The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance

A bold, innovative biography that offers a new understanding of the life, work, and enduring impact of Audre Lorde.

We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde’s teachings on “the creative power of difference” may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today.

Lorde’s understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or being resilient in the face of cancer. It was about the total stakes of what it means to be in relationship with a planet in transformation. Possibly the focus on Lorde’s quotable essays, to the neglect of her complex poems, has led us to ignore her deep engagement with the natural world, the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. For her, ecological images are not simply metaphors but rather literal guides to how to be of earth on earth, and how to survive―to live the ethics that a Black feminist lesbian warrior poetics demands.

In Survival Is a Promise , Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the first researcher to explore the full depths of Lorde’s manuscript archives, illuminates the eternal life of Lorde. Her life and work become more than a sound bite; they become a cosmic force, teaching us the grand contingency of life together on earth.

Traversing multivalent intimacies from the underworld of California’s Central Valley oil fields to the quotidian domestic and love’s painful retraction, Stockton’s poems articulate the blurry modes of extraction, fantasy, loss, gender, and labor as they interact and overlap in the shadow of environmental and personal collapse. Between gas station gifts, Venmo requests, and nocturnal love letters, Fuel unravels the self and violent systems of domination, longing for a togetherness that transcends its own ending.

In these poems, Stockton plunges into petrologic, long drives, the beginnings of ends—whatever enters into love between people and makes it so abstract, or common. In other words, its great subject is the edge, and Fuel is a book of horizons. - Benjamin Krusling

Rosie Stockton is the author of Permanent Volta (Nightboat Books 2021) which was the recipient of the Sawtooth Prize as well as being a finalist for the California Book Awards in Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Their poems have been published by Social Text Journal, VOLT, Jubilat, Apogee, Mask Magazine, Tripwire and WONDER PRESS. They hold an M.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University and are currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Gender Studies Department at UCLA. Rosie lives and works in Los Angeles.

Poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidences through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and video tapes.

Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 gathers this correspondence for readers to eavesdrop on Lorde and Parker. They discuss their work as writers as well as intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer. Sister Love is a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the minds and friendship of two great twentieth century poets.

A forest fire between us is an ambitious publication that uncovers Tee A. Corinne’s radical and expansive photographic practice, offering a new perspective on the intersections of her work as photographer, lesbian sex activist, educator, and author. Edited by curator Charlotte Flint, this book charts a route through Corinne’s practice with never-before-seen photographs, slides, contact sheets, and ephemera uncovered from her archive. Showcasing the pioneering work that established Corinne as one of the foremost lesbian photographers of her time, this publication places Corinne alongside friends, fellow artists, writers, and activists who helped define radical counterculture, from Audre Lorde to Joan E. Biren (JEB), Ruth Mountaingrove to Honey Lee Cottrell, among others.

At the book’s heart are the Feminist Photography Ovulars, gatherings of women in the Oregon countryside which were the setting for DIY photographic workshops exploring image-making against the natural landscape, which Corinne co-organized in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The photographs made during these annual gatherings speak to the incredible community that Corinne fostered, and an understanding of the ways in which play and pleasure can come together to create something radical.

Delving into an extensive array of archival material, A forest fire between us is a call to action that shows us the ways in which photography, activism, and community can come together to create a powerful new visual language around desire.

With an extensive chronology and texts by Ruth Mountaingrove, JEB, and Charlotte Flint.

'My aim for Mother Reader has been to bring together examples of the best writing on motherhood of the last sixty years, writing that tells firsthand of the mother's experience.

Many of the writings in Mother Reader comment on and interpolate one another, in citations, in footnotes, in direct homage. As I was assembling this collection one text would lead to one another, treasure-hunt fashion, the clue provided by an acknowledgement or bibliography. And just as often the writing circles back.

In Mother Reader chapters are excerpted from autobiographies, memoirs, and novels; entries are lifted from diaries; essays and stories are culled from collections, anthologies, and periodicals. My project has been to assemble a compendium or sampler of these ''kindred spirit'' works on motherhood, so that readers, and especially mothers with limited time on their hands, can access in one volume the best literature on the subject and know where turn to continue reading." [Moyra Davey in the introduction]

Writings by Margaret Atwood, Susan Bee, Rosellen Brown, Myrel Chernick, Lydia Davis, Buchi Emeta, Annie Ernaux, Mary Gaitskill, Susan Griffin, Nancy Hutson, Mary Kelly, Jane Lazarre, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Ellen McMahon, Margaret Mead, Vivian Montgomery, Toni Morrison, Tillie Olsen, Alicia Ostrker, Grace Paley, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Sara Ruddick, Lynda Schor, Mira Schor, Dena Schottenkirk, Mona Simpson, Elizabeth Smart, Joan Snyder, Elke Solomon, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Alice Walker, Joy Williams, Martha Wilson, Barbara Zucker.

