A review by casskrug
The Selected Works of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde

4.0

absolutely loved the prose section and am so excited to read the rest of her full-length collections. it was a lot of poetry to get through and it would probably be better to dip in and out of it, but still obviously beautifully written. i listened to the last 30% on audio and appreciated hearing the poems spoken even more than reading them!

she changed my life with uses of the erotic, talking about how we need to look at all aspects of our life through the lens of the joy we know we’re capable of feeling, and see what aspects do/don’t align with that feeling:

“For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”