This is the definitive and complete Audre Lorde collection, including original and revised versions of Lorde's previously unavailable early poems and her later work, which Robin Morgan calls "sinewy, lyrical, celebratory even in the face of death." Lorde was able to write indignantly about political matters ("jessehelms," her excoriation of the right-wing icon, is outrageously funny and angry), and her eloquence from the margins made her an inspiration to many readers. Lorde's writings about family, erotic love, and quiet, beautiful moments of reflection also leave a deep impression. As Adrienne Rich has noted: "These are poems which blaze and pulse on the page."


From Library Journal
Lorde?a recent New York State poet, author of ten books, a self-styled "black lesbian mother warrior poet," and matriarch of the North American lesbian feminist movement?has been sorely missed since her death of cancer in 1992. For readers familiar with Lorde's seminal essays in Sister Outsider (1984), this volume offers a complementary view. The poems are not easy to read in that many of them document the everyday horrors of racism and sexism, eulogizing victims who would otherwise have been forgotten, Lorde's commitment to the fight against injustice, her struggle to raise her children, and her insistence on honest communication with women and men she considered her sisters and brothers are rendered passionately and urgently throughout her oeuvre, from The First Cities, published in 1968, to her posthumous The Marvelous Arithmetic of Distance (Norton, 1993). Lorde's ties that bind are those of blood and also of passion and conviction. Recommended where Lorde's work is popular.?Ina Rimpau, Newark P.L., N.J. Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Since her death in 1992, Lorde's reputation has continued to grow. In life a tough, eloquent crusader who demanded that we honor the varieties of human experience, she retained her hold on readers despite the unavailability of much of her work. This edition, then, should be welcomed wherever there is interest in women's, minority, and lesbian literature. It includes Lorde's passionately private early work as well as her later, more obviously political work, bringing together such lovely, small, personal pieces as "Song" ("Strip our loving of dream / pay its secrets to thunder / and ransom me home") and longer, later works such as "Songs from the Moon of Beulah Land," with its rhetorical, oratorical fullness. The completeness of this collection (it includes multiple versions of several poems) may not serve Lorde's reputation as well as a selection might have, since there are patchy sections in her work. For her best poems--strong, vibrant, and wild--she will continue to be sought out. Patricia Monaghan


Out Magazine
What a deep pleasure to encounter Audre Lorde's most potent genius . . . you will welcome the sheer accessibility and the force and beauty of this volume.


Chuckanut Reader Magazine
This is an amazing collection of poetry by . . . one of our best contemporary poets. . . . Her poems are powerful, often political, always lyrical and profoundly moving.


Adrienne Rich
These are poems which blaze and pulse on the page.


Book Description
Now available for the first time, the collected poems of Audre Lorde, one of this country's most important and influential voices. Gathered here is the complete oeuvre of Audre Lorde's poetry, a poet whom Robin Morgan describes as "sinewy, lyrical, celebratory even in the face of death, and as always, political in the best sense." This collection is the first to include, along with other volumes, three of Lorde's early, previously unavailable works: The New York Head Shop and Museum, Cables to Rage, and From a Land Where Other People Live, books that in the author's own words detail "a linguistic and emotional tour through the conflicts, fears, and hopes of the worlds I have inhabited." The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde celebrates the undeniable voice of a woman who, according to Adrienne Rich, wrote as "a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a lesbian, a visionary; poems of elemental wildness and healing, nightmare and lucidity . . . a poetry which extends beyond white Western politics, beyond the anger and wisdom of Black America. . . . These are poems which blaze and pulse on the page." This collection will provide for Lorde's readers, both old and new, proof of this poet's lasting power.


About the Author
Audre Lorde (1934-1992) published ten volumes of poetry and five works of prose. She was a recipient of many distinguished honors and awards, including honorary doctorates from Hunter, Oberlin, and Haverford colleges, and was named New York State Poet (1991-1993).

ANNOTATION

The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde spans the poetic career of the "visionary" (as Adrienne Rich called her) for whom the personal and the poetic were always political. Lorde (1934-92) published the first of her 10 volumes of poetry beginning in the heady atmosphere of 1968, and continued to question, agitate, and astonish until her death. The first declaration of a black, lesbian feminist identity took place in these poems, and set the terms-beautifully, forcefully-for contemporary multicultural and pluralist debate.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Collected here for the first time are more than three hundred poems from one of this country's major and most influential poets, representing the complete oeuvre of Audre Lorde's poetry. Lorde published nine volumes of poetry which, in her words, detail "a linguistic and emotional tour through the conflicts, fears, and hopes of the world I have inhabited." Included here are Lorde's early, previously unavailable works: The First Cities, The New York Head Shop and Museum, Cables to Rage, and From a Land Where Other People Live.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal