I Hope We Choose Love

American Library Association Stonewall Book Awards Honor Book; Winner, Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature

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, acclaimed poet and essayist 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.

AUTHOR

Kai Cheng Thom

Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, performance artist, and community healer in Toronto. She is the author of the novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir Metonymy Press), the essay collection I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes at the End of the World (an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book), the poetry collection a place called No Homeland (an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book in 2018), and the children’s picture books From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea, illustrated by Kai Yun Ching and Wai-Yant Li, and For Laika, the Dog Who Learned the Names of the Stars, illustrated by Kai Yun Ching. Kai Cheng won the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers in 2017.

Reviews

A candid and intimate collection of poetry and essays calling for compassion and understanding when exploring the nuances of violence, pain and forgiveness. –Ms. Magazine
Many writers talk about wanting to change the world or open eyes with their work, but it takes a special writer to actually do that. Kai Cheng Thom is that writer. With I Hope We Choose Love, Thom utilizes her seemingly bottomless empathy and mesmerizing intellect to both examine and excavate the ways we deal with trauma, abuse, activism, transphobia, and racism. This book will both change the way you look at our damaged world and inspire you to imagine new ways to nurse that world back to health. We are so damn lucky to have this book, to have Kai Cheng Thom. -Alicia Elliott, author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
In this brave and skillfully written collection of essays, Kai Cheng Thom dares to be really honest – to write truths that go beyond easy orthodoxy to her and our own messy, complex, real stories. As a suicide survivor and someone who does work around suicide in queer and femme communities, I deeply appreciate her clarity about how suicide shows up in queer and trans communities and the ways in which social justice, queer, trans and/or Black and brown communities turn on and hurt each other while trying to keep ourselves safe. This is a brave book, and 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
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. I hope readers will choose to take up Kai Cheng Thom’s fiery call to arms. -Vivek Shraya, author of I’m Afraid of Men and even this page is white