If any book is to have unifying potential and power, its spiritual and erotic core undivided from its politics, Mouths of Rain, An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought is such a volume. Anchored by such classic essays as Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic,” Michelle Cliff’s “Notes on Speechlessness,” and other voices of renown (Pauli Murray, Pat Parker, Jewelle Gomez, Barbara Smith, to name just a few), Mouths of Rain embraces fiction, poetry, new and rising voices, and a global view toward activists and intellectuals, troublemakers, shamans and visionaries of all kinds. It reaches for our collective past and in its final section, “Radical Futurities,” into a collaborative, co-arising future – one that we all must create. All of this is beautifully curated by editor Briona Simone Jones and makes for extraordinary and timely reading. SDiane Bogus’s “Fighting Racism: An Approach Through Ritual” charts a path toward new forms of communication essential to bridging some of the divides of the present moment. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, in “The Shape of My Impact,” offers a sharp definition of what survival does and does not mean in our present age of “austerity measures, scarcity narratives, and exploitive practices”—even and especially by those institutions that burnish their names with the efforts of those they fail. “Survival is a promise worth keeping,” Gumbs writes. This volume offers the inspiration, insight and rigorous thought that will help us all to keep it.
Mouths of Rain, An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought, edited by Briona Simone Jones. Published by The New Press. The editor is Julie Enszer. Mouths of Rain is a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction; the winner will be announced on May 11.