"Chocolate Waters’ autobiographical work is part of an archive of lesbian feminist poetry...she was a badass radical dyke, a separatist known for throwing drinks into offensive men’s faces, often called an outlaw or the ‘wild woman’ from Denver...Her archives live among the burgeoning files of lesbians/queer writers housed at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, because, as she said to me, she ‘knows how important it is for our lives to be recognized and documented, especially in [that] era when it was really queer to be gay, not to mention dangerous."

—Red Washburn, from the Introduction

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 heteropatriarchal 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.

Chocolate Waters has been writing and publishing poetry for over four decades. Her most recent collections are Muddying the Holy Waters and the woman who wouldn’t shake hands. Waters was a founder of the feminist newspaper, Big Mama Rag, published in Denver, Colorado from 1972-1982, and a groundbreaker in the art of performance poetry. She lives in New York City.