FALLING BACK IN LOVE WITH BEING HUMAN

Searingly intimate and affecting prose poems that offer a bridge back to hope during heartbreaking times, from the award-winning author of Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars.

"I wrote as through poetry and prayer might mean the same thing...I wrote my way through the question: What happens when we imagine loving the people - and the parts of ourselves - that we do not believe are worthy of love?"

Kai Cheng Thom grew up a Chinese Canadian transgender girl in a hostile world. As an activist, psychotherapist, conflict mediator, spiritual healer, and celebrated writer, she's always pursued the same deeply personal mission: to embrace the revolutionary belief that every human being, no matter how hateful or horrible, is intrinsically sacred.

But then Kai Cheng found herself in a crisis of faith, overwhelmed by the viciousness with which people treated each other, and barely clinging on to the values and ideals she'd built her life around: justice, hope, love, and healing. Rather than succumb to despair and cynicism, she gathered all her rage and grief and took one last leap of faith. Kai Cheng began writing letters to everyone she has trouble holding in her heart - those seemingly beyond saving. She wrote to dead people, exes, prositutes, johns, monsters, transphobes, and racists; to the fantasy man she still longs for, to the ones who hurt her, and to the ones who watched. In writing these love letters, Kai Cheng found herself not only rediscovering and deepening her faith in humanity, but falling back in love with being human.

Drawing from the tradition of Catholic litanies and rooted in the experience of marginalized communities, Love Letters to Lost Souls is a stunning, profound, and deeply hopeful collection that offers a path towards compassion, forgiveness, and self-acceptance.

Kai Cheng Thom is an award-winning writer, performance artist, and community healer in Toronto. She was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the Writers' Trust of Canada's Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers for her surrealist novel, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir. She is also the author of several other books including a poetry collection, an essay collection, and two children's picture books. Kai Cheng writes the advice column "Ask Kai: Advice for the Apocalypse" for Xtra.