The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

A Litany for Survival was my introduction to this amazing woman's talents with words. I have never been a lover of poetry, probably because most of the ones I had read made no sense to me. This author speaks clearly plainly and her words fill me with a special feeling. Many novels I've read have had that impact, but before reading the words of this amazing woman poetry did not. If you have wanted to give poetry a chance then let it be with this book, you will come away feeling - I mean really feeling.

In February 2023, the book disucssion group at The LGBT Center in NYC discussed this book. This was a tough read for us, so much so that I suggested we focus on five essays ("Poetry is Not a Luxury," "My Mother's Mortar," "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," "Fourth of July," and "Is Your Hair Still Political?") and the poetry. Two of these essays ("Poetry..." and "Master's Tools...") are famous and the other three essays are largely stories with valuable information about Lorde's background and approach. A number of readers read some of the other essays, but most of us found them academic and difficult to follow.

I wish Gay had given us more background about Lorde because it is interesting and would have helped us understand her better. Instead, Lorde's Wikipedia page and a BBC discussion found on YouTube gave us valuable information.

One reader found the quote "What woman here is so enamoured of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face?" a good summary of Lorde's works. Her rhetoric is powerful and, all these years later, still accurate. She raises the issues of intersectionality and questions whether it is the job of Black people to educate the rest of us.

We read a number of poems and discussed them, which is always a pleasant exercise. About her poetry, Lorde said, "I speak of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word 'poetry' to mean--in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight." Lorde, we agreed, is all experience without the old-fashioned rhythms, rhymes, and clever writing that we think of with most poetry. And the insights are insistent throughout her works.

Favorite poems included "Sowing," "Change of Season," "One Year to Life on the Grand Central Shuttle," "The Workers Rose on May Day or Postscript to Karl Marx," and "jessehelms."

This was a tough book but we were all glad that we read it. It seems like Audre Lorde may be having a bit of a revival, which is shocking since her points and pleas for advancement have been understood but not implemented for more than 40 years. A few footnotes and background comments would have helped us get through this sizeable collection a little easier.