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Book Cover for: Love Cake, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Love Cake

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Winner:Lambda Literary Award -Lesbian Poetry (2012)

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award, Lesbian Poetry, 2012
Honourable Mention, San Francisco Book Festival, Poetry, 2012

In Love Cake, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores how queer people of colour resist and transform violence through love and desire. Refusing to forget the traumas of post 9/11 Islamophobia, and Sri Lanka's civil war, Love Cake documents the persistence of survival and beauty. It maps the complicated, luscious joy of reclaiming the body and sexuality after abuse, examines a family history of violence with compassion, and celebrates the beautiful resistance of queer people of colour in love and home-making.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Tsar Publications
  • Publish Date: Sep 30th, 2011
  • Pages: 104
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.20in - 5.40in - 0.40in - 0.35lb
  • EAN: 9781894770699
  • Categories: American - GeneralLGBTQ+Canadian

About the Author

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 Bodymap, 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 colour 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, was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in fall 2015.

Praise for this book

"If you haven't read any of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha's incredible feminist essays, you're missing out. Her poetry is as unflinchingly political as her non fiction, but it also touches on the more personal territory of her life as a queer disabled femme Sri Lankan artist." --Bitch Magazine

"Only Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha could concoct the secret recipe for Love Cake. One layer of escaped working class girl from Worcester, MA; one layer of long lost Tamil woman returning to her Sri Lankan roots; sweet cream of sexy queer femme on top; unexpected bite into her bittersweet love & trouble triumph healing rebellion. No one knows quite how she makes it; just that we can't get enough." --Aya de Leon, Director June Jordan's Poetry for the People, UC Berkeley

"Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Love Cake is a book I want to carry with me when I need to remember my body, to remember our ancestors, to rebuild home. Leah's poems are rebel songs and love songs that bear witness and fight back. Love Cake is as miraculous, as mean, as stunning as every queer brown girl who survives." --Qwo-Li Driskill, author of Walking with Ghosts: Poems

"Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Love Cake is a book of poems chronicling the steady kind of love, the grown-up guide to visioning yourself whole with our homemade stories on one arm and our slutty brown femme sister on the other. Love Cake is a necessary book that will heal our communities after heartbreak and push us towards creating our own dreams of liberation." --Ching-In Chen