Presents selections from ten books of poetry by the distinguished American writer, spanning thirty-five years of work.

This volume contains a thorough revision of the author's early poems, 1950-1979, along with nine previously unpublished poems from that period, and an essay describing the revision process. Readers new to Lorde's work will meet here a major American poet whose concerns are international, and whose words have left their mark on many lives. Readers of "The Black Unicorn", "Sister Outsider", "The Cancer Journals", "A Burst of Light", and "Our Dead Behind...

Throughout this book, a milestone in the poet's work and in the poetry of our time, Rich gathers images of our lives and focuses them blindingly in memory's "smoky mirror". As always, she maps out new territory, charting the landscapes of our lives amid the beauties and cruelties of a difficult world.

"Here are the words of some of the women I have been, am being still, will come to be," writes Audre Lorde of this volume, in which she brings together many of the most important poems she has written over the past thirty years."