How do you imagine trans liberation while living in a cis world? On My Way To Liberation follows a gender nonconforming body moving through the streets of Chicago. From the sex shop to the farmers market, the family dinner table to the bookstore, trans people are everywhere, though often erased. Writing towards a trans future, H. Melt envisions a world where trans people are respected, loved and celebrated every day.
Review:
Haymarket Books recently had 90% off sale on all their ebooks, so you can bet I was all over it! This is one of the four nonfiction books I picked up and, by virtue of being a chapbook, the shortest at 28 pages.
Melt, who is trans and genderqueer, writes directly about their experience. We sit with them as they are misgendered, deadnamed, and forced to deal with injustice every day.
But they won’t stop murdering.
Stop legislating. Stop imprisoning.
Stop claiming we are ruining our
countries, families, friendships
and futures too.When every day
we awaken to
build them
anew.
I’m grateful that Melt put their lived reality down on the page for others to experience – the emotion comes through loud and clear. However I’m not the biggest fan of the poetry itself. The work’s missing oomph for me, that punch that makes you want to sit with a poem after you finish it, or go back and reread it immediately. Some of the images will rattle in my brain for a while yet but the words themselves will unfortunately fade more quickly.
Always Doing 