The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

by Audre Lorde, Roxane Gay (Editor), Roxane Gay (Introduction)

Overview

A definitive selection of Audre Lorde’s "intelligent, fierce, powerful, sensual, provocative, indelible" (Roxane Gay) prose and poetry, for a new generation of readers.

Self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, and one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. This essential reader showcases her indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies in twelve landmark essays and more than sixty poems—selected and introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on race and gender, Roxane Gay.

Among the essays included here are:

• "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action"
• "The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House"
• "I Am Your Sister"
• Excerpts from the American Book Award–winning A Burst of Light

The poems are drawn from Lorde’s nine volumes, including The Black Unicorn and National Book Award finalist From a Land Where Other People Live. Among them are:

• "Martha"
• "A Litany for Survival"
• "Sister Outsider"
• "Making Love to Concrete"

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324004615
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/08/2020
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	183,689
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Audre Lorde (1934-1992) published eleven volumes of poetry and five works of prose. Her constellation of honors includes honorary doctorates from Hunter, Oberlin, and Haverford colleges.

Roxane Gay is the author of five books, including the best-selling Bad Feminist. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Roxane Gay is the author of five books, including the best-selling Bad Feminist. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Prose

Poetry Is Not a Luxury (1977) 3

The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action (1977) 9

My Mother's Mortar (1977) 15

Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1978) 29

The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House (1979) 39

Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface (1979) 45

The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism (1981) 53

Fourth of July (1982) 67

I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities (1985) 73

A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer (1988) 81

Is Your Hair Still Political? (1990) 167

Difference and Survival: An Address at Hunter College (undated) 173

Poetry

From The First Cities (1968)

A Family Resemblance 183

Coal 184

Now that I Am Forever with Child 185

Spring III 186

To a Girl Who Knew What Side Her Bread Was Buttered On 187

Father Son and Holy Ghost 188

Generation 189

If You Come Softly 190

Suffer the Children 191

A Lover's Song 192

Suspension 193

From Cables to Rage (1970)

Rooming houses are old women 197

Bloodbirth 198

Martha 199

Sowing 209

Making it 210

On a night of the full moon 211

From From a Land Where Other People Live (1973)

Progress Report 215

Moving Out or The End of Cooperative Living 217

Change of Season 220

Generation II 222

Love, Maybe 223

Conclusion 224

Movement Song 226

Who Said It Was Simple 228

From New York Head Shop and Museum (1974)

New York 1970 231

The American Cancer Society Or There Is More Than One Way To Skin A Coon 234

A Sewerplant Grows In Harlem Or I'm A Stranger Here Myself When Does The Next Swan Leave 236

One Year To Life On The Grand Central Shuttle 238

The Workers Rose On May Day Or Postscript To Karl Marx 240

Cables to Rage or I've Been Talking on This Street Corner a Hell of a Long Time 242

Keyfood 244

To The Girl Who Lives In A Tree 246

Love Poem 248

Separation 249

Song For A Thin Sister 250

Revolution Is One Form Of Social Change 251

The Brown Menace Or Poem To The Survival of Roaches 252

Sacrifice 254

From Between Our Selves (1976)

Power 259

Solstice 261

Scar 263

Between Ourselves 267

From The Black Unicorn (1978)

A Woman Speaks 273

Coniagui Women 275

Chain 277

Sequelae 280

A Litany for Survival 283

Portrait 285

Therapy 286

Recreation 287

Artisan 288

Contact Lenses 290

But What Can You Teach My Daughter 291

From Inside an Empty Purse 292

A Small Slaughter 293

Sister Outsider 294

"Never Take Fire from a Woman" 295

Between Ourselves 296

From Chosen Poems: Old and New (1982)

The Evening News 301

Afterimages 303

A Poem For Women In Rage 308

From Our Dead Behind US (1986)

To the Poet Who Happens to Be Black and the Black Poet Who Happens to Be a Woman 315

Outlines 317

Equal Opportunity 324

Diaspora 327

A Question of Climate 328

Florida 329

Political Relations 331

There Are No Honest Poems About Dead Women 333

From The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance (1993)

Making Love to Concrete 337

Thaw 339

Inheritance-His 340

Jessehelms 345

The Politics of Addiction 347

Today Is Not the Day 349

Notes 353

Prose Index 355

Poetry Index 365

Editorial Reviews

One of the great unspoken pleasures of anthologies is bemoaning what didn't make the cut, in fantasizing about one's own unimpeachable selections. But this is a balanced and representative sampling of Lorde's writing—inspired, even, where the poetry is concerned.

