From Powells.com
Our favorite books of the year.
Staff Pick
Instead of focusing outward at the society that harms us, Kai Cheng Thom excavates the ways trans and queer folks reenact our traumas on each other and confronts the troublesome questions needed to forge a better path. How do we learn from the past when our foremothers have disappeared? What do we do when the revolution hasn't happened yet but babies do? How do we liberate our liberation from the cold heart of neoliberalism? What does it mean to truly abolish the carceral logic of the state within ourselves? How can we, together in the apocalypse, truly choose love?
With more books like this one, I think we just might. Recommended By Cosima C., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
What can we hope for at the end of the world? What can we trust in when community has broken our hearts? What would it mean to pursue justice without violence? How can we love in the absence of faith?
In a heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and prose poems, blending the confessional, political, and literary, Kai Cheng Thom dives deep into the questions that haunt social movements today. With the author's characteristic eloquence and honesty, I Hope We Choose Love proposes heartfelt solutions on the topics of violence, complicity, family, vengeance, and forgiveness. Taking its cues from contemporary thought leaders in the transformative justice movement such as adrienne maree brown and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, this provocative book is a call for nuance in a time of political polarization, for healing in a time of justice, and for love in an apocalypse.
Review
"The essays and poems in Kai Cheng Thom's I Hope We Choose Love forge a fiery path through the violence and negative messages the trans community simmers in....Thom writes unflinchingly, a marginalized voice of laudable might." Shelf Awareness
Review
"This enlightened essay collection is both an invocation of and invitation to love — with intention — as a way to repair, rebuild and reimagine new worlds." Vivek Shraya, author of I'm Afraid of Men and even this page is white
Review
"...an essential text for everyone trying like hell to create something that will come after the end of the world. Read it, and prepare to have your mind challenged and opened." Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
About the Author
Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, performer, and community worker based in Toronto, unceded Indigenous territory. She is the winner of the 2017 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBT Writers and a two-time Lambda Literary nominee. She has published widely, including the novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, the poetry collection a place called No Homeland, and (with Wai-Yant Li and Kai Yun Ching) the children's picture book From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea.