Books › I Hope We Choose Love
I Hope We Choose Love
144 pages
A tender, urgent plea for radical compassion and transformative justice in the face of community heartbreak.
What it feels like
Reading this collection feels like sitting in a quiet room with a trusted friend after a long, exhausting protest. It is a deeply intimate and contemplative experience, moving at a steady pace that allows the weight of its philosophical questions to settle into your bones. The prose is lyrical and fiercely vulnerable, blending the raw honesty of confessional poetry with the sharp clarity of political essay. It holds space for the profound grief of fractured communities and systemic violence, yet refuses to surrender to despair. Instead, it wraps the reader in a tender, urgent atmosphere of radical compassion. This book is a balm for activists, queer and trans readers, and anyone yearning for a more forgiving, loving approach to justice.
- Mood
- intimate
- contemplative
- tender
- heartbreaking
- hopeful
- Tone
- earnest
- vulnerable
- compassionate
- provocative
- urgent
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- transformative justice · radical forgiveness · queer and trans survival · community healing · loving through apocalypse
- The writing
- Lyrical, confessional, and fiercely articulate, blending poetic resonance with sharp political critique.
- The arc
- Moves from the deep grief of fractured communities and systemic violence toward a fragile but resilient hope for radical love.
- Who it's for
- Activists, queer and trans readers, and anyone exhausted by call-out culture seeking a more compassionate framework for justice.
Content notes
- discussions of trauma
- systemic violence
- abuse
- transphobia
- suicide ideation
About the book
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.
Description from Open Library.
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