The Selected Works of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde

The Selected Works of Audre Lorde Reviews

• 
  Taylor Reid

  I have to admit one of my favorite Audre Lorde poems is on the theme of motherhood, “Progress Report.” You can find it in this new collection, out just last September—now with a foreword by Roxane Gay. It also includes the seminal essay, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.
• 
  Jenny (Reading Envy)

  Except for a brief book of correspondence between Lorde and Pat Parker (
  Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989,) I didn't have any experience with Lorde's work, just knew her as a reference point for other poets and thinkers. This is a solid introduction to her work, half essays and speeches, half selections from poetry collections spanning her career. The power she speaks from cannot be compared (and how frustrating that her writing from the 80s feels so timely, a bad sign that truly little has changed.) She speaks openly about being black, a feminist, and a lesbian, and is ready to confront your hangups about any of it. She is not going to make you feel comfortable. The journal of her second bout with cancer is also included.
  
  The poems wrestle with history but also react to current events (now historical), praise her lover's body, and address the black community as well. When she hints at how she feels she is relearning rather than seeing this all for the first time, it feels true.
  
  This just scratches the surface. The brief intro by Roxane Gay is not a full length scholarly commentary. I hope that exists. If it doesn't, it needs to.
• 
  Jonfaith

  Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.
  
  We went out early Saturday morning to walk at Cherokee Park and enjoy the brisk weather and rolling fog. We ducked into Carmichael's on the way back to the car and I found this one on a display of new poetry. Allow us to sing the praises of the bookshop. It is the unexpected which remains such an engine for the imagination.
  
  I read the essays first and then the poetry and then circled back to read the Cancer Diaries. I felt the power of each. It is strange how the essays from the early 1970s through the invasion of Grenada in 1983 sound so timely.
• 
  sunny (ethel cain’s version)

  A powerful must read
• 
  Jim

  It is hard to critique or analyze Audre Lorde, so I won't try. Alongside James Baldwin and Angela Y. Davis, she is a person I would have loved to meet and just sit and listen to for hours and hours. Her passion, strength, intelligence, power, and her deep and abiding love for her work is incredible. Her writings always leave me breathless. She writes with such force and love and care. I will admit to struggling with poetry, with the reading of it. I love words and language and how it can transform. But I read mostly prose, and often forget that poetry requires another mindset, another way. So while I battle to fully absorb the linguistic mastery of Lorde's poetics, I can truly say she never fails to draw me in and amaze me.
  The world lost a treasure with Lorde's passing. We can honor her awesomeness by dwelling on her words and then transforming them into positive change.
  Essential work.
• 
  Jeanne

  The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of these differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken. – Lorde (1977), The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action
  
  I read Audre Lorde because her prose is yummy, because she makes me think, and to come to better understand other views of the world.
  
  Selected Works of Audre Lorde is a compilation of some of Lorde's prose and poetry (first the prose, then the poetry). I read selections sequentially within each section, but interspersed her poems in my reading of her essays.
  
  I've read two of Lorde's books of essays in the past, so I enjoyed a reread of some essays. I've also read her last collection of poetry. It's interesting how pieces read differently in different contexts (and at different times). I enjoyed her essays more than in the past, although her poetry less. (That's not a slam on Lorde. I'm not a big fan of poetry.)
  
  I particularly liked A Burst of Light, selections from her journal after she had been diagnosed with liver cancer (after having survived breast cancer).
  
  I am often in pain and I fear that it will get worse. I need to sharpen every possible weapon against it, but even more so against the fear, or the fear of the fear, which is what is so debilitating. And I want to learn how to do that while there is still time for learning in some state before desperation. Desperation. Reckless through despair. –A Burst of Light, December 19, 1985
  
  Does one simply get tired of living? I can't imagine right now what that would be like, but that is because I feel filled with a fury to live – because I believe life can be good even when it's painful – a fury that my energies just don't match my desires anymore. –A Burst of Light, December 24, 1985
  
  The accuracy of that diagnosis [of liver cancer] has become less important than how I use the life I have. –A Burst of Light, November 6, 1986
  
  I do not think about my death as being imminent, but I live my days against a background noise of mortality and constant uncertainty. –A Burst of Light, November 19, 1986
  
  I appreciate Lorde's willingness to let us see her fear, her courage, and her willingness to live and die with awareness. I also appreciate seeing that her life was not only filled with death. During the period included here, she wrote from New York City, Ohio, Berlin, Cambridge, Melbourne, Michigan, Switzerland, Anguilla, St. Croix, and France. I'm tired just typing this list.
  
