Scan barcode
A review by bibliophage
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are––until the poem––nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. The distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.”
📚📖📚
I don't have to say the obvious––Audre Lorde is an incredible writer and thinker. Plenty of content here is still relevant, and even timely, even 37 years after publication. The occasional insight may make more sense in the 1984 context (I'm thinking specifically about her essays on her visit to the Soviet Union in 1976). I especially love Lorde's discussion of poetry and how poetry and writing/words are directly tied to identity and activism––and she shows this in her soulful prose. I'm still wrestling with some of my own thoughts about particular threads of Feminist thought and theory, but that's precisely why I am investing so much time and energy in all the reading I've done lately, and also why I picked up Sister Outsider.
📚📖📚
I don't have to say the obvious––Audre Lorde is an incredible writer and thinker. Plenty of content here is still relevant, and even timely, even 37 years after publication. The occasional insight may make more sense in the 1984 context (I'm thinking specifically about her essays on her visit to the Soviet Union in 1976). I especially love Lorde's discussion of poetry and how poetry and writing/words are directly tied to identity and activism––and she shows this in her soulful prose. I'm still wrestling with some of my own thoughts about particular threads of Feminist thought and theory, but that's precisely why I am investing so much time and energy in all the reading I've done lately, and also why I picked up Sister Outsider.