Bodymap

Poetry. Women's Studies. LGBT Studies. Asian American Studies. BODYMAP continues Leah's meditation on survival and what it means to be a queer woman of colour in North America, while also striving to document small moments of the body's resistance, and legacy. BODYMAP is divided into five sections. Evidence opens with poems that document transformative love and desire through a queer partnership's evolution and dissolution.Crip World contains poems exploring sick and disabled queer experience through body stories.Hard Girls is a mapping of tough femininity in the bodies of the poet's lovers and comrades.Wrong Is Not Yours contains the political, from the struggles of friends crossing the border to the choice made in claiming a Sri Lankan name. The final section,What kind of ancestor do you want to be?, explores ancestry and queer parenting.

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 ofBodymap, Love Cake and Consensual Genocide and the co-editor ofThe 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. Her first memoir, Dirty River, is forthcoming from Arsenal Pulp Press in fall 2015.