The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

May 4, 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.

Starred review from June 15, 2020
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.

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