The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (2024)

‘I am a bleak heroism of words
that refuse
to be buried alive
with liars.’

Audre Lorde is the Patron Saint of activism. Often best known for her speeches and essays in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, she was also a phenomenal poet and I would like very much for everyone to read her. ‘Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought,’ wrote Lorde. ‘As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring ideas’. Lorde (1934-1982) is a monumental figure in both Black and Feminist writing and activism. The self-proclaimed ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’ spent her life confronting injustices and is still a cornerstone of intersectional theory, speaking out against racism, hom*ophobia, sexism, classism and more. Of any book of poetry I own, this might be the one I have most dogeared and underlined as she is so immensely quotable. Lines of her poetry often tumble about in my head and are empowering anthems that can get anyone through even the toughest days. In a speech given at Harvard in 1982, Lorde said ‘if I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.’ Her poetry champions this spirit through a fierce and valiant voice that is as inimitable as it is inspiring as she confronts a wide range of topics like a protest flooding the streets with demands for a better world.

We made strong poems for each other
exchanging formulas for our own particular magic
-from Neighbors

Born Audrey Geraldine Lorde in 1934, as a child she dropped the ‘y’ in her name because she liked the symmetry of the e-endings in Audre Lorde, an early sign of an ear and eye for language that would blossom into a lifelong pursuit of truth and justice through the written word. She tells this story in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name and says that at a young age she found herself always “thinking in poetry” and began penning poems as early as 12, using poetry to connect with and defend classmates considered outcasts as she was herself for being an openly gay Black girl. Her first poetry publication, a poem written in while attending Hunter College High School in Manhattan--a school for intellectually gifted kids--was originally rejected by her school’s newspaper for purported obscenity so she instead found a home for it in Seventeen magazine.

mother I need your blackness now
as the august earth needs rain.
I am

the sun and moon and forever hungry
the sharpened edge
where day and night shall meet
and not be
one.

After college she began working as a librarian in New York then as a writer-in-residence Tougaloo College in Mississippi where she lead workshops of young Black students who were eager to discuss Civil Rights issues. She lead a life of activism, founded a small press exclusively for WoC during a time when the industry was dominated by patriarchal white presses (as it still is more or less today) calledKitchen Table as well as working with other organizations promoting women in publishing; was a founder of Women's Coalition of St. Croix which helped rape and domestic abuse survivors, helped create Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa which aided women affected by apartheid; was invited to a delegation of Black women writers in Cuba in 1985 that discussed how the Cuban revolution impacted racism and particularly focused on the state of LGBTQ+ people in Cuba; and took part in a visiting professorship in Berlin where she coined the term “Afro-Germanism” and gave rise to a Black women’s movement in Germany. All the while penning insightful essays and poetry. Her’s was a life well lived and a legacy well founded. Even today there exists the Audre Lorde Project, an art center for LGBTQ+ artists in NYC for which I am a sustaining donor.

Love is a word another kind of open—
As a diamond comes into a knot of flame
I am black because I come from the earth's inside
Take my word for jewel in your open light.
-from Coal

Her poetry is outstanding. She was recognized early on and published in Langston Hughes’ 1962 New Negro Poets, U. S. A anthology along with my personal favorite poet Lucille Clifton and nominated for a National Book Award in 1972. With a major publisher finally behind her, her 1976 release of Coal--compiling her earlier works of poetry with fresh work--launched her to the forefront of a Black feminist movement. Her poetry tackles a wide range of subjects but centers around the Black experience, lesbianism, disability and Black feminism. Her poetry is expressly written for those who find themselves “outsiders” to social norms, and is a rallying cry to challenge the obdurate cultures that oppress otherness. ‘I am defined as other in every group I'm part of,' Lorde says, ‘the outsider, both strength and weakness. Yet without community there is certainly no liberation, no future, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between me and my oppression’. Intersectionality is a cornerstone of her work, with many facets of identity comingeling gracefully to inform upon each both individually and as shared concepts. She wrote that she holds a ‘concert of voices within herself and gives each a voice in a stirring orchestra of words.

