Melting in Your Mouth

The best of Chocolate Waters' poetry finds its home in Melting in Your Mouth: The Early Work of Chocolate Waters. During the Women's Liberation Movement, Waters traveled around the United States to share her erotic, angry, and feminine poems, gathering throngs of lesbian admirers. Waters was a modern-day lesbian-feminist bard performing her poems with theatrical flair. Waters' poems grapple with gender norms, sexual harassment, and hetero-patriarchal publishing expressing the rage that comes with experiencing the second-class citizenry of womanhood. Even more radical, Waters' writes of lesbian intimacy and sex, calling attention to nuances of family and belonging in the context of her identity as a lesbian. Melting in Your Mouth is a treasury of Waters' early work. As witness to and participation in Gay Liberation and the Women's Liberation Movement of the seventies and eighties, Waters' poems also witness a genealogy of living and laughing authentically against all odds.