New York Launch and Celebration, Bodymap, by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Bluestockings proudly presents the New York launch and celebration party for Bodymap by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha!! Thursday April 2, 2015 doors 7 PM, performance 7:30 Bluestockings Books, 172 Allan St, New York NY With opening performances by Liz Latty and Sabina Ibarrola! Access info: Wheelchair accessible, space gets tight but we will prioritze chair access and tape off laneways. Lots of seats. 2nd Avenue subway is closest. Closest accessible subway is. Small, tight bathroom; accessible Starbucks bathroom several blocks away. Please come fragrance free so that community members and performers can access the event. For product suggestions and more info: http://www.brownstargirl.org/blog/fragrance-free-femme-of-colour-realness-draft-15 In Bodymap, Lambda Award-winner Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha sings a queer disabled femme of colour love song filled with hard femme poetics. The first book of the author to examine disability from a queer femme-of-colour lens, Bodymap maps luscious and vulnerable terrains of queer desire, survivorhood, transformative love, sick and disabled queer genius and all the homes we claim, make and deserve. 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, "The first time I read the poems in Bodymap I moved my own body closer to sun through a window. The second time I read passages out loud to my partner and we nodded our heads with gratitude and recognition.... It is rare that a poet priestess offers words that allow us to emerge reborn with dirt, glitter and tenderness. This is one of those opportunities. Revere it. Revel in it. Read it again and again!" -Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author, creator of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist MInd "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, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir and Sub Rosa "Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Bodymap, is a cartographer's worst nightmare. In navigating through this gorgeous and complicated terrain of pages, we find ourselves amidst a landscape that refuses to be charted by the voyeur's gaze- a landscape that is defined by its own muscle memory, by the reclamation of its own shifting form, and by honoring the exquisite labour of its own heaving chest." - Annah Anti Palindrome, musician and writer "Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's 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. Rereading is not an option, it's a requisite." Meg Day, 2013 NEA fellow, author, Last Psalm at Sea Level Winner of the 2012 Lambda Literary Award, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled femme writer, teacher and performer of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan, Roma and Irish ascent. The author of Love Cake and Consensual Genocide and the co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities, her writing has been widely anthologized. She is the co-founder of the queer people of color arts incubator Mangos With Chili, a lead artist with Sins Invalid and co-founder of Toronto's Asian Arts Freedom School. In 2010 she was named one of the Feminist Press' 40 Feminists Under 40 Shaping the Future and she is a 2013 Autostraddle Alternative Hot 105 member. Her first memoir, Dirty River, is forthcoming from Arsenal Pulp Press in fall 2015.