The Selected Works of Audre Lorde
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5.0 • 4 Ratings
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Publisher Description
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"
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
