Audre Lorde - The Cancer Journals

Acclaim for The Cancer Journals

Grief, terror, courage, the passion for survival and far more than survival, are here in the personal and political searchings of a great poet. Lorde is the Amazon warrior who also knows how to tell the tale of battle: what happened, and why, what are the weapons, and who are the comrades she found. More than this, her book offers women a new and deeply feminist challenge.

Adrienne Rich

Audre Lordes The Cancer Journals has helped me more than I can say. It has taken away some of my fear of cancer, my fear of incompleteness, my fear of difference. This book teaches me that with one breast or none, I am still me. That the sum total of me is infinitely greater than the number of my breasts. Should cancer of the breast be in my future, as it is in the future of thousands of American women each year, Lordes words of love and wisdom and courage will be beside me to give me strength. The Cancer Journals should be read by every woman.

Alice Walker

Audre Lordes courageous account of her breast cancer defies how women are expected to deal with sickness, accepting pain and a transformed sense of self.... I found a different model of feminist powernot a sidestepping of sickness, but a defiant avowal of the reality of pain and respect for the transformed self it leaves behind.

Rafia Zakaria

Audres words of survival and courage became my new bible, shaping me into a bold warrior in the army of one-breasted women. What she reveals in The Cancer Journals allowed meand legions of womento confront the abyss, to draw nourishment, to share the mantle of her courage. When the need arises, I press Audres book on the next unwitting warrior. No one could have a better weapon.

Phyllis Kriegel

PENGUIN CLASSICS

THE CANCER JOURNALS

A writer, activist, and mother of two, AUDRE LORDE grew up in 1930s Harlem. She earned a masters degree in library science from Columbia University, received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for poetry, and was New York State Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1993. She is the author of fourteen books, including Zami and The Black Unicorn. Lorde died of cancer at the age of fifty-eight in 1992.

TRACY K. SMITH is the author of the memoir Ordinary Light, as well as four books of poetry, most recently Wade in the Water, which was short-listed for the Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes, and Life on Mars, which received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. Eternity, her selected poems, was published in 2019. Smith served two terms as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry of the United States.

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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First published in the United States of America by Aunt Lute Books 1980

This edition with a foreword by Tracy K. Smith published in Penguin Books 2020

Copyright 1980 by Audre Lorde

Foreword 2020 by Tracy K. Smith

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Sections I and II of this book originally appeared in Sinister Wisdom.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Lorde, Audre, author. | Smith, Tracy K., writer of foreword.

Title: The cancer journals / Audre Lorde ; foreword by Tracy K. Smith.

Description: New York City : Penguin Books, [2020] | Series: Penguin Classics

Identifiers: LCCN 2020020310 (print) | LCCN 2020020311 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143135203 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780525506874 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Lorde, AudreDiaries. | BreastCancerPatientsUnited StatesDiaries. | Poets, American20th centuryDiaries.

Classification: LCC RC280.B8 L58 2020 (print) | LCC RC280.B8 (ebook) | DDC 616.99/4490092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020310

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020311

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