"From the back cover: This exclusive edition brings together a selection of Audre Lorde's poetry and essays with "biomythography," the form that she created in Zami: A new Spelling of My Name (1982). Zami combines the narrative power of biography, mythology, and history as it records Lorde's experiences as a West Indian in America and the browth of her emotional and sexual resonance with women. Lorde tackles the complexities of her multiple identities in Sister Outsider (1984). It includes essays such as the often-anthologized "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power" and "Poetry is Not a Luxury," in which she declares that poetry is "a vital necessity of our existence." Published just months before her death, Underson: Chosen Poems Old and New (1992) covers 30 years of Lorde's poetry. Here she demonstrates her mastery of the love poem, but writes with equal passion and eloquence about everything from a simple conversation to the devastation of drug addiction to her identity as a black woman."

"This edition was specially created ... by arrangement with The Crossing Press and W.W. Norton & Company, Inc." -- T.p. verso