
Booklet #11 features a collection of poems by Eros titled To Freedom. It's a deep sense of musicality, wordplay, and humor along with an anarchist vision of liberation, in the Black radical tradition, that brings together the poems of To Freedom. They are one and the same, in fact: the joy of hitting each end rhyme just right, of setting a rhythm and switching it up just for fun, as complement and echo of Eros' subversive speech, her zigzaging digressions that double as flanking maneuvers, out of the hands of authority and towards liberation. These are poems to be read aloud, both to fully appreciate the incredible skill with which Eros has crafted the sonic landscape of these poems (not just a matter of rhyming the ends of her lines, but of striking harmonic notes with internal rhymes, working also within the lines, and using rhythm, setting it up and upsetting it, to propel the tongue forward ["I'm a hill billy dirt low down drinking asshole"] or trip it up as needed [Remediated and remedied from irrational") and to be struck by the punch and insight of lines like "can't I just be different? / I gotta be classified so that autism speaks can try to fix it? fuck em." and "Calling me a faggot but my pics is how you jackin it". What is radical about these poems goes beyond the literal meanings of Eros' political statements - her calls for the abolition of borders, prisons, states, and gender, even her invoking the Black Panthers and seeing herself within the history of Black autonomous/self-defense movements (hinting at a subject that deserves its own book; perhaps, "Self Defense and Black Trans Women: A History"). It's also that by using AAVE, by borrowing from the inventiveness of rap and her experiences as a bi trans woman, she's able to push the English language to a new place that is uniquely her own: conversational, theoretical, militant, clever, confessional, as well-versed in the DSM-5's abstractions as it is in today's pop culture. Which brings us back to the title of the collection, To Freedom: not just an exhortation or a demand, but a practice which Eros has put into motion at every level of her poems.