The Black Unicorn: Poems

The Black Unicorn is a new collection of poetry by a woman who, Adrienne Rich writes, "for the complexity of her vision, for her moral courage and the catalytic passion of her language, has already become, for many, an indispensable poet."

Rich continues: "Refusing to be circumscribed by any simple identity, Audre Lorde writes as a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a Lesbian, a feminist, a visionary; poems of elemental wildness and healing, nightmare and lucidity. Her rhythms and accents have the timelessness of a poetry which extends beyond white Western politics, beyond the anger and wisdom of Black America, beyond the North American earth, to Abomey and the Dahomeyan Amazons. These are poems nourished in an oral tradition, which also blaze and pulse on the page, beneath the reader's eye."

Of Audre Lorde's previous book, Coal. the poet and critic Hayden Carruth said, "For us these words indeed are jewels in the open light."

Audre Lorde, who lives in Staten Island, is on the English faculty of John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. She is the author of six previous books of poetry, one of which---From a Land Where Other People Live---was nominated for a National Book Award.

COVER ILLUSTRATION: The headdress represents the spirit Tji-Wara, or Chi-Wara, who is said to have introduced agriculture to the Bambara people. It is used in dances to insure germination of the seed, and a good harvest. Chi-Wara is the name also used for evil spirits (witches), who must be propitiated, as well as for a goddess of fecundity and earth.

COVER DESIGN by Jay J. Smith

-from the back cover