Survival is a Promise
The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
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- 11,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
An exhilarating biography of the iconic poet, essayist and activist Audre Lorde
Read these chapters like a collection of poems that speak in chorus in all directions. Understand each word as an opportunity for Audre’s fierce love, which is the same love that birthed the volcanoes and split the continents, to reach you, wherever you are.
Audre Lorde was a survivor: of childhood disability injustice, of her best friend’s suicide, of the atomic age. She was a college activist against nuclear arms. A mother who knew poetry could help her children survive a racist world. And, ultimately, a cancer survivor, who understood the war going on within her cells was connected to the struggle against oppression taking place all around her.
This stunning new account of Lorde’s life and work illuminates how, for Lorde, survival was not simply about getting through, or about resilience. It was about how to live on, and with, a planet in transformation. Lorde’s commitment to justice was intimately connected to her deep engagement with the natural world; with the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. For Lorde, ecological images are not simply metaphors but rather literal guides to how to be on earth, and how to live fully as a Black feminist lesbian warrior poet.
In Survival Is a Promise, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the first researcher to explore the full depths of Lorde’s manuscript archives, illuminates the eternal life of Audre Lorde. Her life and work swell to become a cosmic force, showing us the grand possibility of life together on earth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This scintillating tour de force from poet Gumbs (Undrowned) traces the life of feminist poet Audre Lorde (1934–1992) in a free-ranging style as distinctive as its subject. Among other topics, Gumbs discusses Lorde's upbringing in Harlem amid rampant police violence, her conflicted feelings about teaching literature to cops at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the 1970s, and her poetry's exploration of the relationship between individuals and their environment. Highlighting formative figures in the poet's life, Gumbs explores how the memory of Lorde's first love, who killed herself when she and Lorde were teenagers, haunted Lorde's writing for decades, and contends that psychologist Frances Clayton, Lorde's long-term partner, brought a stabilizing influence to the poet's personal life. Forgoing the strictures and linearity of traditional biography, Gumbs enlivens her narrative with unconventional flourishes that in lesser hands might feel like a gimmick but here come across as revelation. (A chapter comprised almost entirely of questions pondering how Lorde made sense of the racist children's literature she read in her youth calls attention to the shortcomings of the archival record and imagination's inescapable role in reconstructing history.) Gumbs is a master stylist with a knack for writing sentences at once direct and expansive ("The scale of the life of the poet is the scale of the universe"). This is a feast for the intellect—and the soul.
