Pass with Care: Memoirs

Product Description

FEATURED IN PUBLISHERS WEEKLY’s “STILL HERE, STILL QUEER: LBGTQ BOOKS 2020”
FEATURED IN BOOK RIOT’S “INDIE PRESS ROUND-UP: 10 GREAT NEW RELEASES FOR SUMMER”
Pass with Care is a testament to trans resilience, queer joy, and the power of finding freedom and adventure within a community of your own creation. In this stunning debut memoir-in-essays, transgender writer, artist, and activist Cooper Lee Bombardier shifts effortlessly between lyrical essays, poetry, and narrative nonfiction as his own landscape changes over the course of two decades. From working-class New England to the queer punk scene of early ’90s-San Francisco to New Mexico’s deserts, Bombardier documents his experiences with compassion and reverence, offering us an expansive view of gender and sexuality, masculinity and tenderness, and the difference between surviving and thriving.
Pass with Care: Memoirs is a necessary and important glimpse into a living trans history as Bombardier explores how much the world has changed and made room for trans people. —BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW

Review

Through lyrically constructed prose, Bombardier introduces us to the fraught and beaming world of being queer, trans, and of passing in the world as a man…Pass with Care: Memoirs is a necessary and important glimpse into a living trans history as Bombardier explores how much the world has changed and made room for trans people. —
BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW

These essays are personal, honest, and sensitive, and full of valuable insights into gender and masculinity. —
BOOK RIOT, “Indie Press Round-up: 10 Great New Releases for Summer”

A reflection on generational changes of queer life, on two decades and change into life as a trans man…insightful and wise and touching —
LAMBDA LITERARY REVIEW

A gorgeously rendered response to what one might call the “Now what?” question: After an experience as metamorphic and all-consuming as a gender transition, what happens next? Who do we become after that becoming? Where do we locate meaning? —THE RUMPUS A record of bygone eras―notably the queer punk scene of nineties San Francisco―Pass With Care is equally a contemporary political text that wrestles with questions of queerness, transness, and masculinity as they unfold today and into the future. —POETS & WRITERS In a voice that meshes disarming humanity with humor, the author chronicles his journey through life as a trans man, making peace with experiences that wounded him and led him to become the human being he now is. —THE PROVINCETOWN INDEPENDENT One of the year’s strongest essay collections. —LARGEHEARTED BOY Multi-faceted and textured…By taking stock of his own faults and failures, successes and dreams, [Bombardier] enables us to more clearly see ourselves, which is memoir’s highest purpose. —GERTRUDE PRESS This is a volume of juxtapositions and repositions looking for a self/other relationship of balance. Cooper is deep, he searches, he travels, relates through different forms, different voices, an emotional gravitas as the only constant…He works to separate the ever-changing issues of being a complex person with the ever-changing experience of being trans, so that trans and person become one and Cooper and person become one, as the land and cities shift. Pass with Care is moving in both senses of the word. —SARAH SCHULMAN, author of Maggie Terry, The Cosmopolitans, Conflict is Not Abuse, and others Pass with Care is a memoir of becoming, an essay collection as layered and lovely as the life it describes: from working-class kidhood to ’90s dyke utopia to life of letters, I cheered this hero on at every turn. —MELISSA FEBOS, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me Cooper Lee Bombardier’s tender and fierce writing brings class and gender, art and life together with big heart and tough intelligence. I’ve long been influenced by his voice and am so excited to watch Pass with Care enter our crucial contemporary canon. —MICHELLE TEA, author of Astro Baby, Against M