Summary in 3 sentences
Still reading this but returning to library as of June 2026
A non-linear, quantum biography on Audre Lorde
How I discovered it
First through Secret Studies - finding out about Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ work, then seeing it on the library shelves
How it changed me
Behavior, ideas, perspectives, emotional shifts A manual of sorts on how to be, how to grow one’s voice, how to take up space
- Audre wasn’t able to speak until 5! She stuttered in the beginning of her life
- stutter is a pause, but the non-intentionality and lack of control makes it vulnerable
- Cultural divide, where not asking questions was a form of respect in her home life. Contrasting that with school, where she was expected to speak her mind
- Audre learning to be infinite within the scale of a human life by honoring the landscape of her own soul
- soul as infinite
- earth as source and mother, foundation
- Doorway, threshold as transcendence, as portal. Childhood friend Genevieve’s death by suicide
- Audre’s time in Mexico realized a shift from writing poetry as a way to create beauty through landscape to celebrating existing beauty
- poet’s role as witness
Quotes from Audre
“I will never be gone. I am a scar, a report from the frontlines, a talisman, a resurrection.”
“What I come wrapped in is close to you as love is close to death”
“When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid.”
“May I never lose that terror that keeps me brave.”
“The best thing I had to give to anyone has got to come out of myself… Anchor in the heaviest power I know…and that is me.”
Quotes from Alexis
“Life in full emerges in the field of relations in each particle”
“Audre’s silence and unreadability was the door she could close on them.” (84)
“Life as a tension between geological time and human mortality”
“Poetic darkness was a way for Audre to express a loss without measure, a loss without end”
“Lungs are upside down trees…they split 2.5 times before we arrive at what we need, a molecule of air.”
“There is heat, fuel, and possibility inside her that she has to nurture before anyone else follows her map into herself.”
Other related poems
- Walter De La Mare’s “The Listeners” - AL’s favorite poem
- Edna St Vincent Millay “Renascence”
- Audre Lorde’s “Coal” - “I Is the total black, being spoken From the earth’s inside”