I have been woman
for a long time
beware my smile
I am treacherous with old magic
and the noon's new fury
with all your wide futures
promised
I am
woman
and not white.
-from A Woman Speaks

Her poetry is complementary to her essays and work to probe similar territory in alternate ways. Much of the theory from Sister Outsider is found expressed in her poetry in a beautiful way that lets it further seep into your heart. Lorde urges readers to speak out against injustice, and reminds us that silence is complicity. ‘[B]ut when we are silent / we are still afraid,’ she writes in A Litany for Survival, ‘so it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive.’ This is a powerful statement that reminds all readers that the forces working to crush you will do it regardless, so it is better to face them decrying their destruction rather than be smote in complicity to them. As a gay, Black woman, she has confronted her share of injustice and prejudice, and Lorde speaks of harnessing your rage and using it for social productivity. Survival won’t come for many without demanding it, and systemic injustice cannot be destroyed from within, as she writes in some of her most quoted passages from her essays:

those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference – those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older – know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.

Touching you I catch midnight
as moon fires set in my throat
I love you flesh into blossom
I made you
and take you made
into me.
-from Recreation

There are few poets who empower and inspire as much as Audre Lorde much less live a life of activism as powerfully and proudly as she did. Her words are immortalized in her perfect prose and no reader who devours them will ever be the same. Drop everything and read Audre Lorde.

5/5

The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.

I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds
and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep
blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders
is the only liquid for miles
and my stomach
churns at the imagined taste while
my mouth splits into dry lips
without loyalty or reason
thirsting for the wetness of his blood
as it sinks into the whiteness
of the desert where I am lost
without imagery or magic
trying to make power out of hatred and destruction
trying to heal my dying son with kisses
only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.

A policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood
and a voice said “Die you little motherf*cker” and
there are tapes to prove it. At his trial
this policeman said in his own defense
“I didn't notice the size nor nothing else
only the color”. And
there are tapes to prove that, too.

Today that 37 year old white man
with 13 years of police forcing
was set free
by eleven white men who said they were satisfied
justice had been done
and one Black Woman who said
“They convinced me” meaning
they had dragged her 4'10'' black Woman's frame
over the hot coals
of four centuries of white male approval
until she let go
the first real power she ever had
and lined her own womb with cement
to make a graveyard for our children.

I have not been able to touch the destruction
within me.
But unless I learn to use
the difference between poetry and rhetoric
my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold
or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire
and one day I will take my teenaged plug
and connect it to the nearest socket
raping an 85 year old white woman
who is somebody's mother
and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed
a greek chorus will be singing in 3/4 time
“Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.

I've been reading through these poems again for a while now and love them as much as ever. So much to think about.

Sharp, provocative, and impassioned, Audre Lorde's poems combine narrative, myth, cultural history, and politics in powerful ways that still feel fresh and perceptive. Lorde aimed to make her poetry accessible to an audience outside of academia, even as she remained highly invested in questions of structure and artifice. Unsurprisingly, her work often reads as down to earth but complex, artful but unaffected.

audre lorde inspired me to write poetry, so i’m biased, but she’s one of the best poets. hands f*cking down. she is iconic. no one writes verse like lorde does.

"I am a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars"

it took me exactly 305 days to explore every sentence Lorde puts into ink in detail.

I think it was important for me to pick this book up when I needed it the most, to live with it the way she lived with her words and poems throughout her entire life. This book truly is a treasure and I can't believe we are lucky enough to be this intimate with such a brilliant force of nature.

I am sure to go back to this over and over, hunch over her every word once more to get a deeper understanding every time.

"and when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcome
but when we are silent,
we are still afraid.

It is better to speak,
remembering
we were never meant to survive"

Mulher, negra, lésbica. É dessa posição que você vai encontrar a poesia indefectível de Audre Lorde, é uma poesia política, feminista e pessoal e a não ser que você viva em outro planeta não verá as coisas ao seu redor transmutada na poesia dessa autora maravilhosa.

God damn! God damn!

“There is nothing beautiful left in the streets of this city.”

“Ego trips through an incomplete self.”

“Only the children are growing”

“For how else can the self become whole”

“Who exists to go into dust to exist again”

“Drugged decisions hanging from his belt”

“This is how I come to be loved by loving myself loveless”

“All her powers defined her”

“Your mothers night mares are not mine but just as blinding”

“The only sacrifice of worth is the sacrifice of desire.”

When my friend told me to read this book, I didn't know what to expect because I had never heard of this author. Not familiar with her name, I did a quick google search and became interested in the moment I saw that she described herself as: "a black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet, who dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and hom*ophobia."

