GLR May-June 2025

“Audre referenced the natural world in her poems, not as a metaphor for human relations but as a map for how to under stand our lives as part of every manifestation of Earth.” Some of Gumbs’s poetic analogies work to great effect, as in using Lorde’s visit to Ghana’s Elmina Slave Castle and its infamous “The Door of No Return” to equate the African slave trade to a particle accelerator or “atom smasher ... shattering bloodlines, shattering social contracts ... shattering language groups in order to funnel down to an individual unit of capital.” Other connections, like linking Lorde’s experiences in Berlin with Afro-German women to the songs of mother whales com municating with their offspring, are not as successful. Referencing a lecture by the Caribbean-Canadian poet Dionne Brand in a discussion about the relationship between her work and Lorde’s, Gumbs comments: “Brand’s talk was to subvert the colonizing structures in the books that influenced her education and to critique what they taught her was possible about telling a life story.” Survival Is a Promise attempts a sim ilar critique and subversion of the established structures of bi ography. As Gumbs makes clear from the start: “this is not a normative biography linearly dragging you from a cradle to a grave.” As such, however, it is only partially successful. Several of the author’s lyrical leaps and poetic connections are not entirely convincing. Although the book is smoothly written throughout, a succession of chapters that move across time and place with out clear chronological markers in the second half of the book occasionally leaves the reader feeling adrift. While erudite and impressively researched, this singular survey of the life of Audre Lorde ultimately feels oddly unsatisfying.

A Pioneer’s Progress

T HE RISK of an academic ap proach to exploring an author is that, through all of the analysis, the vitality and beauty of the prose can be lost. The essays in the collec tion Unsettling Cather largely avoid such a fate by honoring Willa Cather as an artist in their exploration of the many dimensions of her writing. Because her most famous works, such

her writing, not having read the novels is not a barrier to understanding their points. They may, in fact, stimulate interest in reading or rereading her novels, as they did for me. The collection covers a wide range of Cather’s writing, including her four most fa mous novels— My Ántonia , O Pioneers! , The Song of the Lark , and One of Ours — along with lesser-known novels that deal with such controversial issues as race and

B RUCE S PANG

UNSETTLING CATHER Edited by Marilee Lindemann and Ann Romines Univ. of Nebraska Press 380 pages, $40.

as My Ántonia and O Pioneers! , are stylistically “modern” à la F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby , it’s easy to forget that Cather (1873–1947) grew up in rural Virginia and in Nebraska in the late 19th century, when sex roles and social attitudes were both straight and narrow. Yet her views of women and men were both complex and visionary, challenging Victorian stereotypes about both sexes. Unsettling Cather is divided into four parts. The first deals with race, the second with sex and gender roles, the third with geopolitics, and the last with her often-dismissed novel Lucy Gayheart . Because the essays provide many clear examples of

disability. Four essays delve into her last novel Sapphira and the SlaveGirl , which brings out themes from her early upbringing in Virginia, where slavery was still a recent memory. Some con sider it a precursor to Black Liberation theology, while others believe that it never frees itself from an underlying racism. The essays on gender roles reveal that Cather wrote in a so ciety that was on the cusp of change. Her female characters— from the hard-working Ántonia to the free-spirited Lena Lingard in MyÁntonia , the indomitable matriarch Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers! , or the independent, successful singer Thea Kron borg in The Song of the Lark , all coming into their own in small, provincial Midwestern towns—were fiercely driven to defy the Gilded Age view of women as subservient homemakers.

Bruce Spang is a poet and writer living in Chandler, NC. May–June 2025

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