Description
Poetry. Women's Studies. LGBT Studies. Asian American Studies. BODYMAP continues Leah's meditation on survival and what it means to be a queer woman of colour in North America, while also striving to document small moments of the body's resistance, and legacy. BODYMAP is divided into five sections. Evidence opens with poems that document transformative love and desire through a queer partnership's evolution and dissolution. Crip World contains poems exploring sick and disabled queer experience through body stories. Hard Girls is a mapping of tough femininity in the bodies of the poet's lovers and comrades. Wrong Is Not Yours contains the political, from the struggles of friends crossing the border to the choice made in claiming a Sri Lankan name. The final section, What kind of ancestor do you want to be?, explores ancestry and queer parenting.
"The poems [in BODYMAP] cover a lot of ground, but they never lose the unwavering voice. They never lose the strength, the drive, the relentless pushing and scraping and grasping for more. Leah's activist spirit and tender queer heart fill the pages, every one. . . . [T]he way Leah writes let me see her, too, in all of her glory and splendor and low points. Her poems go where other poems so often can't or won't."—Carmen Rios
"If you read poetry, this book is a reminder why you love it. If you don't read poetry, you should read BODYMAP because it's accessible and beautiful, written with deep maturity and open-hearted honesty. If you're a long-time fan [of Piepzna-Samarasinha], you won't be disappointed as she covers familiar topics with precise and vivid language. If you haven't read Piepzna-Samarasinha's work before, BODYMAP is an excellent place to start."—Elinor Zimmerman
"These poems are a gift for your love for self, your love itself and everyone you love. It is rare that a poet priestess offers words that allow us to emerge reborn with dirt, glitter and tenderness...Revere it. Revel in it. Read it again and again!"—Alexis Pauline Gumbs
"BODYMAP uses the alchemy of the voice on the page to transform words into an ache in the pit of me. I want what these poems demand: to be free to love & die, to be resurrected in time, & to be restored by desire. Piepzna-Samarasinha has located where this body houses the smirk learned from the sidewalk, the reason to do the difficult, and the blessings for the best worst thing."—Meg Day
"Sharp, yet remarkably compassionate, Piepzna-Samarasinha knows that the poem is no place for tidy inquiry and easy answers. She offers her own tenacious guts and veins on each and every page. Only someone who understands rage and reconciliation and blood and bone can write like this."—Amber Dawn
Author Bio
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is the author of two poetry collections published by TSAR Publications, LOVE CAKE (2011), winner of the Lambda Award, and BODYMAP (2015). Her poems have appeared in Prism International, SAMAR, Jaggery, glittertongue, AS:US, Locked Horn, Nepatlera, and 580 Split. She's also performed at NYU Pride Week, Carleton University, Ottawa, University of Toronto, and gave keynote performance at UC Riverside's TABLA conference of queer and trans students. She continues to tour and perform widely. In 2013, she was named one of the Autostraddle Alternative Hot Queer 105.
Author City: OAKLAND, CA USA