Audre Lorde

Our Dead Behind Us

In this challenging and extraordinary collection, Black activist and artist Audre Lorde gives us poems that, in her own words, "explore differences as creative tensions, and the melding of past strength/pain with future hope/fear, the present being the vital catalyst, the motivating force—activism."

As Marilyn Hacker has written "Black, lesbian, mother, cancer survivor, urban woman: none of Lorde's selves has ever silenced the others; the counterpoint among them is often the material of her strongest poems." That counterpoint here becomes a compelling force for change.