Misery, impatience, urgings, loneliness, refusals, love, and terror rise from the pages of Audre Lorde's From a Land Where Other People Live…. In Lorde's poems, "elementary forces collide in free fall": she has a freer and less programmatic emphasis than [Sonia] Sanchez or [Don] Lee, though she is no less pained. Her poems express uncertainties about choices and roles, the difficulties and falterings of motherhood and living. (pp. 319-20)

Lorde's freedom from norms of "poetic" language gives her an acute simplicity. She spares herself not at all, seeing, for instance her own inevitable obsolescence in the flourishing of her children…. [Lorde's poems] depend less on ambiguity or irony than on the force of earnestness and plain speech…. The almost artless voices of the black poets distrust a concealing rhetoric, and practice instead only the mute rhetoric of contiguity: the condemned house, the firemen, the huddled lumps. The convergence...