Bodymap

Praise for Bodymap

“Leah’s side eye can cut you, but her maps to working class, disabled, queer Asian home girl medicine might also save your life. At the locus of social justice, documenting survival, and the joy of sex, here are love poems to Hondas and cedar plank shacks and fucking in places where we are hated. Leah is working and working it. Hurt is here, but so is survival, and all the joy and mascara running beauty it affords.”
— Bao Phi, author, Sông I Sing

“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, author of Last Psalm at Sea Level

“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 of How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir and Sub Rosa

“Bodymap paints a portrait of crippled body sovereignty in a world that would rather isolate us until we disappear… The beauty of Bodymap is that it is written for us: crippled queers of color.”
— Cyree Jarelle Johnson, Deaf Poets Society.