For Lorde is everywhere today; we see the flowering of her most subtle ideas. In the essay Poetry Is Not a Luxury, included here, she describes poetry as the skeleton architecture of our lives: It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. The rise of the prison abolition movement has followed the decades of activism by Lorde and fellow Black feminist writers, including the Combahee River Collective, and many others. She feels present in every call to reconceive models of care and justice in the work of the organizer Mariame Kaba, for example (Poetry helps me to imagine freedom), and the scholar Akwugo Emejulu, who spoke at a recent series of conversations on abolition inspired by Lorde. (I hope that we can be brave, that we can be courageous, that we allow ourselves to think expansively about this idea of abolition, Emejulu has said. I hope that we allow ourselves to have our imaginations run wild.) I hear Lordes words in Arundhati Roys essays on Covid-19: Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal.

But to Lorde, Without community, there is no liberation. And community, for her, involved parsing difference, honoring it. In her time, as in ours, to speak of difference can court charges of divisiveness, even opportunism, but she regarded it as a fund of creativity and connection the chance to hone ourselves upon each others courage.

On this point, a few omissions in this collection rankled the pieces that reveal what it means to negotiate difference, with all its risks and rewards. I missed Eye to Eye, perhaps the most self-critical and self-revealing piece Lorde ever wrote, about the sources of anger between Black women. I missed her letter to Daly, too, and her public conversations with Adrienne Rich and James Baldwin, which felt like genuine events in their time.

Lorde loved to be in dialogue, loved thinking with others, with her comrades and lovers. She is never alone on the page. Even her short essays come festooned with long lines of acknowledgment to those who have sharpened their ideas. Ghosts flock her essays. She writes to the ancestors and to women she meets in the headlines of the newspaper missing women, murdered women, naming as many as she can, the sort of rescue and care for the dead that one sees in the work of Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe. In The Cancer Journals, in which she documented her diagnosis of breast cancer, she noted: I carry tattooed upon my heart a list of names of women who did not survive, and there is always a space left for one more, my own.

The boon in this book is its wealth of poetry. Lorde is beloved for her essays and her groundbreaking memoir, Zami, with its vivid, sexy, very funny depictions of the drama of Downtown gay-girl life in the 50s, but she insisted she was a poet first.

For those familiar with her biography, the poetry becomes a shadow journal a document of her inner life, her hungers, as she left home young, labored in factories, taught high school students, taught cops. She married, bore two children, divorced, fell in love again (and again), with the brilliant women who were to become some of her chief interlocutors. The poems grow cleaner and clearer, with the years. The last ones are still full of appetite and the taste of loving even as she weakened, with a tumorous town growing in my liver.

I am dying / but I do not want to do it / looking the other way, she wrote.

Her work was interrupted; her work continues, as she knew it would. In The Cancer Journals, she described talking with Black women trying to organize New Orleanss first feminist book fair. She was galvanized by their energy, and deeply moved: These women make the early silence and the doubts and the wear and tear of it all worth it. I feel like they are my inheritors, and sometimes I breathe a sigh of relief that they exist, that I dont have to do it all.

Excerpt from:

A Timely Collection of Vital Writing by Audre Lorde - The New York Times