Melting in Your Mouth: The Early Work of Chocolate Waters

Author: Chocolate Waters

Publisher: Sinister Wisdom (2025)

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.