Pass with Care: Memoirs by Cooper Lee Bombardier
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.
Finalist for the 2021 Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction
Pass with Care pairs heart-in-hand vulnerability with the split-knuckle candor of venerated queer voices like Dorothy Allison and Saeed Jones. In singular blue-collar lyricism, Bombardier brings the trans-masc experience into view―gritty as a classic honkytonk song, and as unforgettable, too. —LILY BURANA, author of Grace for Amateurs: Field Notes on a Journey Back to Faith, I Love a Man in Uniform, and Strip City
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
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 Cosmopolitan, and Conflict is Not Abuse
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, and Black Wave
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, sexy and funny even as its observations cut deep. —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
About Cooper Lee Bombardier
Cooper Lee Bombardier is an American writer and visual artist living in Canada. His writing appears in The Kenyon Review, The Malahat Review, Ninth Letter, CutBank, Nailed Magazine, Longreads, Narratively, BOMB, and The Rumpus; and in 18 anthologies, including the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology, The Remedy–Essays on Queer Health Issues, and the Lambda-nominated anthology, Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Speculative Fiction From Transgender Writers, which won a 2018 American Library Association Stonewall Book Award. His memoir-in-essays Pass with Care, is available now from Dottir Press.