The New York Times - Parul Sehgal

05/04/2020

This well-chosen selection of work by feminist author Lorde (1934–1992) features incisive prose pieces and poems from nine collections published between 1968 and 1993. In the fiery 1979 polemic “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Lorde, as one of the few African-Americans at the Second Sex Conference commemorating Simone de Beauvoir’s classic text, criticizes the majority-white organizers for their disinterest in more diverse voices: “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.” The prose portion also features selections from Lorde’s intense and deeply affecting journals written over the years she battled cancer. The sublime choices of Lorde’s poetry include the haunting “Martha,” written during a former lover’s recuperation after a car accident, and “Father Son and Holy Ghost,” which beautifully records a childhood memory of her father returning from work, “Misty from the worlds business/ Massive and silent as the whole day’s wish.” Readers new to Lorde’s work couldn’t ask for a better introduction, and those already familiar will find this an ideal collection of her greatest hits. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2020-05-30
A collection of Lorde’s groundbreaking prose and poems on race, injustice, intersectional feminism, and queer identity.

A trailblazing black lesbian writer and activist, Lorde (1934-1992) produced a prolific and profound body of work. In this compilation, Gay presents a selection of representative texts from among Lorde’s prose and poetry. The compilation features a dozen essays, including a series of journal entries about living with cancer; selections from Lorde’s American Book Award–winning collection, A Burst of Light (1988); and more than 60 poems taken from multiple volumes, including National Book Award nominee The Land Where Other People Live (1973). For Gay, Lorde was the first to demonstrate that “a writer could be intensely concerned with the inner and outer lives of black queer women, that our experiences could be the center instead of relegated to the periphery. She wrote beyond the white gaze and imagined a black reality that did not subvert itself to the cultural norms dictated by whiteness.” In the oft-quoted “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Lorde denounces white women for being in bed with the “racist patriarchy,” excluding black women’s leadership and ideas from supposedly feminist spaces. In “Uses of the Erotic,” Lorde calls for a more expansive view and embrace of the erotic “as a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane.” She also revisits the turbulent onset of her adolescence and complex relationship with her mother. Lorde’s poems, urgent and intimate, focus on the ordinary and the extraordinary, a range of subjects including love, death and dying, and police killings of black people with impunity. That the author’s masterful work is as relevant and necessary today as it was in the last century is both a tribute to her and a condemnation of a society that continues to oppress and marginalize black women.

An essential anthology that challenges our 21st-century social and political consciousness.

Kirkus Reviews

Mia Ellis offers a steady slow-paced narration of Audre Lorde’s essays and poetry. Her pace allows the listener to imbibe the enormous breadth and depth of Lorde’s work, which covers race, sexism, language, eroticism, and her experience with cancer. Ellis is meticulous in her enunciation, which provides just enough feeling. While there is variation in Lorde’s literary work, Ellis is universally formal, almost automated sounding, in her tone. It works because there is also an emotive side to each piece. Ellis provides the right balance for this activist work of art. T.E.C. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2022 - AudioFile

Mia Ellis offers a steady slow-paced narration of Audre Lorde’s essays and poetry. Her pace allows the listener to imbibe the enormous breadth and depth of Lorde’s work, which covers race, sexism, language, eroticism, and her experience with cancer. Ellis is meticulous in her enunciation, which provides just enough feeling. While there is variation in Lorde’s literary work, Ellis is universally formal, almost automated sounding, in her tone. It works because there is also an emotive side to each piece. Ellis provides the right balance for this activist work of art. T.E.C. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2022 - AudioFile