Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Publishing Group for providing a copy of this book for review.

This is a 4.5-star book, rounded down.

I apologize for the delay in my review. I had a reading slump and didn’t realize I could still provide feedback.

I requested this book because anything by Audre Lorde was on my reading list as a way to better understand intersectionality.

The essays begin with a discussion of Lord’s trip to Russia and Uzbekistan, which has some things that still apply but things she said were not problems have been shown to be extreme problems there in the intervening decades. So it is an interesting essay which, unfortunately, only partially holds up over time. I’m also privileged to have a mother who traveled to Russia around the same time as Lord. I grew up with the stories of a cis het white woman’s visit around the same time. My mother did not see the promise that Lord did.

As the collection moves through interviews and essays, the discussion of intersectionality becomes clearer and the point about bread made in the first essay becomes a through-line.

The collection ends with the US’s invasion of Grenada (which I remember) and a discussion of socialism and specifics about Grenada as a Black country. Many of the points line up with the first essay about Russia.

I am angry that these essays still stand up when they should not. That we are facing all the same issues that Lord discusses and that it feels we have not bridged them.

Overall, I learned a lot reading this collection. It’s a good introduction to Lorde if you have not read anything from her and a lesson we should not need to learn this many years later.

So happy to have this collection of Audre Lorde's speeches and essays all in one volume. This will let new readers discover her foundational intersectional ideas.

Audre Lorde was one of those figures who just got it, she got what it meant to live in the world with all its ugliness and beauty. I remember reading an essay in this book in high school, and then later on the full thing in college. Her words are timeless, and one of the most moving aspects of her words is their applicability at any point and facet of life. That means that any time one picks up this book, they will see, read, and understand her words in new ways. A lovely book, a lovely author, a lovely philosophy.

Sister Outsider is a must-read for those curious about or studying black feminism. Audre Lorde explores the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality through her essays and speeches and makes the political personal. She speaks from the perspective of a Black woman, a lesbian, a mother, a feminist, and other identities. My favorite essays are "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism" and "The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power." Both explore emotions, anger and pleasure respectively, that are so often used against Black women. Like much of Lorde's writings, these essays encourage the discovery and use of our power as agency and tools to express ourselves.