The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs Reviews

• 
  Danika at The Lesbrary

  Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is the author of two of my favourite books: Bodymap, a collection of poetry; and Care Work, a collection of essays about disability justice. So it's no surprise that I loved their new essay collection about disability justice during the pandemic and in the future.
  
  This book is written for a queer, BIPOC, neurodivergent, disabled audience, which is also the focus of disability justice. Not only does Piepzna-Samarasinha discuss their experiences as a queer femme disabled person of colour, but in this collection, she also writes about recently realizing they're autistic and how that interweaves through those experiences.
  
  I took so many notes while reading this that I could keep spouting off bullet points of what I think is powerful and essential from The Future is Disabled, but it would be a very long review and would not be as good as just reading it. I always get so much out of Piepzna-Samarasinha's books, and I'm looking forward to rereading it to get even more.
  
  I can't recommend this book highly enough. Every book I've read about disability justice has expanded my mind and made me see new possibilities for the world and the way I live in it, and I know I've only scraped the surface of the wisdom and collective knowledge of this movement.
  
  Full review at
  the Lesbrary.
• 
  Nathan Shuherk

  A little less theory based than Care Work, and some very important and practical guides and advice in navigating the disability world in a time that seems to be making it harder and harder to exist. The “future” as a focus in this book was a very interesting lens but left me wanting more attention, especially surrounding climate change (it is certainly addressed often, but could’ve been even more prominent). For those that loved Care Work, I’d be confident you’ll love this as well.
• 
  Ashton

  beautiful, wonderful, incredibly meaningful and impactful. maybe(?) easier to read than Care Work for anyone looking to get into disability justice, but still contains in-depth, nuanced, and crucial conversations. there’s so much i love about this book. the way leah references and cites other DJ writers and thinkers really reinforces how broad and interconnected DJ work is, plus it leaves the reader with a lot of jumping-off points to dive deeper. some standout chapters to me include: chapter 1: we were maybe not going to save the world, but we were going to save each other - how disabled mutual aid is different than a led mutual aid, chapter 9: i wanna be with you everywhere (and i am) - disability justice art as freedom portal, chapter 11: autistic long-form, short-form, no-form, exchotextia: autistic poetic forms, and the entirety of part three (the disabled future.) there are so many points i highlighted in this book and will undoubtedly be coming back to. highly recommend.
• 
  Sarah Cavar

  An insightful account of the origins of and ongoing discourse around disability justice, as a movement rapidly entering mainstream discourse despite/because of COVID. The meta narrative of disability justice is underlined by the intensely personal account of its originator, Stacey Park Milburn’s, untimely death, and its impact on Piepzna-Samarasinha. There are some excellent insights into crip craft/writing and the beginnings of a rich DJ intertext of care practices highly relevant in an ongoing pandemic.
  
  That said, the best parts of this book were weakened by its unwillingness to enter deeper theoretical conversations. That isn’t to say I expect this book to be a “theory text,” far from it, but I noticed the brief chapters ending prematurely rather than expounding on (for example) crip linguistics, disabled knowledge/practices in relation to mainstream publishing, and the shifting meanings of “access” and “collective living” and even “love” when enacted in increasingly precarious contexts. We’d get so, so close to a generative and underdiscussed topic, and then we’d move on, leaving some chapters thin and unfinished. I wish this book’s topics had been narrowed and deepened, especially in its engagement with other contemporary disabled writing (and that some kind of reference list / bibliography had been included!!!)
• 
  Sarah

  Not to be dramatic but Leah Lakshimi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s work has changed the way I see myself and the world around me !!!!
• 
  Harmony Williams

  This is one of those foundational, life-changing books for me. I've had PTSD for 15+ years, chronic pain for 5 years, identified as disabled for 4 (ever since I started using a wheelchair), but like many disabled and chronically ill people I've been isolated. It often feels like I'm stumbling in the dark and this book is a light to me. It reminds me that I am not alone. It orients me as to the current issues and the possibilities and the freedom disabled life can be. It gives me a base from which I can build and launch myself not as a lone person, but as a part of a community.
• 
  leo :}

  i’m not sure i have words for how beautiful and impactful this book was for me. gonna get care work immediately!!
• 
  Sonia

  Affirming and insightful and authentic in the best sense of that complicated word: messy, sometimes a bit meandering, grieving COVID as a "disabling event" and all of us who knew that isolation before the pandemic and will know it after. But ultimately hopeful, somehow, anyway.
• 
  Hilary

  [Thank you Arsenal Pulp for a gifted copy]
  
  Leah begins: “I believe in the disabled future.” I remember dreams of something like this, where disabled bodyminds are celebrated and respected and, to use language that Leah themself chooses, allowed to come home.
  
