In these poems, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores how queer people of color resist and transform violence through love and desire. Remembering and testifying about the damage caused by the racial profiling of South Asian and Arab people post 9/11, border crossings and internal and external wars in Sri Lanka and the diaspora, LOVE CAKE also documents the persistence of survival and beauty—especially the dangerous beauty found in queer people of color loving and desiring. LOVE CAKE maps the joys and challenges of reclaiming the body and sexuality after violence, examining a family history of violence with compassion and celebrating the resilient, specific ways we create new families, take our bodies back, love, fight, and transform violence.
Available from Mawenzi House
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-894770-69-9
104 pages
Publication Date: September 2011
Praise for Love Cake
“If you haven’t read any of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha’s incredible feminist essays, you’re missing out. Her poetry is as unflinchingly political as her non fiction, but it also touches on the more personal territory of her life as a queer disabled femme Sri Lankan artist.”
— Bitch Magazine
“Only Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha could concoct the secret recipe for Love Cake. One layer of escaped working class girl from Worcester, MA; one layer of long lost Tamil woman returning to her Sri Lankan roots; sweet cream of sexy queer femme on top; unexpected bite into her bittersweet love & trouble triumph healing rebellion. No one knows quite how she makes it; just that we can’t get enough.”
– Aya de Leon, Director June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, UC Berkeley
“Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Love Cake is a book I want to carry with me when I need to remember my body, to remember our ancestors, to rebuild home. Leah’s poems are rebel songs and love songs that bear witness and fight back. Love Cake is as miraculous, as mean, as stunning as every queer brown girl who survives.”
— Qwo-Li Driskill, author of Walking with Ghosts: Poems
“Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Love Cake is a book of poems chronicling the steady kind of love, the grown-up guide to visioning yourself whole with our homemade stories on one arm and our slutty brown femme sister on the other. Love Cake is a necessary book that will heal our communities after heartbreak and push us towards creating our own dreams of liberation.”
— Ching-In Chen