Parul Sehgal’s review of “The Selected Works of Audre Lorde” is a beautiful reflection on the depth and brilliance of Lorde’s work and continued influence. 

“Lorde, like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, is vulnerable to selective quotation. Black writers can be treated as oracles, read symbolically, with lazy reverence; their work is flattened into self-help or polemic, the message extracted and all torsions and contradictions (often the very ones that catalyze the writer) smoothed away. It’s the sort of reading that gives us a simplified, neutralized Lorde, deracinated from her radical roots.”

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