This book is exactly about all of this.

You can feel in her poems her own feelings: anger, fear, maternal love, sexual love, despair, despair...

I confess that I found her writing a bit complicated in some poems, but I think that just made the book even more personal: in some poems, it seems that she was scribbling some thoughts and then she was lost between memories, and, in the end, I think I ended up enjoying feeling a little confused. But in other poems, you feel everything so intensely that you need to stop reading for a few minutes to be able to digest your own feelings.

4.3 stars!

Neighbors

We made strong poems for each other
exchanging formulas for our own particular magic
all the time pretending
we were not really witches
and each time we would miss
some small ingredient
that one last detail
that would make the spell work
Each one of us
too busy
hearing our other voices
the sound of our own guards
calling the watch at midnight
assuring us
we were still safely asleep
so when it came time to practice
what we had learned
one grain was always missing
one word unsaid
so the pot did not boil
the sweet milk would curdle
or the bright wound went on bleeding
and each of us would go back
to her own particular magic
confirmed
believing
she was always alone
believing
the other was always
lying
in wait.

I didn’t think this was a very well-edited collection, to be honest. Many of the poems came up more than once.
And naturally, considering this is a very large collection, I didn’t love every single one.
However, the ones I did love were so unbelievably good. There was a particular poem titled “Power” that I still have goosebumps because of, even though I read it two days ago.
Audre Lorde is definitely a new favorite poet of mine.

me voy a tatuar a esta señora y a sus poemas, es la figura más inspiradora con la que me he encontrado últimamente

Are you seeking the shape of a girl
I have grown less and less to resemble
Or do you remember
I could never accept your face dying
I do not know you now
Surely your vision stayed stronger than mine
Genevieve tell me where dead girls
Wander after their summer.

I wish I could see you again
Far from me—even
Birdlike flying into the sun
Your eyes are blinding me Genevieve.

“I Die for All Mysterious Things”
The Hanged Man
Broken
By fire
Is
Neither
More Beautiful
Nor
Less
Sane.

Am I to be cursed forever with becoming somebody else on the way to myself?

I am afraid
They will discard my most ancient nightmares where the fallen gods became demon
instead of dust.

My children play with skulls
and remember
for the embattled
there is no place
that cannot be
home
nor is.

To what death shall I look for comfort? Which mirror to break or mourn?

Favorite book of poetry ever!
Easily one of my all time favorite books!

The real question now is how do I get everyone I know to read Lorde??!

Edit:
In the wake of my grief over the loss of my mom I retreated into Audre Lorde's work. And like when I read Black Unicorn for the first time her words held me. Her work is now even more important to me. I can find little comfort now and her work is keeping me here. I still haven't read Zami: A New Spelling of My Name and knowing that there are still words of hers I haven't read is keeping me here. Her light helps guide me more than ever can be put into words.

I had so many thoughts, feelings and reactions reading this compilation of Audre Lorde's incredible work, celebrating her Black Feminist Gay fierceness.

The first thing I noticed in the poems, was the inclusion of common elements:

Stone
Thunder
Sun
Mirror/reflection
Earth
Death
Fire
Rain
The Four Seasons

The poems read like songs, and many are named as such.

The poet exposes all the people we are. Each day, we are a different version of ourselves, riding the tide of becoming. The poet herself embodies the space between fearlessness and bravery, and invites us in. She asserts that our power comes from the same place as our pain. It's a revelation and a stark reminder of the costs of social revolution. She sees activism as a kind of agitation, a refusal to be comfortable with things as they are. Her dreams speak to her consciousness, always restless and unrelenting.

She's always being told she's too little or too much, never taking up the correct amount of space, for her gender, for her race. She divines that the roots of rage are watered by blood. and as the writer David Diop reminds us: at night, all blood is black. So, why is it that some people are seen as more disposable than others? And why is it that one mother must forge her children in fire, to steel them for the world, while other mothers are allowed to let their children slide into mediocrity with no armor at all? She exhorts us not to die politely.

Knowing your worth is a vital, revolutionary act. She doesn't want her worth counted only by what some big corporation can sell her. She does not shrink at the effort required. Activism is work, whereas "hope is counter-revolutionary." When change comes, whatever we sacrificed will have been worth it. And part of that sacrifice is shedding what doesn't help. When you fight the system, you realize that Marx had it wrong: the proletariat rises up to help the arm of the state vs. the protestors. You have to know the difference between what people say and what they do, how far they are willing to go when it costs them something besides mild discomfort.

