[Until] the recent awakening of interest in women's achievements [Lorde] seemed destined for an obscurity that rarely enfolds male poets of comparable talents. What is heartening … [is that she has] made fine art out of the experience. (p. 296)

Lorde, of course, is an outsider in more ways than one. A black woman poet, living, writing, teaching, and raising children in the gray chaos that New York City has become, she observes and describes the alienation imposed on her by her race, her sex, her vocation, and even her city, "smeared upon the east shore of a continent's insanity." As an artist, she perceives that she has been "shot through by the cold eye of the way things are baby / and left for dead on a hundred streets of this city." As a mother, she struggles "to speak out living words … to leave my story behind" and to revenge...