Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

This is an author I have been meaning to read for a while, and this was a stunning way to first encounter them. A collection of poems and performance pieces that digs into ALL the intersections of marginalization of being a disabled queer femme of color. Being overlooked and left behind by everyone all the time for being disabled, but then even being left out of various disabled groups for being queer, or those groups centering whiteness. But Piepzna-Samarasinha is here to choose love, for show more themself and their community, fighting for recognition for elders and ancestors, extending tools and compassion to the newly disabled, working themselves past "normal" endurance to create spaces for their community to thrive. An amazing collection. show less

I believe in transformative justice like I believe in abolishing prisons and police, like I believe in a utopian anarchist society; it's mostly theory and there are many steps to achieving these far-fetched goals and dreams. There are a lot of steps we have to take to get there, and they make take generations if ever to achieve, but there are people out there doing the work to make it happen. The ends don't justify the means; the ends are the means. I think this is where anarchists and show more communists disagree.

Beyond Survival is three hundred plus pages of writings by people who have put in the work, against all odds. There are stories of success (few), stories of learning from failures (many), interviews with people who have been knee deep in accountability processes for decades, and more. Progress has been made and there are pockets in the world where communities don't call the police or rely on the injustice system when someone has been wronged. They get together as human beings and figure out what works best for everyone involve to try and make things as right as possible.

As much as I thoroughly enjoyed this book there were definitely parts that I skipped through because I found them irrelevant or boring, but that doesn't mean everyone will. This is the kind of book that I'm glad to own because I know (hope?) there will be many times where I take it off the shelf and use it to help guide my dream of creating a better world.

Every community should have at least one copy of this book, and you can order yours from AK Press. show less

This books was really incredible--it hurt but there's also so much heart and I literally couldn't put it down. I read it in like two hours in the middle of the night, and couldn't sleep for a little bit afterwards because it had wriggled into my brain and the narration style wouldn't leave me alone. It like. Oozes compassion, which is a bad word to describe it, but that's all that comes to mind. The compassion like seeps out of this book and into your brain and I walked away from it wanting show more to think more about compassion and justice, about compassion and survival, and about how that survival is made, like its very building blocks. I feel so inadequate writing this review, but it was so good and I just want more people to read it and feel their own versions of what I felt reading it. show less

Just powerful, and with so many resources and great ideas. Piepzna-Samarasinha does an amazing job of drawing together QTBIPOC crip brilliance and really exploring care from this perspective. Even just being exposed to ideas around different ways that care happens between disabled people, especially in disabled, working class queer and trans communities of color, is both theoretically rich and practically useful and hugely important. They also include actual resources on things like show more accessible venues, and recognize all of that work, of organizing those resources and then enacting them, among others, as labor that needs to be addressed and reciprocated within our means. Strongly, strongly encourage folks to read this, as it's given me a lot to chew on and more places to go from reading it. show less