MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
The world according to Audre Lorde
RON JACOBS reviews a new biography of the American poet who revolutionised the perception of black writers in the creative milieu of the day
ON THE SAME SIDE OF HISTORY: Audre Lorde, left, with Meridel Le Sueur an American writer associated with the proletarian literature movement of the 1930s and 1940s and Adrienne Rich an American poet, essayist and feminist, 1980
[K Kendall/flickr/CC] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Allen Lane, £35
SOME TIME in the 1970s, probably at an event in the San Francisco Bay Area, I heard Audre Lorde read a poem. I don’t remember the poem, but do remember her reading of it demanded my attention.
I was slightly familiar with her work up to then, mostly because of my female friends, gay and straight, whose bookshelves often included a couple of her books. In addition, the Kitchen Table Press, which she helped found, was an inspiration to my friends and I who hoped to write and publish something ourselves someday.
I read From a Land Where Other People Live and New York Head Shop and Museum — the former was nominated for a National Book Award and the second had an intriguing title with poems that demanded both an intellectual and emotional response.
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