And finally, I'm reminded of the words of Sojourner Truth "Ain't I a woman?" Lorde shines a light on the marginalization of Black women by many feminist organizations, who still center issues around whiteness. It's an indictment of the fossilization of systemic structures we have yet to break down and rebuild.

I want to take a class just on Audre Lorde's work so badly bc I know I am just getting the surface layers of what she is really doing. It has taken me a year or more to make my way through this book bc the material is so rich and the world she is responding to is so traumatic and, sadly, not too different from the one I'm reading it from. It takes in the whole of her poetic career (1968-1992). She is a poet who humbles and inspires. She critiques with precision. Read her well.

I tried reading this collection a few years back, but found the poems to be way over my head. After reading Lorde's ZAMI and her collection of essays in SISTER, OUTSIDER, I returned to the collection, and I'm so glad I did! Reading her memoir and essays really helped me understand her poems a lot more than I previously had. That being said, I don't think I'll ever feel like I 100% understand her poems; they're so rich and dense. You can read them over and over and find something new every time, which I think is the mark of greatness.

I especially appreciated her poems now. As the US hurtles toward who-knows-what, I found comfort in this book. Some excerpts I especially loved:

From "Power": The difference between poetry and rhetoric/is being/ready to kill/yourself/instead of your children.

From "Echoes": There is a timbre of voice/ that comes from not being heard/ and knowing you are not being/heard noticed only/ by others not heard/ for the same reason.

From "Sacrifice": The only hungers left/are the hungers allowed us.

From "A Sewerplant Grows In Harlem Or I'm A Stranger Here Myself When Does The Next Swan Leave": Have you ever risen in the night/ bursting with knowledge and the world/ dissolves toward any listening ear/ into which you can pour/ whatever it was you knew/ before waking/ Only to find all ears asleep/ or drugged perhaps by a dream of words...

Coal

I
is the total black, being spoken
from the earth's inside.
There are many kinds of open
how a diamond comes into a knot of flame
how sound comes into a words, coloured
by who pays what for speaking.

Some words are open like a diamond
on glass windows
singing out within the crash of sun
Then there are words like stapled wagers
in a perforated book - buy and sign and tear apart -
and come whatever will all chances
the stub remains
an ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.
Some words live in my throat
breeding like adders. Other know sun
seeking like gypsies over my tongue
to explode through my lips
like young sparrows bursting from shell.
Some words
bedevil me

Love is word, another kind of open.
As the diamond comes into a knot of flame
I am Black because I come from the earth's inside
Now take my word for jewel in the open light.

Audre Lorde is one of my favorite poets, and I found her works at a critical time in my life when I most needed it. This collection is great.

so many pages/poems not meant for consumption all at once, not gonna finish for months or years but it’s my new bible. bottom line

Check out my book blogs at:
https://abookblog4you.blogspot.com/
https://www.tumblr.com/bookowldevours...

*Spoiler alert!*

“History is not kind to us
We restitch it with living
Past memory forward
Into desire
Into the panic”

Throughout the volume, we experience history as seen contemporaneously by her, such as the struggle to overthrow the apartheid regime in South Africa and the civil rights fight in America. Even though she is no longer with us (she passed in 1992), her poetry echoes presciently, hauntingly with our present moment, where issues of destructive foreign policy, racism, sexism, hom*ophobia, and discrimination are not ghosts but are still with us.

She wrestles with historical legacy in a very astute way in the many different ways that patriarchal societies mythologize women—fitting them squarely within archetypes such as healer, nurturer, Mother Bear, etc. without recognizing their complicated humanity—that are no longer with us:

“What do we want from each other
After we have told our stories
Do we want
To be healed do we want
Mossy quiet stealing over our scars
Do we want
The powerful unfrightening sister
Who will make the pain go away
Mother’s voice in the hallway
You’ve done it right
The first time darling
You will never need
To do it again”

I enjoyed the contrast between the deliberateness of how we are representing our species in the Golden Record in contrast with the impulsive, unfiltered release of radio waves containing various TV shows and the legal scandals of the day (Watergate, McCarthy, etc.). How is anyone out there making a judgment about humanity when presented with these two contradicting narratives? What judgment comes out of that?

