The Way Disabled People Love Each Other

by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Genres: Poetry, Disability, Queer, LGBT, Mental Health, Autistic Spectrum Disorder, Nonfiction

128 pages, Paperback

Published April 7, 2026

About the author

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a Toronto and Oakland-based poet, writer, educator and social activist. Her writing and performance art focuses on documenting the stories of queer and trans people of color, abuse survivors, mixed-race people and diasporic South Asians and Sri Lankans.

Reviews

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A new collection of fuel raged poetry from autistic disability activist Leak Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. These poems reflect the authors grief about the deaths of her abusive parents, anger at living through COVID and seeing fellow crip friends die. Her depression following the death of her friends and her hopes for persisting in a world that doesn't welcome disabled folk, especially queer and BIPOC ones. Powerful and moving and hard to put down!

[jellyfishiii · Rating 5 out of 5]

big fan! i knew i would start this and not want to put it down and i was right! idk how i didn’t cry! but ill def reread it and cry!

i’m not a poetry person but this made me want to try:

“You moved to your mom's ashram, then when the incense killed you immediately, / bought a one way ticket to minneapolis to stay with someone you'd / never seen. ‘I don't even know how to spell Minneapolis! Any venmo you / send me will go to pizza, coffee and cigarettes!’” (41)

“and the thing I am given this generous offer of forgiveness for? / A letter I sent when I was 22, stringently edited, saying Incest, and / I Have Permanent Scars on The Anterior Wall of My Vagina, / and I Love You, but Group Therapy MB? / And One Month Space? K?” (61)

“I was born to run and I made the home I deserve out of garbage / and my imagination / So can you” (75)

“I want to say, my friend is dead and they want us all to die, l know / you're shy and we both were wrecked by horrible people at an / early age, but let's just fuck before we're ghosts.” (98)

“Jess was out of bourbon and we couldn’t find soju in all of North / Carolina / But there still managed to be whiskey” (104)

oh and the titles were excellent too

i’m glad i spent too much money on this in a cool bookstore <3

[MK :)]

“Being disabled means loving the shit out of all of us
that everyone else wants to die
like, Love in a way most people never get to be loved
and then watching us die.”

“You can’t save me, but you can hold my hand.”

“Love is difficult, yes it’s work, it’s the practice of queer freedom what do you do when queer freedom is leaving?”

“I have spent the last 3 years hating that you are buried in a military cemetery but standing here I realized you were a solider just in a different kind of army. Yashna said you know she’s probably definitely organizing all those disabled vets missing a limb getting something else resting next to you casualties of America. Disabled people don't forget each other even when everybody else obliterates or never cared to know in the first place.
Disabled people use our autistic hacker skills and complete batshit wild-assed grief derangement to find cemetery row 3A3 even when the bio fam says who are you queers again?”

[Anna Samson · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a disabled poet, I love love love reading poetry by and for disabled writers. So many of these poems resonated with me. “When your friend dies like Jesus on her 33rd birthday” brought me comfort as I grieve my father’s unexpected passing, something I wasn’t expecting from a poetry collection that centres on disability. But that’s the thing about disability, it touches everything in your life and no one really gets it until they get it.

Every poem is imbued with disability justice and how it’s about taking care of everyone. Disabled love bleeds through every word of this book–the care, understanding, and support that only disabled people can give, receive, and know.

I was so lucky to hear the author speak at a virtual event recently where they did readings of some poems and shared additional context about them.

[beyondthebookcase95 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This digs under your skins and lodges itself there. It got to me and I appreciated it but ohhhh damn it also hurts to read as well. But I thanked it and kept going.

ARC from Edelweiss and publisher, all thoughts are my own.

[Bonnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection specifically focuses on disability and grief in current times. Not all the poems are created equal but the good ones are incredibly good.

[Isobel · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful

[Olga · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like it, but I couldn't find much love in it. I think it's important to acknowledge how hard living with disabilities can be without making it sound as if the lives of disabled people were exactly what mainstream narratives often claim them to be. I also had the impression that identity labels are used extensively without adding much meaning.