Melting in Your Mouth: The Early Work

by Chocolate Waters

The best of Chocolate Waters' poetry finds its home in Melting in Your 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.

232 pages, Paperback

Published July 8, 2025

About the author

During the "second wave of feminism," Chocolate Waters was one of the first openly lesbian poets to be published and her contribution has been documented in Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975 (U of Il. Press, Barbara Love, Ed.).

A pioneer in women's publishing and in the art of performance poetry, she has toured throughout the United States, but makes her home in Manhattan. Her first three collections: To the man reporter from the Denver Post, Take Me Like A Photograph and Charting New Waters were produced by Eggplant Press during 1975-80 and are considered classics of the early women’s movement.

Her CD, Chocolate Waters Uncensored, spans three decades of groundbreaking work, and was released by Eggplant Productions in 2001. The woman who wouldn’t shake hands was published by Poets Wear Prada in 2011 and Muddying the Holy Waters, a combination of poems, essays and photographs was published by Eggplant Press in Oct. 2021.

Waters is the recipient of a New York State Foundation for the Arts fellowship in Poetry and has also been awarded a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. In 1995 she was one of five featured artists in the "Artist As Citizen" exhibit, curated by Amy Ernst, at the American Council for the Arts in New York City.

Her work, which has been nominated for several Puschcart prizes, has appeared in hundreds of publications, both in hard copy and online. Most recently in Black Coffee Review, Shot Glass Journal, the Rye Whiskey Review and Big City Lit.

Hailed as the "Poet Laureate of Hell’s Kitchen," Waters teaches poetry workshops and tutors individual clients and is a frequent participant in the New York poetry circuit.

You can contact her on Facebook or at her website, www.chocolatewaters.com.