“Don’t make waves
Is good advice
From a leaky boat

One light year is the distance
One ray of light can travel in one year and
Thirty
Light years away from earth
In our infinitely offended universe
Of waiting
An electronic cloud announces our presence
Finally
To the unimpressible stars

This is straight from a Scientific American
On the planet earth
Our human signature upon the universe
Is an electronic cloud
Of expanding 30-year-old television programs
Like Howdy Doody Arthur Godfrey
Uncle Miltie and Hulahoops
Quiz shows and wrestling midgets
Baseball
The McCarthy hearings and Captain Kangaroo

Now I don’t know what
A conscious universe might be
But it is interesting to wonder
What will wave back
To all that”

Happy reading!

--BookOwl

“As my tongue unravels
in what pitch
will the scream hang unsung
or shiver like lace on the borders
of neverrecording
which dreams healwhich
dream can kill
stabbing a man and burning his body
for coverbeing caught
making love to a woman
I do not know.”

Of course, her poetry more than anything else reflects the pain and suffering she went through in our culture where still racism is the case. Most of the poems here are written in a highly energetic stream-of-conciousness manner,giving a sense of perpetual state of rawness reflecting her immanent existence. It is not only herself;with her it is the concrete world which is giving meaning to her emotions,and even to the abrupt thoughts in her mind. Frustration, anger,sadness,mourning —almost every sorts of emotions that drives a person to sublimate his/her emotions into a work of art was explicit here in her poems. At every moment,we readers were becoming aware of her choice to sublimate her very person into these poems,even some of the most ugliest words(which we consider ugly in terms of using those in our poems)were used by her. In a word,she didn’t give a damn what we would think as a reader. Maybe writing these poems was for her a form of salvation. And as a reader,we can connect with her on so many levels because of our common human ground, where we are more or less rooted by our primordial human existence.

“For women
perspective is more easily maintained.
But something in my body
teaches patience
is no virtue
every month
renews its own destruction
while my blood rages
for proof
or continuity.
Peering out of this
pressured metal cabin
I see my body patterns
repeated on the earth
I hear my blood breath beating
through the dark green places
between the mountain’s thrust
without judgement or decision
a valley rhythm captures all.”

Absolutely radiant collection of poems. Sometimes books come to you when you need them, and Audre Lorde is who I needed in these times.

Naming the Stories

Otter and quaking aspen
the set of a full cleansing moon
castle walls crumble
in silence
visions trapped by the wild stone
lace up the sky pale electric fire
no sound
but a soft expectation of birds
calling the night home.

Half asleep bells
mark a butterfly’s birth
over the rubble
I crawl into dawn
corn woman bird girl sister
calls from the edge of a desert
where it is still night
to tell me her story
survival.

Rock speaks a rooster language
and the light is broken
clear.

As a white man, a lot of these poems escaped me. Audre Lorde’s experiences as a black woman are clearly the inspiration for a good majority of her work so there were things I didn’t fully understand because I’ve never experienced them. However, I won’t fault her just because of my privilege of never having had these experiences. Besides, her use of the english language is unlike many other poets I’ve read and is the real shining star of this collection. She is an incredible writer. And the poems that did grab me, like “Power” and “A Woman/Dirge For Wasted Children”, grabbed on tight and proceeded to rip me to shreds.

Esse foi meu primeiro contato com a obra da Audre Lorde e é difícil descrever a profundidade dos poemas. A autora passa por vários temas duros de forma tão corajosa e bonita que mexem com a gente.
É triste perceber como muitos desses poemas poderiam estar sendo escritos hoje, como forma de denúncia da realidade vivida pelos negros dos EUA. Afinal, como o movimento Black Lives Matter vem mostrando, muito pouco mudou.

Agggh this was incredible!! So so good! It was unflinching and unapologetic, raw and beautiful and so deeply personal. I love poetry collections and Audra Lorde is my queen and contributed so much to the world. I highly recommend her work if you're ready for it. This did contain some sexual references and cursing so be aware of that, but it was so beautifully written and unlike anything I've read before. It just blew my mind!

i’ve been deeply touched by some of these poems and will reread them countless times.

I LOVE AUDRE LORDE.

Took me too long to finish.

The best thing I can say is that I needed this