  This book. It’s a mourning (because how many disabled people have we lost to the pandemic and medical violence and lack of access to the care they need?); it’s a catalog (because the contributions of disabled people are so often ignored, even as abled people learned crip ways that have always existed as a way of survival); it’s an act of love (because how else to describe how Leah always manages to write words that make me go yes, yes, yes). Leah herself also titles it as prophecies, because even under the weight of grief, this is first and foremost about crip dreaming, about creation, about fashioning better worlds where all bodyminds are made to feel safe, welcome, and dignified—and keep dreaming, Leah tells us, please keep dreaming—they dare us, guide us lovingly, to imagine our answer to the question: “What future would you create if you leaned into the wild crip imaginings you maybe have not let yourself imagine?”
  
  If you are disabled, read this to be held in your grief, pain, and dreaming. If you are not disabled, this book is here to hold you too, and to remind you to be humbled by the glorious ways that crip bodyminds traverse this earth, and that the ferocity of our beings is something that cannot be ignored.
  
  Arsenal Pulp—please keep publishing disabled voices! We love you for it.
• 
  Shannon

  Another must read from Canadian disability justice activist, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha! This collection of essays provides great insight into the unique challenges disabled people faced during the pandemic and especially BIPOC and queer people.
  
  Told with great empathy and passion, this #ownvoices work resonated deeply with me as a fellow neurodivergent disabled person. I really enjoyed learning about different strides being made in terms of accommodations and community (Assistive Device Libraries in particular sound so amazing!) as well as the areas that we still need to keep fighting for changes. Great on audio and highly recommended!
• 
  Ma'Belle

  I can't recommend this enough. Leah pulls no punches and refuses to coddle "the ableds." They challenge me in great ways - to consider the half-assed ways I've thought about accessibility, to hear the word "disabled" as a positive verb, and even to question why I have defaulted to identifying as able-bodied, especially in recent years as I've suffered from several chronic conditions.
• 
  benjie !

  i am Loving this book! i was so excited to have access to a local author so early after its release. it has so far been a beautiful and validating narrative to read. ive had to put it down for awhile but i look so forward to getting back into it!
• 
  Hannah

  One of those essential and beautiful books that you dog-ear every. single. page. of
• 
  sarah panic

  Everything I didn’t know I needed and so, so much more.
• 
  Jaye Elizabeth Elijah

  the future is disabled as in the newly disabled & those new to the political identity of disability need to see themselves in the future by seeing themselves in the past
  
  required reading for lineages of care; the disabled will inherit the earth
• 
  Carla Harris

  Ooof. Thanks to Peipzna-Samarasinha, for exploring topics of traumatic amnesia, & definitions of codependency & interdependency. I Especially appreciated discussion on the need to relearn healthy behaviours after having been abused physically & mentally.
• 
  Tamar

  I knew I had to read this book, but really postponed it because it always feels so intimidating to read something non-fiction that is not a memoir. But then I realized I could listen to it as an audiobook and that helped a lot! I read it over a few days and loved it so much. Leah's voice is so engaging and at times adds humor to the text, their reading it themselves made it so much more warm and fleshy. And the content was so, so relevant in my life. I didn't know a lot about disability justice yet, my knowledge about disability stuff was mostly more the disability rights stuff, about accessibility and the social model etc. So this blew my mind. I have always felt a lot of hesitance about the idea of interdependence and mutual care, and I loved how Leah is very real about it and addresses the very legitimate concerns I had about it, but also made clear how my everyday life is already instilled with interdependence, so I'm already doing it, and it's good to be aware of that and to think it through, to see the beauty of it and be able to consciously address the pitfalls.
  
  I do want to read more about it in Care Work though (which I hadn't read yet), to understand more about the difference between disability rights and disability justice. I think I understand the difference in broad lines, and how a focus on independence by paying often more marginalized people to work for you is actually a very white and privileged thing, just like the focus on "shiny" technology, but I think there's probably much more to it than that.
  
  I also loved the chapter on migration, and the one about disabled writing. I hadn't realized how relevant this is to my own life. When I saw the title of the part about art I had my usual first reaction of "I'm not an arts person, this does not relate to me", forgetting that I actually want to write a book and writing is art too. It spoke DIRECTLY to my own experience and hesitance about starting the writing process. About the abled gaze that I find so hard to shake off, about the guilt of not doing more immediately relevant volunteer work instead of writing. So that was very helpful!
  
  And the chapter about migration, that we cannot GTFO do easily as people seem to think. As a person who would love to and has had seemingly real opportunity to move to another country but "chickened out", I felt so seen. It has taken me five years to create a good life here since becoming disabled, it's still not done as I'm still working the system to get some final mobility devices and my heart sinks when I think about having to do all of this work again somewhere else where I don't know the language, don't understand the procedures, and don't have any network yet to fall back on. It would be so lonely. Yet it keeps nagging on the back of my mind. At least now I feel more seen and understood about it. It is do good to read a book all from the Crip point of view.
  
  And as a white person I still think I've only scratched the surface of getting to understand more of the BIPOC crip experience, but I'm glad LL just let us tag along instead of chewing everything out for us. I think it's the only way to do this, not centering white people as a readership. And I feel grateful for this book and for the disability justice movement. (Why does it always feel so awkward to say this stuff from a white privileged position... Well anyway, better awkward than avoid it I guess?)
• 
  Amanda

  I came to this book already familiar with and a fan of
  Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
  Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, a book that quietly and softly changed my thinking and my world view, shifting the basic foundations of how I viewed community, care, rest, access, sustainability within movements, and accommodations.
  
