The African American poet Audre Lorde (1934-1992) wrote poetry exploring the relationships between lovers, children and parents, and friends in both a very personal and a socially relevant manner. She...
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Audre Lorde is probably best known as a feminist poet; yet her contributions to the new black poetry movement cover a wide range of themes. Black pride, black love, and black survival in an urban envi...
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Critical Essay by Dudley Randall
Audre Lorde's The First Cities … is a quiet, introspective book. You first notice the striking phrases: "the crash of passing sun," "...
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Critical Essay by Joan Larkin
[Audre Lorde] risks expressing herself fully in her poems as a woman capable of rage as well as love.
From a Land Where Other People Live reveals the poet's growth...
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Critical Essay by Helen Vendler
Misery, impatience, urgings, loneliness, refusals, love, and terror rise from the pages of Audre Lorde's From a Land Where Other People Live…. In Lorde&#x...
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Critical Essay by Helen Vendler
In her uneven but intermittently powerful new poems, best in their New York reportage ["The New York Head Shop and Museum"], Audre Lorde mixes bitterness,...
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Critical Essay by Sandra M. Gilbert
[Until] the recent awakening of interest in women's achievements [Lorde] seemed destined for an obscurity that rarely enfolds male poets of comparable talent...
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Critical Essay by Claire Hahn
Lorde's poems [in Coal] are concerned most often with the mystery and variety of love relationships…. Her poems are often angry and bitter, etched in vitrio...
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Critical Essay by Hayden Carruth
I don't care much for [Audre Lorde's writing in The Black Unicorn], which seems far too close to the commonplace. (One wonders why contemporary Afro-Amer...
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Critical Essay by Michael T. Siconolfi, S.j.
Some years ago, Randall Jarrell remarked that the best critic who ever lived could not prove that the Iliad is better than "Trees."… [...
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Critical Essay by Andrea Benton Rushing
In The Black Unicorn, Audre Lorde reaches across 300 years of black diaspora and reclaims African history and mythology as a basis for her imagery about women; ...
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In the following essay—which the poet herself described as one of her "core pieces " of expository prose—Lorde characterizes poetry as a "vital necessity" for...
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In the essay below, Hull conducts a broad appraisal of the themes and issues Lorde addresses in her poetry.
In Audre Lorde's poem "A Meeting of Minds," a woman who "stands ...
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The following is a telephone interview that took place in 1990 between Rowell and Lorde, who was living in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. Lorde discusses the relationship between her roles as poet an...
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In the excerpt below, Chinosole explores the ways in which Lorde's poetry celebrates Black and female differences from the dominant culture as sources of power and self-definition.
The fullest ...
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In the following review, Clausen uses the coinciding occasions of Lorde's death and the publication of Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New (Revised) to conduct a broad survey of Lorde's ...
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In the following review, Parson-Nesbitt traces the development of Lorde's poetry as evidenced by the selections in Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New (Revised).
Audre Lorde wrote, "Poet...
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In the folowing excerpt, Keating argues that Lorde incorporates elements of African myths into her poetry and, in doing so, "reclaims a tradition which has been almost entirely erased by wester...
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Audre Lorde
Audre (Geraldine) Lorde
