The Audre Lorde compendium: Essays, speeches, and journals

by Audre Lorde

This volume contains three works by the famous US black, lesbian poet and academic, Audre Lorde. Both The Cancer Journals and A Burst of Light give an insight over a ten year period of her life with cancer. Sister Outsider continues her writing and documents her essays and speeches.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Memoir, Essays, Politics, Biography, Social Justice

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Audre Lorde was a revolutionary Black feminist. Lorde's poetry was published very regularly during the 1960s — in Langston Hughes' 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in several foreign anthologies; and in black literary magazines. During this time, she was politically active in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements. Her first volume of poetry, The First Cities (1968), was published by the Poet's Press and edited by Diane di Prima, a former classmate and friend from Hunter College High School. Dudley Randall, a poet and critic, asserted in his review of the book that Lorde "does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit, in the bone."

Her second volume, Cables to Rage (1970), which was mainly written during her tenure at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, addressed themes of love, betrayal, childbirth and the complexities of raising children. It is particularly noteworthy for the poem "Martha", in which Lorde poetically confirms her homosexuality: "[W]e shall love each other here if ever at all." Later books continued her political aims in lesbian and gay rights, and feminism. In 1980, together with Barbara Smith and Cherríe Moraga, she co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher for women of colour. Lorde was State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992.

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Reviews

[Nabilah · Rating 5 out of 5]

She manages to fill me with hope through her essays in which she examines how people relates to one another and how she endures the tyranny of differences. I feel compelled to rewrite this review because i often think about my destiny as a woman and what a pity if people don't know why i like her. She is a Black lesbian poet who is also a mother, a woman who endures everything including cancer that robbed her from us but she prevails, still, without losing the light in her. With all of that, she gave us this to endure today.

[Lola · Rating 4 out of 5]

A visionary, must read for all women