Superior and Inferior presents a facsimile reprint of Italian abstract artist and feminist Carla Accardi's provocatory publication Superiore e Inferiore and the first ever English translation of the full text.

"In this book, I have bought together the transcripts of dialogues I recorded on tape in three girls' classes from the first, second and third year of a state middle school. For having proposed this unauthorised activity, I was dismissed from teaching in the light of a formal complaint". – Carla Accardi introducing her book Superiore e Inferiore, 1972.

First published in 1972 by Carla Accardi, the book Superiore e Inferiore features discussions among girls at a middle school—all between 10 and 13—about society's discriminatory behaviour towards women. They also commented the Manifesto of the revolutionary feminist group Rivolta Femminile—collectively written by Accardi, art critic and feminist activist Carla Lonzi, and Elvira Banotti—which first appeared posted on city walls in Rome in July 1970. For having discussed sex-related issues with pupils, Accardi was fired and permanently suspended from teaching. (Her letter of dismissal issued by the Italian Ministry of Education forms part of the introduction to the book.) Along the lines of Pasolini's Comizi d'Amore (Love Meetings), Accardi's own voice is secondary in the book, giving way to the thoughts, narratives, opinions, and debates expressed among girls on the role of women and girls, family conflicts and intimate relations.

Carla Accardi (1924–2014) was an Italian abstract painter associated with the Arte Informale and Arte Povera movements, and a founding member of the Italian art groups Forma (1947) and Continuità (1961). She experimented with different forms of art, such as black and white painting and Sicofoil. During the late 1970s, she became part of the feminist movement with critic Carla Lonzi. Together, they founded Rivolta femminile in 1970, one of Italy's first feminist groups. Accardi's first solo exhibition in the United States was in 2001 at MoMA PS1.

05/09/04 Now she is blogging. Now she is sitting on the black couch listening to the sirens wail and the rain fall. Now she is thinking of oysters. Now she is wondering why this is worth sharing. Now she is thinking, how decipher what is worth reading? Who is to say? Sifters. She thinks we have become a nation of sifters. So began a three-year experiment in blogging. An experiment begun for many reasons—a way for an expat to keep in touch with fellow Canadian writers and artists, a way to come to terms with the increasing relevance of the internet in literary lives, and a way to figure out why, after decades of gains, women writers are still grossly underrepresented in critical dialogues.

With an afterword by Vanessa Place.

THE MOON IS READING US A BOOK is the debut collection of poetry from a writer who displays a wide-ranging palette for storytelling and folklore in a suite of narrative poems. The collection is built around an ensemble of characters that range from known to unknown, through which Serubiri crafts visually-inspired poems that combine the photographic, the intensely personal, and the scholarly. In his book, he manages to domesticate larger-than-life figures, including Zanzibari-born singer-songwriter Freddie Mercury and Nigerian-born photographer Rotimi Fani Kayode. Simultaneously pondered and elastic, Serubiri’s poetry lures these figures – and the reader – into an atmosphere that is only as expansive as the interior landscapes he delineates with each succeeding poem. With this he expresses his own doubts and path, from memories of his native Uganda to New York City, through a psychology of decisions and life choices. 

Serubiri Moses is a Ugandan curator and author based in New York City. He currently serves as faculty in Art History at Hunter College and visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. He previously held positions at New York University and the New Centre for Research and Practice, and delivered lectures at Williams College, Yale University, University of Pittsburgh, The New School, basis voor aktuelle kunst, and University of the Arts Helsinki. As a curator, he has organized exhibitions at museums including MoMA PS1, New York; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and the Hessel Museum, Bard College, NY. He previously held a research fellowship at the University of Bayreuth; received his MA in Curatorial Studies at Bard College; and is an alumni of the Àsìkò International Art Programme. He serves on the editorial team of e-flux journal. He has published poetry in the online journals Jalada and Badilisha Poetry Exchange, as well as in print in journals Kwani? 7, Kwani? 8, and READ: A Journal of Inter-Translation (2022). His poetry has been reviewed online in The New Inquiry. THE MOON IS READING US A BOOK is his first book of poetry.