  My thanks to Norton, which sent this book unrequested with another book that I did request.
• 
  Kawai

  The essays are brilliant, but I had a hard time clicking into the poems; having said that, I consider myself a pretty bad reader of poetry, so my reaction is entirely personal and subjective and in no way a reflection of the quality of Lorde’s work (which is extraordinary).
• 
  Melissa Stacy

  First published in 2020, "The Selected Works of Audre Lorde," by Audre Lorde, edited and introduced by Roxane Gay, is an excellent introduction to the poetry and prose of Audre Lorde (1934-1992).
  
  I confess that I found this book dark AF. Reading about Lorde's cancer, in particular, was a long, hard trek through the grim. The essays about her personal encounters with overt racism added to the visceral truth of the unfairness and brutality that surrounded Lorde's life.
  
  The essays deservedly come down hard on mainstream white feminism. As I write this review in 2021, it feels like mainstream feminism might have finally gotten the memo about internalized racism.
  
  Lorde remains worth reading because Lorde remains ahead of her time, and ahead of our current time (2021).
  
  This is such a heart-wrenching book. It's chock-full of so many horrible things that make me despair, but they're always coupled with Lorde's burning passion for change and unwavering hope for a better tomorrow.
  
  I don't feel smart enough to read Lorde's poetry. I just don't have the intellectual bandwidth to make sense of it, or to get anything out of it.
  
  Five stars for the essays. No rating for the poetry; I can't rate something that I can't make any sense of.
  
  Highly recommended to anyone interested in Audre Lorde.
  
• 
  Sophia Bailey

  i annotated the hell out of this book. audre lorde needs to be talked about more.
• 
  maddie

  beautiful collection of audre’s work spanning across her lifetime. “the cancer journals” in particular were absolutely gutting to read. i listened while crocheting and felt so immersed in her words. i read “warrior poet: a biography of audre lorde” by alexis de veaux toward the end of my time in college, and it provided so much critical context about her, her family, her loves, and her many fights that she so gracefully and valiantly fought (cancer, racism, lesbophobia, etc.) that made reading this collection all the more poignant. she was and is such a powerful force of a woman and an author.
• 
  María Gisela

  A lot of what I usually read, both poetry and prose, tends to be very individual, but Lorde becomes the collective form of women by the way she focusses so intensely in the universal and the group. She is us, women, queer women, women of color. She speaks for herself and for all of us at once. She made me feel proud to be woman and queer and different, she made me want to scream that I exist, that I'm powerful, that I'm full of life, no matter how hard the world tries to extinguish me. This is the kind of feminism everyone needs, the one that confrots the issues and the living that happens through them, the one that never, never stops.
  
  As much as Lorde symbolizes the sisterhood of women for me and made me feel so connected, it also reminded me of my priviledge and how much I need to fight for those that don't have it. It's my duty to not only be an empowered woman, through my poetry and my eroticism, but also to be educated and be and advocate, to fight for the feminist world both Lorde and I believe in, to use my anger for good.
  
  Her essays are definitely my favorite and, as hard as it was to read, I felt I learned the most from her journals (A Burst of Life) about how to exist and fight and truly live a feminist life, no matter the circumstances. Her poetry was beautiful and her themes struck hard. She, again, talks about women, always keeping her sisters in the forefront of her mind. She touches on motherhood and queer relationships more openly that I think I've ever seen (and definitely more openly than I allow myself to be). She's political and conscious, educated and educational, she is a mother, a sister, a daughter, a lover. She is woman, before anything, she's black and queer and woman and she's loud and proud. She is a stepping stone in my path of becoming just that.
  
  Some of my favorite poems were:
  A Family Resemblance, Father Son and Holy Ghost, Generation, If You Come Softly, Martha, Making it, Progress Report, Chanfe of Season, Generation II, Conclusion, Who Said It Was Simple, New York City 1970, The American Cancer Society, A Sewerplant Grows In Harlem, Cables To Rage, Love Poem, Separation, Song For A Thin Sister, Revolution Is One Form Of Social Change, Power, Scar, Between Ourselves, Chain, A Litany For Survival, But What Can You Teach My Daughter, Sister Outsider, The Evening News, Afterimages, A Poem For Women In Rage, There Are No Honest Poems About Dead Women, Today Is Not The Day
• 
  hope

  this is another one of those books where i don't really know how to review it other than just: everyone should read this? audre lorde is so smart and so eloquent and this was an incredible selection of her works and i will be thinking about it for years
  
  "we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. death, on the other hand, is the final silence. and that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether i had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while i planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else's words.
  
