Pass with Care: Memoirs

by Cooper Lee Bombardier

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948340489
Publisher:	DOTTIR PR
Publication date:	07/07/2020
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

COOPER LEE BOMBARDIER is a writer and visual artist from the South Shore of Boston. HuffPost named him one of “10 Transgender Artists Who Are Changing the Landscape of Contemporary Art.” He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Pass with Care: Memoirs is his first book.

Read an Excerpt

“A Trans Body’s Path in Eight Folds”

One: right concentration
A trans body sightsees at Carlsbad Caverns. It pays admission and enters the gap-toothed maw. Eyes are open but not working at first, seeing only the green opposite of the hot, white outside. Soon, the trans eyes forget the world’s way of seeing, in favor of its own vision in the cool balm of dark. It feels a kinship with the stalactites fanging down from the dark ribbed roof, growing and changing ever so slowly, drip by drip—an inch a century, if that. The waiting and the long unfolding to become, molecule by molecule. In the yellowing glow of a miner’s headlamp, the trans body spelunks toward nature’s confirmation of the impossible made manifest, and vows to cultivate the patience of a cave.

Two: right action
A trans body visits a lover in a high desert town in the American Southwest. While running near to panting from altitude on a community center treadmill, this trans body spots another trans body on an adjacent treadmill, two machines over. A wash of warm recognition floods the one at the sight of an other. The trans body runs in place and listens to punk rock through headphones while shaping a way to connect with the other trans body. Hello, it imagines saying, me too. Or, I am your people. Too stiff? Too awkward? I am so happy you and I are here together in this place, of all places. How many more of us might be here? Slowing the treadmill down to run, tripping on the flapping, black rubber belt, the trans body knows it cannot make any reach toward the other. More likely than a welcomed connection, it could be received as an affront, a highlighting of some failure of detail—or worse, a dangerous positioning of crosshairs on the back of the other. One trans body might go undetected, but two trans bodies begin to shape an identifiable pattern. Two trans bodies dismount treadmills, sweating, alone.

Three: right speech
A trans body meets another trans body for coffee. In the span of drinking a twelve-ounce Americano, one trans body is smudged out and rendered invisible by the other. Countless people wield the power to erase a trans body, but nothing wounds to the same extent as when it happens by the hands of another trans body. A trans body rents a place with a friend. The friend leans on the trans body sometimes, as if they were spouses, or two old trees bordering a field who fell into each other in a windstorm—hard to tell who is holding the other up. The friend sometimes shakes out tired assumptions about “X” or “Y,” like wet wash about to be pinned to a line that only extends in two finite directions. One day, the friend-spouse directs the trans body to do something in a highly divided public space. When the trans body reminds the housemate-friend why this suggested action would not be ideal, how it would expose, embarrass, or worse, imperil a trans body, the spousemate says, Sometimes I forget you are trans, sharp with darts of exasperation, like the trans body’s transness is the most difficult thing in the world for the housemate (and friend) to bear, and yet the easiest thing in the world to forget.

Table of Contents

Foreword Susan Stryker ix

Preface Morgan M Page xv

Introduction xix

A Trans Body's Path in Eight Folds 1

Lincoln Street 7

Boombox 15

Prayer for the Workingman 23

Identity Poem 26

The Conversation 27

Lips like Elvis 33

In This Dungeon, All Prisoners Are Free to Leave 41

The First Time 58

Sharing Trans: Internet Transgender Discourses and the End of Gatekeeping 63

Lessons from the Locker Room 96

Pigeon Hunters 100

Splinters 113

Manhood Is Boring 120

Trans Grit 136

Holding on with Both Hands 147

Man Pageant, Unscripted 151

My Life in Ink 163

The Love That Remains 170

Antoinette, for Example 182

Gar Crash on Interstate 5 187

Soil, Shit, and Compost 193

Half as Sensitive 204

The Fourth Level 227

Throwing a Sheet over the Ghost 256

Author's Notes 263

A Note on Language 267

Acknowledgments 272

Bibliography 276

About the Author 278

Editorial Reviews

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 Memoir, Black Wave, and others

Pass with Care is an insightful trans memoir. It’s also a brilliant book about ambivalence, class in America, self-acceptance, discovery. — CHRIS KRAUS , author of Summer of Hate and After Kathy Acker

Blessed are those who get to watch a man become a man on the page and feel pride and joy at his offerings in Pass with Care. Each sentence is a story, entering room after room of shed skin and raw truths tethered to the squared problems of language imposed on trans bodies. Bombardier’s moxie, grace, kindness, and ferocity as a writer and thinker are unmatched and lasting. — SOPHIA SHALMIYEV , author of Mother Winter

In these clear-eyed, intelligent, intimate essays, Cooper Lee Bombardier writes fearlessly and profoundly about gender, identity, and class. Whether examining the loneliness of men, the fierceness of the dyke community in 1990s San Francisco, or the intricacies of his own gender transition, Bombardier leads with curiosity and vulnerability, unveiling a story of possibilities and resilience, and shining a light on a self who has learned “how to make freedom.” A much-needed, wonderful collection. — CARTER SICKELS , author of The Prettiest Star

Pass with Care is a fantastic essay collection—wise, humble, and funny. The book ranks as a major addition to the body of trans literature. But it is, more importantly, a brilliant book about the construction of identity...A pure delight. — STEVE ALMOND , author of Bad Stories and Candyfreak

Pass with Care is much more than a memoir...breathtaking in its beauty. — JONATHAN D. KATZ , curator of Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the first major museum queer exhibition in the U.S.

Funny, honest, and soulful, [ Pass with Care ] educates without preaching and entertains without cheapening. It's a marvel, and so is its author. — TOM BISSELL , author of Apostle and co-author of The Disaster Artist

From the Publisher