The ArQuives Digital Exhibitions

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

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Title

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

Subject

Memoir of queer disabled person of colour and abuse survivor

Description

In 1996, poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, carrying only two backpacks, caught a Greyhound bus in America and ran away to Canada. They ended up in Toronto, where they were welcomed by a community of queer punks of colour offering promises of love and revolution, yet they remained haunted by the reasons she left home in the first place. This passionate, riveting memoir is a mixtape of dreams and nightmares, of immigration court lineups and queer South Asian dance nights; it is an intensely personal road map and an intersectional, tragicomic tale that reveals how a disabled queer woman of colour and abuse survivor navigates the dirty river of the not-so-distant past and, as the subtitle suggests, "dreams their way home."

ISBN 9781551526003

Creator

Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi

Publisher

Arsenal Pulp Press

Date

2015

Format

Book: softcover

Language

English

Type

Physical Object

Identifier

Call Number: 2.21 PIE DIR 2015

Citation

Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi, “Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home,” The ArQuives Digital Exhibitions, accessed August 14, 2026, https://digitalexhibitions.arquives.ca/items/show/3581.