Survival is a Promise

Survival Is a Promise is a lightning strike of a biography on The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. It is poetic in form, political in scope, and revelatory in understanding Lorde's divine relationship to the earth as an ecological thinker. Alexis Pauline Gumbs has created a community of poetic ancestors, including June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, and Fannie Lou Hamer, now eternal sisters with whom she stands alongside in a circle of relationships. Gumbs describes the work of Audre Lorde as 'a black archive of buried photosynthesis.' In her hands, it is pure light in the vitality of the struggle. This singular volume is a force field of love full of prophetic dreaming animating not only what is possible but necessary. Power lives in this book. Chapter by stunning chapter, this spiritual biography made me want to be braver in voice and spirit

writer-in-residence, Harvard Divinity School

A passionate and loving evocation of an extraordinary life, Survival is a Promise is moving and inspiring. Alexis Pauline Gumbs conjures up her subject with imagination and inventiveness, producing a portrait of Audre Lorde that is rich and resonant

Emily Jeremiah

This is the one book I would take with me to my desert Island. I would survive on the nectar of Gumbs rich dark earthy prose and drink in the sweet pain of Lorde's blackness so I can see the hopeful dawn of her fierce love on the horizon and know I will be saved. That's the promise of this book

Heidi Safia Mirza

With Survival is a Promise Alexis Pauline Gumbs has succeeded in crafting a multi-faceted diamond of a biography lovingly tracing the shape of Lorde’s impact upon this earth, her eternal life. Dazzling like a burst of light, nurturing like a gray whale and fierce like a hurricane, this book is a gift of “well-researched wonder” that deftly holds close possibility, imagination, questioning and the sensuality of the archive. I dare you to read it and not recognise that Lorde’s story is inseparable from the story of all life, even yours

co-editor of Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies

Alexis Pauline Gumb's book is a powerful and poetic affirmation of Lorde's defiant life and work, re-membered now through a shapeshifting cloud of connexions with people, ideas, places, objects, feelings. You can begin reading this fiercely imaginative text on any page and be drawn into the radical and urgent promise of survival in the face of political and planetary troubles that haunt us still

Professor of Politics, International Relations, and Critical Interdisciplinary Studies

A life-giving enquiry into the visionary Audre Lorde. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, an extraordinary poet, composes this remarkable work from many growing tips that tangle and entwine. Flowing through this adventure is a vital pulse of insight: Poetry is woven through our flesh and is fundamental to the way we think, feel, imagine, heal, and transform. Gumbs’s breathtaking telling of Lorde is an intimate guide to some of poetry's most fierce and tender powers

author of Entangled Life