LORDE, Audre.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Cables to Rage. First edition of Lorde's scarce second book, containing the lament "Martha", the poet's "first overtly lesbian poem to be published" (Reuman, p. 115). The collection was primarily composed during her time as poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, where she met Frances Clayton, the woman who would be her romantic partner until 1989. Cables to Rage established Lorde as a "writer who saw herself in relational dialogue with the world" (Reuman, p. 115). It includes reflections such as "After a first book" and "Rites of passage", an elegy to the recently assassinated Martin Luther King Jr.The work was published as Volume 9 in the Heritage series, Paul Breman's radical literary venture which released 27 volumes by Black writers between 1962 and 1975. Cables to Rage went into a second edition in 1973 before going out of print.

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