"Inheriting the Poetry of Survival": Caleb Ward reviews "Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde" by Alexis Pauline Gumbs (Keywords: Poetry; Biography; Black Feminism)
Briefly

"Gumbs documents how the Lorde that we have come to know grew out of childhood battles and joys, fear of the dark, a complicated legacy from her parents, and the influence of poets like Edna St. Vincent Millay, who shaped Lorde's visions about time, change, and human life and death."
"Gumbs invites us to take seriously Lorde's florid juvenile poetry and science-fiction imaginings, which show how 'in high school [Lorde] already understood life as a tension between geological time and human mortality' (91)."
"Alexis Gumbs is fundamentally a poet, and her aim is to make readers feel the movement of her subject... lifting up tiny details from across the archive with amazing sensitivity and deftness."
Read at The Philosopher
[
|
]