  This book is similarly rich and mind expanding. Mutual aid. The long term effects of Covid. Finding and making community. Real talk about the difficulties of organizing together. Finding common ground within a movement. Making space for knowing yourself so that you can define and hold appropriate boundaries and request accommodations. The history of the disability justice movement. The importance of JOY.
  
  This is a book I will continue to think about for a long time and I will return to reread as I absorb and reflect on what they are saying. What a gift to the disability justice movement to have this history captured and to all organizers to have this wisdom shared.
• 
  Kathy

  I shall finish reviewing at some point. Listening to Leah Lakshmi Peipzna-Samarasinha just feels like listening to a friend.
  
  I really enjoyed the last chapter, on cripping Ugliness and what Uglification means. I'm surprised there was no discussion of
  Tressie McMillan Cottom's Beauty essay, since the rest of Leah's writing is so well-researched. Adding to that—an accessibility queen walking the walk (ha), putting the footnotes in the audio narration! Thankful for that. My leading gripe about nonfiction audiobooks is that they seem to frequently treat footnotes as not fit for narration. I wanna know when stuff is being cited and from whom!
  
  I did not realize Stacey Park Milburn was Korean American. Park, duh! Of course another of the DJ movement's lights is Asian American, and of course she was queer. Of course one of the most compassionate and expansive activists in this sphere, where caregiving IS the work, was a queer Asian American woman who taught (and fed!) her community toward healing. Leah honors Milburn and their friendship in reflections that urge us toward dreaming better lives for everyone, a really tender and transformative grief that really lifts this text. The chapter left me feeling like I knew Stacey and wanted to celebrate her legacy too. Which can't be said about all autobiographical-prone essayists.
• 
  Kate

  || THE FUTURE IS DISABLED ||
  •
  "At the core of my work and life is the believe that disabled wisdom is the key to our survival and expansion. Crip genius is what will keep us all alive and bring us home to the just and survivable future we all need."
  •
  "Community building isn't always seen as "real activism" but the work we do to create disabled Black and brown community spaces, online forums, hashtags, and artwork is lifesaving because it creates space for disabled BIPOC to come out as disabled."
  •
  THE FUTURE IS DISABLED Piepzna-Samarasinha writes of living in the pandemic as a disabled femme of color in an ableist world. Of disability justice, the care crisis and disabled wisdom making survival in the furure a possibility. This book is a love letter to disabled folks, and an informative read for anyone interested in disabilty justice, the care crisis and more.
  ✍🏻
  What a gift and vital tool this book is. That's coming from an able bodied person interested in disability studies. This would definitely be even more meaningful to disabled BIPOC. I read this essay collection very slowly, digesting all Piepzna-Samarasinha had to say and found it an incredible moving and necessary book. Its written clearly and concisely, and offers much knowledge on disability justice for now and the future. I highlighted so much of this book. A great nonfiction November pick but honestly a great pick in general.
  
  Gifted from the publisher opinions are my own.
  
  For more of my book content check out
  instagram.com/bookalong
• 
  Erika Derr

  This book was incredibly powerful and instructive for me in deepening my awareness and understanding of disability justice. I appreciate Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s deep dives into a wide range of DJ concepts, without turning away from the profound complexity of seeking to achieve full inclusion and community with complicated human beings. Will definitely be one of putting their earlier works, Care Work, on my reading list.
• 
  tessa s

  This might be my favorite theory piece of the year. It is incredibly intentional in its mixture of embodied theory and praxis. I would describe this as theory meant for sipping instead of gulping. I appreciated the structure of this piece, it flowed and meandered by including moments of disabled joy and reflections.
  
  This piece is FILLED with meaningful ways to build our disabled future + present.
• 
  Dynah

  Loooooved this. Not that I had any doubt I would. I can't name everything I liked or this review would be as long as the book, but something that runs throughout and will stick with me is the reminder that crip joy, community, and resistance/activism can be found in any ways we support each other (texts! couch/driveway hangs!). <3 <3 <3
• 
  Koko

  Have not been disappointed by a Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha book yet. So much to be treasured in this one and comfort to be found. I loved the discussion of joy and beauty as a form of care towards the end.
• 
  Erin

  Although this book is not written for everyone -- it's especially for the QTBIPOC disabled community -- this is a book that can help everyone to learn, celebrate, grieve, and challenge societal narratives. Those who it's "not written for" may even have the most to learn from it, if we can lean in.
• 
  Chelsea House

  Once again feeling so seen and empowered by this author ❤️
• 
  Mo

  I can't state strongly enough how much I love this book.
• 
  Senshin

  Having APD and misophonia I had to stop listening to this audio book. The same word is used over and over and it drives me nuts. Otherwise a really good book. I'll try and finish it over time.