I am a post-mastectomy woman who believes our feelings need voice in order to be recognized, respected, and of use. The book consists of an introduction and three chapters, each featuring passages from her diary. This year, I decided to pick up The Cancer Journals, which is an essay collection that deals with her struggle with breast cancer. I read a collection of her essays and poetry in 2018 and ever since then I wanted to read more by Audre because I feel like I can learn so much from her. Lorde was State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992.įeels good to be reading Audre again. In 1980, together with Barbara Smith and Cherríe Moraga, she co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. It is particularly noteworthy for the poem 'Martha', in which Lorde poetically confirms her homosexuality: 'e shall love each other here if ever at all.' Later books continued her political aims in lesbian and gay rights, and feminism. 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. 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 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.

During this time, she was politically active in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements. 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.

Audre Lorde was a revolutionary Black feminist.

The cancer journals