  ...
  
  i was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not i had ever spoken myself. my silences had not protected me. your silence will not protect you."
• 
  Crystal

  Reread some of the essays I'd originally read in previous collections of Lorde's work and, most notably, A Burst of Light which sounded slightly familiar but that could just from reading excerpts. Different lines caught my eye than the (maybe) first time. Also read some of the poetry after a quick comparison between her collected poetry collection and this one.
• 
  Júlia

  encantada. apaixonada. fascinada.
  
  É exatamente assim que eu fico quando penso na obra dessa mulher, já falei desse livro tantas vezes aqui que já nem sei mais por onde começar a falar sobre.
  
  Conhecer a obra da Audre era uma das minhas metas pra esse ano, e eu to muito contente que eu comecei por esse livro que traz um compilado das obras dela em prosa e poemas. Eu gosto muito de conhecer o íntimo dos autores, saber as motivações deles, as paixões, conhecer os monstros, as coisas que eles odeiam, enfim o ser humano por trás e acho que esse é o papel desse livro.
  
  Eu fiquei completamente fascinada como essa mulher não tinha medo de ser quem ela era e afirmar isso o tempo todo (embora cansativo, na época em que ela escreveu a maior parte dessas coisas, elas eram extremamente necessárias). Em um dos capítulos somos apresentados a um diário da autora que escreve sobre angústias, medos, esperança e negações de se viver com câncer. É um relato cru e honesto demais sobre a experiência dela. Eu fiquei muito comovida e chorei em algumas partes.
  
  Os poemas são a cereja do bolo, eu que sou apaixonada por poesia fiquei apaixonada pela escrita dela, pelos tópicos que ela traz em poucas linhas. Comentei que “Martha” mexeu muito comigo, ele é uma ““carta”” para a primeira ex-namorada dela, é doloroso e bonito ao mesmo tempo.
  
  É tão importante que a gente tenha acesso a pessoas como a Audre, ela contribui tanto pro mundo que a gente viveu e segue vivendo, ver a coragem dela de afirmar com todas as letras quem ela era é um exemplo enorme. Tô muito feliz e grata por ter a oportunidade de conhecer a obra dessa mulher gigante que foi uma ativista feminista, mulher negra e lésbica GIGANTE, que deixou um legado enorme pra todos nós.
  
  Leiam, conheçam e se apaixonem por essa mulher.
• 
  Monica Kim | Musings of Monica

  Happy New Year! 🎉 I always start off the New Year reading with a nonfiction, specifically self-help & personal development, but decided to go with something else this year. Couple years ago when venerable Toni Morrison’s “The Source of Self-Regard” came out, I was having a conversation with someone about collections by literary giants. And I recall mentioning something about wanting Audre Lorde’s collection. So imagine my surprise when I found “The Selected Works of Audre Lorde” by Audre Lorde, Edited by Roxane Gay when I was browsing my local bookstore. I’m a big fan of Roxane Gay and follow her on social media & receive her newsletter, so I don’t know how I could have possibly missed this publication. But who better than Gay to curate & bring this collection together!
  .
  First published in 2020, this is an excellent, definitive selection of Audre Lorde’s poetry & prose. It is an impressive collection and thoughtfully curated & introduced by Gay. There are intimate & personal writings, but there is also wider issues Lorde advocated for that is as timely as ever and have the ability to educate. — mo✌️
• 
  Grace

  Really solid collection of essays and poems from Audre Lorde! It's not my most favorite compilation of essays, as it didn't necessarily feel as tightly cohesive as some of her others I've read, but I do think that's sort of par for the course with a "Best Of" type approach such as this. It was actually my first time reading Lorde's poetry, and I enjoyed it overall, but I can't say it's my absolute favorite.
• 
  agua

  great selection of lorde’s work across essays, poems, journals & talks. it felt important to reread some of her crucial essays with the wider context of some other personal writing, particularly her diaries written during illness. wish there had been a zami excerpt!
• 
  Francesca Walker

  I’ve been coming to this book for so long without being able to finish it because I couldn’t stop rereading the same passages. What a fantastic collection wow this book is all around perfect. The essays in the beginning were undoubtedly a necessary read and paired with the poems for the second half it makes for a fantastic ending. Everyone needs to read Audre Lorde right now.
• 
  Maura

