The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde

“Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us?”

“The question arises in my mind, Mary, do you ever really read the work of Black women?” she wrote.

In her 1979 open letter to the feminist writer Mary Daly, she objected to how crudely Daly had quoted her. She witnessed the misuse of her words in her own time. She would have been dismayed but never surprised. Her notion of self-care as “political warfare,” as she described it after her second cancer diagnosis, has been snatched up as a generic wellness credo. “Your silence will not protect you.” “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” How often her ideas are plucked from her work, snipped and scraped, turned into zesty curls of quotation and used to garnish some very strange brews. Lorde’s lines ring like mantras, all strong cadences and neon warnings. Lorde’s writing has rarely been more influential - or more misunderstood.Įven more than scandal or a shoddy biographer, a writer’s sheer quotability can guarantee an uneasy afterlife. “The Selected Works of Audre Lorde,” edited and introduced by Roxane Gay, arrives at an especially interesting moment, however. “There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love,” she once wrote.Īny opportunity to contemplate Lorde would be a cause for celebration. She left riches: poems, essays and two genre-defining memoirs, “Zami” and “The Cancer Journals.” Her work is an estuary, a point of confluence for all identities, all aspects kept so strenuously segregated: poetry and politics, feeling and analysis, analysis and action, sexuality and the intellect. She wanted, as Angela Davis said, to “demystify the assumption that these terms cannot inhabit the same space: Black and lesbian, lesbian and mother, mother and warrior, warrior and poet.” But there was always that garland of identifiers - and not just because she couldn’t be defined by one word. “I am a Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet doing my work, coming to ask you if you’re doing yours,” she’d sometimes say.

In her public appearances, Audre Lorde famously introduced herself the same way: “I am a Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” There were occasional variations.

The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde