In her uneven but intermittently powerful new poems, best in their New York reportage ["The New York Head Shop and Museum"], Audre Lorde mixes bitterness, shame, and hope, sometimes in leadenly explicit lines, but often coming alive in rapid anecdotes. She [should] be quoted at length, because her effects at her best are cumulative….

Lorde is much less gifted in her abstractions than in her story-telling, and least happy in the love poems, which run to remarks about "entering her," finding "her forests," honey flowing "from the split cup / impaled on a lance of tongues / on the tips of her breasts," etc. etc. What Lorde hasn't yet found is a way to transmute feeling into original symbolic equivalents when she is trying to deal with non-narrative material. But her street photographs are acidic and hard-edged, and sardonic "cables to rage" are humming with their own electricity.

Helen Vendler...