pagesabout 4–6 hours
2015
first published
  • 2016Arsenal Pulp Press · 240 pages · ENGISBN 9781551526010
  • 2015Arsenal Pulp Press · 240 pages · ENGISBN 9781551526003

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, yet remained haunted by the reasons she left home in the first place. This passionate and riveting memoir is a mixtape of dreams and nightmares, of immigration court lineups and queer South Asian dance nights; it reveals how a disabled queer woman of color and abuse survivor navigates the dirty river of the past and, as the subtitle suggests, "dreams her way home."

How do you feel?