Authors: Audre Lorde and Pat Parker
Publisher: the87press
Paperback
One of our books of the year 2024.
So says: A great publication from the ever-ambitious and urgent 87Press, a lively conversation between two remarkable poets and thinkers about and entwining desire, politics, gossip, philosophy, creativity and their experience of illness. Lorde is now well-known in the UK with her backlist published by Penguin since the revelatory force of Silver Press’s collection Your Silence Will Not Protect You, but utterly shockingly none of Pat Parker’s equally incendiary poetry is currently in print here, so it’s doubly important that 87Press are giving us a chance to hear her voice. It’s a privilege to be party to their extraordinary conversations – and also a companionable push to get organising as well as writing, and sharing our thoughts with each other. Letters may be becoming a lost form, but collections such as this are both revealing and inspiring of what an art they were in the hands of such dazzling writers.