“I want to know that I have told the truth as best as I know it,” she tells me, “And that I have done my diligence as best as I can to a story that needs to be told.” We speak by phone during Thom’s lunch hour from a retreat she is attending on Salt Spring Island, off the coast of British Columbia. Time moves more slowly on Salt Spring, but she jumps out of the island’s unrushed rhythm and right into discussing ideas of truth, storytelling and her new book. Thom recently spoke with me about her new collection of essays and poems, I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes for the End of the World - a book that considers the need for transformative justice and revolutionary love both before and during the #MeToo movement. To survive them, she insists, we will need community and love. The world is undergoing tremendous - and alarming - changes.

This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.“It has become something of a truism among my community of queer people of colour that the end of the world is nigh,” Kai Cheng Thom writes at the beginning of her new book. Looming climate catastrophe. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA).

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. 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.

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. 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?

I hope we choose love by kai cheng thom