  What a beautiful, necessary, exquisite and brutal book. This is an active read - it is not an escape but a demand for introspection and a reckoning with yourself and your actions.
• 
  Daryl

  I hadn't read Lorde, and this was a great introduction to her work. I was mostly so-so on the poetry (but I'm mostly so-so on poetry in general), but I found her prose to be marvelous. I think she may write about as clearly and directly as any nonfiction author I've read, without sacrificing lyricism or, to use a sort of abstract word for it, heart. Even her journal entries read as if well polished.
• 
  Owen Bonk

  Okay full disclosure at the Top of the Review I think this is a 3.5 and I'm only really giving it the benefit of the doubt because I didn't understand a lot of what was going on.
  
  On the part of the editor (Roxane Gay, who happens to be one of my favorite authors) I think there were a couple of mistakes. First, the book could have been served by a short biography–I really wanted to know more about Lorde, and I felt unsure about the circumstances in which some of these pieces were produced. Did lots of googling.
  
  To be honest my brain is mush at this point in the semester and I'm losing confidence in my own original thoughts (do I have opinions anymore??) so I'm just going to make a list of the essays and poems that I found striking,
  
  Prose
  1. My Mother's Mortar (felt more like a short story, the descriptions were vivid and nostalgic)
  2. Uses of the Erotic (remember reading this last year for class and thought it was awesome the second time around as well)
  3. A Burst of Light (I like delving into the journals of writers I think they are so interesting and this one in particular was awesome... she is like cancer sucks and this swiss hospital is so strange... but also was wanting some more context here)
  
  Poetry
  1. Martha (the motif of sickness is one she explores with much success)
  2. Love, Maybe (short and sweet!)
  3. New York City 1970 (self explanatory, New York is one of the only cities)
  4. The Workers Rose On May Day or Postscript to Karl Marx ("so they climbed down the girders/and taught their sons a lesson/called Marx is a victim of the generation gap/called I grew up the hard way so will you/called/the limits of a sentimental vision.")
  5. Love Poem (so erotic, awesome!)
  6. Revolution Is One Form of Social Change (super clear-eyed about the arbitrariness of social groups, one of the rare times I didn't have to read the poem four times so that my eyes would actually stick on the page; once again I think the problem is actually me I am becoming stupefied by higher education and so many hours on zoom....)
  7. Portrait ("strong women/know the taste/of their own hatred")
  8. To the Poet Who Happens to Be Black and the Black Poet Who Happens to Be a Woman (I wrote "striking" on the page, experimenting with annotating my books and I must say ladies I love!)
  9. Outlines (Awesome poem about romantic relationships across racial divides... really heartfelt and elegant)
  10. Political Relations (Russian translators!!!)
  
  Ok I'm out! In conclusion I am grateful for the work of miss Lorde but I feel the anthology needed some rounding out and contextualization and also some of the stuff was redundant...
  
  Damn I wish I understood poetry like I got so frustrated sometimes ...
  
  Today my friend cut my hair in the dorm bathroom and now if I flatten out my bangs you can tell that she cut them in a straight line and it's making me laugh... But also I'm incredibly grateful to her... I literally want nothing more than spring break and instead I am given midterms and a singular three day weekend. Abolish Tufts
• 
  andré crombie

  “Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.
  
  That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.
  
  This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
  
  During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncolored margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag, releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. Then taking it carefully between our fingers, we would knead it gently back and forth, over and over, until the color had spread throughout the whole pound bag of margarine, thoroughly coloring it.
  
  I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience.”
  
  Thoughts: I can already tell that I will be revisiting this reader, and soon. I didn’t read the last handful of poems because I want to experience them in their collection first. Highlights: My Mother’s Mortar, Uses of the Erotic, Sexism, Fourth of July, I am Your Sister.
• 
  Marcos Teach

  A towering collection of writings. Just WOW. But being a reader of essays and prose, I have decided to write a brief reflection on some of Audre Lorde's essays. But her poetry is equally as thrilling and powerful and so much to write about.
  
  Being a gay English teacher teaching kids of color, having read Audre Lorde's essays and poetry was a mind-blowing experience that is not going to leave me anytime soon. "A Burst of Light" was an honest and raw insight into Lorde's experience and feelings of terror having been diagnosed with cancer. But she also writes for those who are constantly othered in our society, being a black woman, and for those "who feel the tragedy of being an oppressed hyphenated person in America" (Lorde 98).
  
