The Black Unicorn, Audre Lorde

You may be thinking, wow Kasia, you already abandoned the blogging, so soon? But actually, I've been a terrible reader. This might actually happen to me at the end of every semester — I get so excited about having additional reading time that I start running around like a headless chicken, picking up every book I pass. So I'm in the middle of, like, 12 books right now, and that's the main reason why I haven't posted.

But I did finished Audre Lorde's Black Unicorn. I pretty much always have a book of poetry going, usually in the bathroom (sorry poets). Lorde is in what I've termed my pantheon, aka, the collection of authors whose complete works I intend to read. Her work is so, so amazing. My first introduction to her writing was actually Cancer Journals, which is not where most people start, but it's an incredible text — she writes about her mastectomy and cancer treatment, and it's just a completely mind-opening work on gender, intimacy, self, illness. If you haven't read her, I think Sister Outsider is really the place to begin. What makes her essays so astonishing is the incredibly straightforward way that she moves through her ideas. We often think of difficulty as a marker of intelligence, when it comes to critical theory, but Lorde's writing is extremely accessible. As I write this, I'm wondering whether I'd call her ideas complex, and I'm really not sure — but certainly, they are profound. 

This was my first forray into her poetry, and it's actually very similar, in some sense, to the essays. The language is mostly fairly simple, but there's just an incredible force to her words, and you find yourself re-reading them over and over, working through the enormity of what is being said. For example:

TO MARTHA: A NEW YEAR

As you search over this year

with eyes your heart has

sharpened

remember longing.

I do not know your space now

I only seek a woman whom I love

trapped there

by accident.

but such places do not change

so much

as what we seek in them

and faith will serve

along the way

to somewhere else

where work begins.

This is writing that is openly spiritual, full of feeling, connected to a sense of ancient, elemental ways of being, and that's the kind of thing that can be difficult for soul-less intellectuals like me, heh heh, but truly, Lorde's writing is the closest I come to religion, and these poems feel like sacred texts.