Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home

Author: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press (2015)

In 1996, poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha ran away from America with two backpacks and ended up in Canada, where she discovered queer anarchopunk love and revolution, yet remained haunted by the reasons she left home in the first place. This passionate and riveting memoir is a mixtape of dreams and nightmares, of immigration court lineups and queer South Asian dance nights; it reveals how a disabled queer woman of color and abuse survivor navigates the dirty river of the past and, as the subtitle suggests, "dreams her way 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 hero(ine) in her odyssey to know her true self."

–Jewelle Gomez

"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

"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 bite―it's a kind of primal yell for all us survivors of abuse, as we pull together and howl and love and live."

–Randa Jarrar

"Dirty River goes above and beyond being a story of survival; it is a manifesto for those of us who have also been walking, scantily clad, down dark alleys for most of our lives."

–Lambda Literary