  But it is sisterhood and creating safe spaces and chosen families is what makes life worth it, "learning to consciously extend ourselves to each other and to call upon each other's strengths is a life-saving strategy" (Lorde 156).
  
  "Is Your Hair Political?" is a brilliant personal essay of Lorde being refused entry into Virgin Gorda because she wore her hair naturally. She was perceived as Rastafarian, stereotyped as being part of a violent community entrenched in crime and gang violence. It's the dream vacation turned into a nightmare due to racism and xenophobia.
  
  In her essay, "I am your sister", she wants readers to understand that "it is a reality that is starkly clarified as we see our young people becoming more and more uncaring of each other...those stereotypes are yours to solve, not mine, and they are a terrible and wasteful barrier to our working together. I am not your enemy, we do not have to become each other's unique experiences and insights in order to share what we have learned" (Lorde 80).
  
  Like so many of our black artists who have moved us teachers, writers and readers, such as Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde definitely is placed with those goddesses of the black experience.
• 
  Mac Rogers

  Thank you Roxanne Gay and thank you to Audre Lorde! This was my first introduction to Audre Lorde’s work and I’m so grateful I picked this collection. The first word that comes to mind is power. Power in its purest, rawest form. Audre Lorde writes with a clarity and force that I can only articulate right now as something akin to the power and presence of the natural world. A friend once described the late Lee Maracle as a “mountain of a person” and I feel that applies to Audre Lorde as well. There is an undeniable strength and power in her writing but one that does not seek to dominate. Instead, she simply demands the freedom and dignity to live as her true self and stands her ground in the face of forces looking to erode her right to be as she is. She embraces and honours difference and in her power to hold space for difference, she makes a home for all seeking that same dignity and freedom in this world.
  
  The essays here are a remarkable collection that have healed and clarified so much for me. I see myself returning to them often. I love the way she talks about the craft of poetry but I struggled more with the poetry itself. Many of the pieces felt more elusive and cryptic and did not have the same immediate impact when placed right after these very direct and definitive essays. I would like to revisit them again with time though as I know there is much to be gained from her prose.
• 
  Emma

  I’m so glad I started the year off with this collection of Audre Lorde’s work. She truly had so much wisdom and such a beautiful mind. Her writing is distinct and clear yet deeply descriptive. In my opinion her prose is more impactful than her poetry, but that’s also because her poetry is harder to digest. Some of my favorite prose included , uses of the erotic: the erotic as power, my mothers mortar, and Fourth of July. I wish I could’ve liked “A Burst of Light” better but it felt so long in comparison to the rest of the prose pieces, even if reading about the black experience with cancer is very necessary. Some poems that really stuck with me were coal, the workers rose on May Day or postscript to Karl Marx, the Brown Menace or Poem to the Survival of roaches sacrifice, and Separation. Overall though, I’m glad I did the work for this book it was totally worth it and she definitely is one of my all time favorite writers.
  
  Edit-
  Reading this book makes me see a world in which women celebrate our differences and use them to make us stronger to fight the patriarchy, and the ability to do so is quite literally magic. I love Audre Lorde!!!
• 
  Alex Alvarez

  Stunning, inspiring, and thought provoking; Roxane Gay found a way to compile some of Lorde’s most iconic work along side pieces that give insight into who she was, context of the times she was living in, and the wisdom and knowledge she leaves behind for readers of today to think upon and act on- beyond excellent
  
  Personal highlights include The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, Difference and Survival (which gave me an inspiring crisis) and the poem Outlines!
• 
  Geena Zebrasky

  Audre Lorde is an excellent writer - I wish that I was a better reader of poetry, because I’m sure I’d really gain and appreciate so much more from it if I knew how to put in the work to really learn from poetry. Definitely a book I will be revisiting, particularly the poems, when I have more time! I think that it would be great poetry to read in a group setting. But regardless, her poetry is beautiful and she says so much (about many things!) with both her poems and her prose.
• 
  Kris - My Novelesque Life

  RATING: 5 STARS
  
  What is not to love about Lorde's writing? Whether it is one of her poems or an essay she does it with raw lyrical magic. She writes about all the things she is passionate about and you can feel every emotion. Lorde is a phenomenal writer, and her activism in social justice rights only endear me further to her as a person and a writer. Lorde is right up there with Nina Simon, Billie Holiday, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison to name a few of my favourite storytellers.