Audre Lorde is generally presented as displaying a poetic voice that blends feminism, lesbianism, and Caribbean and African-American concerns in a passionate way. Clarence Major, in The Garden Thrives: Twentieth-Century African-American Poetry, places Lorde in a pantheon of African-American writers such as Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez, and Amiri Baraka, who developed in the 1960s and who "tried to give lyrical expression to the complex personal, social, and political issues" of the time. Lorde was personally and professionally befriended and supported by fellow poet Adrienne Rich. According to critic Beverly Threatt Kullii, as quoted in Andrews, et al., Lorde's The First Cities, her first published book of poetry (including "What My Child Learns of the Sea"), "was cited as an innovative and refreshing rhetorical departure from the confrontational tone prevalent in African American poetry at the time." Publication of the first edition of Lorde's Chosen Poems: Old...