Zami/Sister Outsider/Undersong

by Audre Lorde

Librarian Note: ISBN 0965072514/9780965072519

This exclusive edition brings together a selection of Audre Lorde's poetry and essays with "biomythography," the form that she created in 'Zami: A New Spelling of My Name' (1982).

'Zami' combines biography, mythology, and history as it records Lorde's experiences as a West Indian in America and the growth of her emotional and sexual resonance with women. Zami grows up, goes to high school and college in New York City, and looks for women like herself. Ultimately she discovers Afrekete, a kindred spirit whose passion and will match her own. She must learn to deal with racism, sexism, and opposition to her lesbian identity, but she has the spirit to retain her individuality.

Lorde tackles the complexities of her multiple identities in 'Sister Outsider' (1984). It includes essays such as "Poetry Is Not a Luxury," in which she declares that poetry is "a vital necessity of our existence."

Published just months before her death, 'Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New' (1992) covers 30 years of Lorde's poetry. Here, Lorde demonstrates her mastery of the love poem, but she writes with equal passion and eloquence about everything from a conversation to her identity as a black woman.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Feminism, Queer

652 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1993

About the author

Audre Lorde was a revolutionary Black feminist. Lorde's poetry was published very regularly during the 1960s — in Langston Hughes' 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in several foreign anthologies; and in black literary magazines. During this time, she was politically active in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements. Her first volume of poetry, The First Cities (1968), was published by the Poet's Press and edited by Diane di Prima, a former classmate and friend from Hunter College High School. Dudley Randall, a poet and critic, asserted in his review of the book that Lorde "does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit, in the bone."

Her second volume, Cables to Rage (1970), which was mainly written during her tenure at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, addressed themes of love, betrayal, childbirth and the complexities of raising children. It is particularly noteworthy for the poem "Martha", in which Lorde poetically confirms her homosexuality: "[W]e shall love each other here if ever at all." Later books continued her political aims in lesbian and gay rights, and feminism. In 1980, together with Barbara Smith and Cherríe Moraga, she co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher for women of colour. Lorde was State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992.

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Reviews

[Kevin McConnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Audre Lorde was the first author I read to write something that really resonated with me as a kid. I was gifted this book by a family member early in high school, I was about 14 or 15 at the time when I read this book and specifically the famous essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” really spoke to my heart, for my own personal reasons. When you’re a victim of abuse or discrimination you become familiar with having your voice suppressed, as a victim of child abuse I found excerpts from this essay very cathartic to my younger self. “For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for the final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.” An absolutely brilliant mind that I am so fortunate to have been exposed to when I needed it most ten years ago.

[Marilyn Sue Michel · Rating 4 out of 5]

What Baldwin did not describe, Lorde giveth in detail. You might lose interest in her detailed descriptions of her early love affairs. Lorde was born in 1934, ten years after Baldwin, and spent her early days with her traditional-minded West Indian parents in Harlem. Very illuminative of the state of gay Black women in the 1950s. Her adventures in 1955 held special interest for me because I was born in March of that year.

[Savy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only finished Zami and it was a great book!

[amelia]

I will always be glad I read this. even if I did skim through some of the longer poems

[Sophia Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

god. i love audre lorde. that’s all.