As one of her most famous pieces, I was surprised to see that it’s only four pages long. Thinking back, on my younger self, I wonder how much attention I paid to this piece on first encountering this collection. When poetry was simply another unit in English class, I
Spring settled in, slowly at first. Here’s a picture of a mid-April snowfall. We’re in Northern Ontario now, temporarily, where we are spending time with family and where I am working on a new writing project. The landscape is beautiful and there are 330 lakes to explore here. Fewer
This, her first essay in Sister Outsider, is based on edited journal entries from her travels in 1976, when she was invited to observe the African-Asian Writers conference, which was sponsored by the Union of Soviet Writers. She writes about her flight to Moscow, nine hours long, and her
It is the way of things that, in the week I was reading and writing about Audre Lorde’s first essay in Sister Outsider, I met her in another book too. In “The History of Black People” from Magical Negro (2019), Morgan Parker writes: “If you cut open my heart,
After last year’s gulp and gobble of new books, I have been tentative and restless. I touch my tongue to a book in my stacks, then move on, relishing the contrasting flavours but rarely sitting for a meal. Here, in Lorna Goodison’s Controlling the Silver (2005), I found this
