[Until] the recent awakening of interest in women's achievements [Lorde] seemed destined for an obscurity that rarely enfolds male poets of comparable talents. What is heartening … [is that she has] made fine art out of the experience. (p. 296)

Lorde, of course, is an outsider in more ways than one. A black woman poet, living, writing, teaching, and raising children in the gray chaos that New York City has become, she observes and describes the alienation imposed on her by her race, her sex, her vocation, and even her city, "smeared upon the east shore of a continent's insanity." As an artist, she perceives that she has been "shot through by the cold eye of the way things are baby / and left for dead on a hundred streets of this city." As a mother, she struggles "to speak out living words … to leave my story behind" and to revenge herself upon those "who bomb my children into mortar in churches." And as a black woman artist—an ironic, witty, passionate outsider—she sometimes tells the story of her life, the way women always have, as a funny, cautionary fairy tale that should instruct children of all ages…. (p. 297)

Considering all the pain of her triple—maybe quadruple—alienation, then, it's not surprising that Lorde occasionally seems to be choking on her own anger. Cables To Rage is the title of one of her earlier collections, and she uses the phrase again to name one of the poems in [The New York Head Shop and Museum]: Cables to Rage or I've Been Talking on This Street Corner a Hell of a Long Time. The words, all of them, are apposite, for when she connects with her anger, when her fury vibrates through taut cables from head to heart to page, Lorde is capable of rare and, paradoxically, loving jeremiads. When she loses touch with the authentic sources of her own feelings, though, the weariness of days spent "talking on this street corner" at the edge of an indifferent, white, male estate hoarsens her voice and coarsens her language. Lines like

  I hide behind tenements and subways in fluorescent alleys
  watching as flames walk the streets of an empire's altar
  raging through the veins of the sacrificial stenchpot …

sincere as their angry observations may be, finally sound hollow and rhetorical, like fatigued echoes of Ginsberg howling against Moloch. And even such affirmative anger as "Woman power / is / Black power / is / Human power" ends up, for me, as mere sloganeering. Lorde's natural tone isn't the measured thunder of the Whitmanesque male prophet, just as her New York, "head shop and museum" though it may be, isn't a fiery, visionary city of "angelheaded hipsters."

On the contrary, at her best, even her angriest, Lorde is curiously lyrical, wistful, as if nostalgic not only for a less disillusioned past but for some luminous future she fears she will never see…. And her New York [is] intricately detailed, sad, cold…. Transforming anger into art, she exorcises the image of the supercilious, racist "monkeyman" from her own body ("There is a strange man attached to my backbone / who thinks he can sap me or break me"). Finally, like so many other women artists, she imagines a healing powerful witch-self who will eventually redeem the outsider from the house of servitude. (pp. 297-98)