ISBN 978-1-83405-030-0 E-ISBN 978-1-83405-031-7 $21.95 CAN / $18.95 USA
The latest poetry collection by the award- winning author of Tonguebreaker, Care Work, and The Future Is Disabled. Preorder here (Canada) and here (United States.) Pre orders super super help my press and me. You can always order it “anywhere but amazon”- your local bookstore, Bookshop.org for online, or direct from Arsenal (or at an event.) Ask your library to buy it and tell your friends.
Released March 26/ April 7, 2026
The latest poetry collection by the award-winning author of Tonguebreaker, Care Work, and The Future Is Disabled
Lambda Award-winning poet, memoirist, and disability justice movement worker Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha returns with their long-awaited fifth collection of poems, written over five years of pandemic lockdown, during which time they lost a cherished friend and comrade and met their estranged parents’ end of life.
The Way Disabled People Love Each Other is a fierce crip reckoning with all the ways disabled people love each other, in all our complexity. A book that will speak to any kind of griever, but particularly disabled BIPOC queer trans ones sitting with the endless mass grief and possibility of this time, and those with violent family from whom we still yearn to claw out beauty from the trauma rubble. It’s a road map for survivors looking for something that’s neither a happy Hollywood ending nor a transformative justice fairy tale – not the healing we wished for, but the healing we find anyway.
This collection is a rigorous, rueful documentation of a specific time of pandemic fascist grief and possibility. Brimming with odes, elegies, and mourning songs, these poems sparkle like switchblades and offer new possibilities for love, grief, and memory.
This is Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, who always saves our lives, always steals us back to ourselves, always insists on the gritty everyday of survival. But in this particular collection of elegies, laments, spells and witness is Leah at their most June Jordan, their most generous, offering the grieving heart our grieving hearts need. -Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
Leah is our most fearless chronicler of crip life, which means they’ve got one of the biggest hearts alive in a body that also wields the fiercest pen. Their work has been a lodestar for so many of us who have had our hearts broken by ableism’s insidious and rampant effects, and this book is yet another shining pinnacle to follow – arriving, as Leah often does, at exactly the right moment. Not only does Leah know the specific and abundant universe of this heartbreak in their bones, but they also know how to transmute that brokenness into image and story, action and catharsis, solidarity and legacy. This book is a major achievement, a document that shimmers with crip survival, grief, loss, pain, love, and life. We always say about Leah that their books are urgent, of this time and the necessities of the present – but for me they are at once an ancient soothsayer, a reporter from the front lines, and the one we’ll be reading in 100 years. What can I say? They’re the best of us. -Johanna Hedva, author of How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s The Way Disabled People Love Each Other hinges on the question “Who mourns when disabled people die?” This, as Piepzna-Samarasinha knows, cannot be answered without touching this inquiry’s twin: “Who celebrates disabled life?” Every bloody, intimate, elegiac page of The Way Disabled People Love Each Other is an offering to the gods of disabled vivacity and a bullet launched another centimetre closer to that which seeks to kill us. -Cyree Jarelle Johnson, author of SLINGSHOT and WATCHNIGHT
With adept, hard-won magic, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha transforms the endlessness of disabled grief into an endlessness rooted in remembering (celestial, earthly, everywhere), loving (fiercely, wordlessly, imperfectly), and surviving (while howling and breaking). The Way Disabled People Love Each Other is what poetry is meant to be, a photobook, an altar, and a composite of community crip wisdom you return to over and over when nothing feels real and you need something that is. This is a collection where the pages sizzle, ancestors cackle and dance with you, smoke lingers in the room, and you know you’ll never have to fight alone. -Jane Shi, author of echolalia echolalia
The Way Disabled People Love Each Other: The Speak/Easy Tour
I thought about calling it the “Sad sack of shit tour” but tbd 😉 maybe this will be the unofficial nickname.
My friend Satchél said, this tour isn’t just a bunch of readings, it’s a queer disabled grief/ love ritual. yup.
Many events will include an installation of the Disabled Grief Portal Altar, an installation co-created between me and disabled visual artists to hold and honor the deaths of disabled loved ones.
