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The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
A bold, innovative biography that offers a new understanding of the life, work, and enduring impact of Audre Lorde.
We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity-center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde's teachings on "the creative power of difference" may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today.
Lorde's understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or being resilient in the face of cancer. It was about the total stakes of what it means to be in relationship with a planet in transformation. Possibly the focus on Lorde's quotable essays, to the neglect of her complex poems, has led us to ignore her deep engagement with the natural world, the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. For her, ecological images are not simply metaphors but rather literal guides to how to be of earth on earth, and how to survive―to live the ethics that a Black feminist lesbian warrior poetics demands.
In Survival Is a Promise, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the first researcher to explore the full depths of Lorde's manuscript archives, illuminates the eternal life of Lorde. Her life and work become more than a sound bite; they become a cosmic force, teaching us the grand contingency of life together on earth.
"[A] scintillating tour de force...in a free-ranging style as distinctive as its subject ... Forgoing the strictures and linearity of traditional biography, Gumbs enlivens her narrative with unconventional flourishes that in lesser hands might feel like a gimmick but here come across as revelation ... Gumbs is a master stylist with a knack for writing sentences at once direct and expansive ('The scale of the life of the poet is the scale of the universe'). This is a feast for the intellect―and the soul." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A celebration of a tireless advocate...Stars, hurricanes, and even whale songs feature in a narrative notable for lyrical prose and unabashed admiration ... Gumbs offers thoughtful analyses of Lorde's poems, as well as the pressures and pleasures of her life: friends and lovers; marriage to a white gay man; motherhood; divorce; and recurring cancer ... A defiant woman sensitively and incisively portrayed." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Gumbs, one of our great poets, has delivered not only a masterful biography of Audre Lorde but a revolution in what a biography can be. Whether you only know Lorde through her most famous quotes or if you've read everything she wrote a thousand times, there is something new and exciting here for you. Structurally playful, deeply researched, vibrantly felt, it's a masterwork all around." ―LitHub
"An award-winning poet, writer, feminist and activist in her own right, Gumbs is among the first researchers to delve into Lorde's manuscript archives. The resulting book highlights the late author's commitment to interrogating what it means to survive on this planet―and how Lorde's radical understanding of ecology can guide us today." ―Erika Taylor, NPR
"Alexis Pauline Gumbs has been a kindred keeper of Audre Lorde's lesbian-warrior-poet legacy for nearly two decades. This long overdue, and yet right-on-time biography of the Lorde caresses and transgresses the limits of genre, to care for all the women and girls that Audre Lorde ever was or hoped to be. Nobody tends to Black girls' stories like Alexis P. Gumbs, who takes Black women deadly rigorously seriously. This book is a study in mastery of forms, with the kind of sacred irreverence that makes clear who the real geniuses always were. I read this book and could hear the Lorde saying, 'and it was good.'" ―Brittney Cooper, author of the New York Times bestseller Eloquent Rage
"Only Alexis Pauline Gumbs could have written Audre Lorde's life story in seven dimensions. She is Lorde's spiritual daughter, and Survival Is a Promise is no mere biography―it is a communion, an ancestral divination, a long intimate walk where history, poetry, politics, and wisdom are passed to a new generation." ―Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"Survival Is a Promise is a lightning strike of a biography on The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. It is poetic in form, political in scope, and revelatory in understanding Lorde's divine relationship to the Earth as an ecological thinker. Alexis Pauline Gumbs has created a community of poetic ancestors including June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, and Fannie Lou Harmer, now eternal sisters with whom she stands alongside in a circle of relationships. Gumbs describes the work of Audre Lorde as 'a Black archive of buried photosynthesis.' In her hands, it is pure light in the vitality of the struggle. This singular volume is a 'force field of love' full of prophetic dreaming animating not only what is possible but necessary. Power lives in this book. Chapter by stunning chapter, this spiritual biography made me want to be braver in voice and spirit." ―Terry Tempest Williams, Writer-in-Residence, Harvard Divinity School
This information about Survival Is a Promise was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of several works of poetry and of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals, which won a Whiting Writers' Award in 2022. In 2023, she won a Windham Campbell Prize for her poetry. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.
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