This article was last updated on April 16, 2022
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Another Story Bookshop and Arsenal Pulp Press celebrate the launch of Dirty River – the long awaited memoir by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.
Sunday, October 18th @ 7pm
Beit Zeitoun
612 Markham Street
Free – all welcome!
1990s BIPOC hits DJed by DJ Syrus Marcus Ware
access info:
please come fragrance free!
closest accessible subway is Bathurst
wc accessible but not the bathroom
please email brownstargirl@gmail.com if you need ASL or childcare
lots of seating and space
Co-sponsored by the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto
about the book:
Please come celebrate the long awaited launch of Dirty River, LLPS’s 10 years in the making memoir!
In 1996, poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, carrying only two backpacks, caught a Greyhound bus and ran away to Toronto, where she was welcomed by a community of queer punks of colour offering promises of love and revolution, yet she remained haunted by the reasons she left home in the first place. This passionate, riveting memoir is a mixtape of dreams and nightmares, of immigration court lineups and queer South Asian dance nights; it is an intensely personal road map and an intersectional, tragicomic tale that reveals how a disabled queer woman of colour and abuse survivor navigates the dirty river of the not-so-distant past and, as the subtitle suggests, “dreams her way home.”
About Dirty River;
“Fierce and seductive. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is the kind of writer who reminds us with every turn of phrase and every turn of the page that art exorcises trauma, running can be good medicine, and the freedom to be our very own freaks is the happiest ending we might ever hope for. Ariel Gore, author of The End of Eve and Atlas of the Human Heart
“Dirty River will give you back the life you stole and saved: your own. In the tradition of June Jordan’s Soldier, Audre Lorde’s Zami, Asha Bandele’s Something Like Beautiful, and Staceyann Chin’s The Other Side of Paradise, Dirty River is a memoir that will make you itch all over while you read it and emerge having shed another layer of internalized doubt. You are brave enough to face this honest, transformative work, because you are brave enough to be who you are.” Alexis Pauline Gumbs, co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering
“Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s newest book is the powerful, badass, and important story of a young queer femme of color’s coming of age on her own terms. Intersectional and glittering and raw, this book has biteit’s a kind of primal yell for all us survivors of abuse, as we pull together and howl and love and live.” Randa Jarrar, author of A Map of Home
Dirty River is a candid and comic view from the tattooed underbelly of contemporary life. There is no syrup in this survivor’s tale, yet the sun does shine through these shadows, making you cheer for the heroine in her odyssey to know her true self. Jewelle Gomez, author of The Gilda Stories
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