The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance Poems, 1987-1992

This collection, 39 poems written between 1987 and 1992, is the final volume by Audre Lorde, "a major American poet whose concerns are international, and whose words have left their mark on many lives", in the words of Adrienne Rich. Audre Lorde was a poet of the city of her birth, New York, as well as of other urban landscapes. She spoke of the Caribbean, Africa, Europe. She brought to all these places a true cosmopolitan vision, one dissatisfied with the usual description of things, one eager for truth-telling, for change. She spoke of her hopes for this, her final offering to the world she traveled: "Beyond the penchant for easy definitions, false exactitudes, we share a hunger for enduring value, relationship beyond hierarchy and outside reproach, a hunger for life measures, complex, direct, and flexible....I want this book to be filled with shards of light thrown off from the shifting tensions between the dissimilar, for that is the real stuff of creation and growth".