Poetry:
The First Cities, 1968
Cables to Rage, 1970
From a Land Where Other People Live, 1973
New York Head Shop and Museum, 1974
Between Our Selves, 1976
Coal, 1976
The Black Unicorn, 1978
Chosen Poems, Old and New, 1982 (revised as Undersong: Chosen Poems, Old and New, 1992)
A Comrade Is as Precious as a Rice Seedling, 1984
Our Dead Behind Us, 1986
Need: A Chorale for Black Woman Voices, 1990
The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance: Poems, 1987-1992, 1993
The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde, 1997
Nonfiction:
Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, 1978
The Cancer Journals, 1980
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, 1982
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 1984
I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities, 1985
Apartheid U.S.A., 1986
A Burst of Light: Essays, 1988
The Audre Lorde Compendium: Essays, Speeches, and Journals, 1996
Audre Lorde died just as she was writing her best poetry. A brief review of the titles of her works indicates much about her life and her writing, for the two were inextricably bound. Lorde was one of the first women in the United States to admit honestly to all of her “affiliations,” as she sometimes would wryly call them. She was a mother but also a feminist and a lesbian. She was part African American and part German. She was an educated woman who had grown up in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, although she was too young to remember its writers or events personally.
Audre Lorde
All these affiliations and events were to affect her writing, in addition to the one event that Lorde thought of absolute importance to her and her friends, and those who read her work. She was a cancer survivor, or at least she was for most of her last thirteen years. Her autobiographical The Cancer Journals were written at a time when cancer was still considered one’s private illness, and certainly no African American had written what it was like to have breast cancer, to take treatments, to be scared, and to go through a ritual scarification of her body. No woman, moreover, had testified to these truths with the precise lucidity of Lorde’s slim volume. Unfortunately, the book was brought out by a small press (perhaps because of its content), so its initial circulation was limited. It went out of print and stayed that way until 1997, five years after Lorde’s death as a result of the cancer.
As any of her books testify, Lorde was a stubborn woman, but a sensitive one. The same woman who wrote beautiful poetry could swear down a room full of men who ignored the needs of women. Through her own willpower, Lorde fought to get out of Harlem, but she always believed that black people needed to hear her, so she stayed in New York her whole life.
The causes that emerged from and contributed to her life became her life. In a sense, Lorde’s battle with cancer was nothing compared to her battle with men: her battle to be recognized as a woman and then to be granted legitimacy as a lesbian woman. It was equally important to Lorde to be granted legitimacy as a responsible parent, and she fought for these causes personally and in her writing.
Lorde’s greatest poetry is included in The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance, written in her declining years and published soon after her death, and in A Burst of Light, published five years before she died. Both books display a transcendent awareness of Lorde’s place in the world and the place in the world of all people. The former book garnered quiet accolades from Alice Walker and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1994. After A Burst of Light was published, a feisty Lorde was named New York State Poet in 1991.
Lorde did not apply for grants, fellowships, and awards. She believed that her calling was to write to and for the people of the world. Her poems in The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance are for civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, about Berlin, “the politics of addiction,” peace, and her own lovers. The volume includes the moving, beautiful poem “Today Is Not the Day” (to die)–even though Lorde defers to its coming. The poem is a lyrical masterpiece.
In her declining years, Lorde lived with performance artist and poet Pat Parker. Parker wrote of these times as memorable; obviously Lorde was able to redouble her efforts against cancer through the help of Parker.
Throughout her career, Lorde concentrated on writing: From a Land Where Other People Live is a polemic; Chosen Poems, Old and New came about because a publisher wanted a volume of selected poems; Sister Outsider makes clear where Lorde thinks women, particularly lesbian women, fit in American culture; and Apartheid U.S.A. expresses Lorde’s attitude toward the system of government in South Africa at that time (before the end of apartheid) and how the situation in the United States was little more enlightened. The latter volume focuses on separation, as many of Lorde’s works do, but here the distinction is not between men and women but between the races. Half German, Lorde often did not see herself as African American, but it was equally hard for her to see herself as white in the Germanic sense. She always seemed more comfortable being herself–with all that meant in terms of racial, sexual, gender, and artistic identities.