Audre Lorde<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":950,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[44,57,48,16,56],"class_list":["post-601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bookshelf","tag-20th-century","tag-housing","tag-new-york","tag-poetry","tag-race","with-featured-image"],"featured_image_urls_v2":{"full":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/lorde-head-shop-square.jpg",500,500,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/lorde-head-shop-square-300x300.jpg",300,300,true],"medium":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/lorde-head-shop-square-450x450.jpg",450,450,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/lorde-head-shop-square.jpg",500,500,false],"large":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/lorde-head-shop-square.jpg",500,500,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/lorde-head-shop-square.jpg",500,500,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/lorde-head-shop-square.jpg",500,500,false],"ab-block-post-grid-landscape":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/lorde-head-shop-square-500x400.jpg",500,400,true],"ab-block-post-grid-square":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/lorde-head-shop-square.jpg",500,500,false],"atomic-blocks-featured-image":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/lorde-head-shop-square.jpg",500,500,false],"atomic-blocks-featured-image-wide":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/lorde-head-shop-square.jpg",500,500,false],"atomic-blocks-logo":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/lorde-head-shop-square-300x300.jpg",300,300,true]},"post_excerpt_stackable_v2":"![\"Audre](\"https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/lorde-head-shop-1-292x450.jpg\")
Sara Ahmed observes that Lorde\u2019s writing is \u2018personal testimony as well as political speech\u2019 and that she \u2018made life itself a political art, an art which you must craft from the resources that you have available\u2019. One of her most crucial resources was New York, the place where she was born and where she lived for signi\ufb01cant periods of time. Her 1975 collection New York Head Shop and Museum<\/em> (now out of print but available as part of her Collected Poems<\/em>), \u00a0is both a portrait of the city as it slid into dereliction in the 1970s and a metaphorical act of taking to the streets in order to reclaim space and assert the existence of the marginalised. A glance at the contents list indicates the extent of New York\u2019s critical role in the collection \u2013titles include \u2018New York City 1970\u2019, \u2018To Desi as Joe as Smoky the Lover of 115th Street\u2019, \u2018A Sewerplant Grows in Harlem\u2019, \u2018A Birthday Memorial to Seventh Street\u2019, \u2018A Year to Life on the Grand Central Shuttle\u2019, \u2018A Trip on the Staten Island Ferry\u2019 and \u2018Memorial III from a Phone Booth on Broadway\u2019. The poems themselves are \ufb01lled with references to a wide range of identi\ufb01able places all over New York, including the subway, the Staten Island Ferry, East Side Drive, Wall Street, Fourteenth Street, Riverside Drive, Brighton Beach Brooklyn and 125th Street and Lenox. The city that emerges from New York Head Shop<\/em> is overwhelmingly de\ufb01cient but richly lived, containing occurrences of horror, heartbreak and sometimes happiness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"