Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    A Study Guide for Audre Lorde's "Hanging Fire"
    A Study Guide for Audre Lorde's "Hanging Fire"
    A Study Guide for Audre Lorde's "Hanging Fire"
    Ebook30 pages22 minutes

    A Study Guide for Audre Lorde's "Hanging Fire"

    By Gale and Cengage

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Audre Lorde's "Hanging Fire," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 2, 2016
    ISBN9781535824446
    A Study Guide for Audre Lorde's "Hanging Fire"

    Read more from Gale

    Related to A Study Guide for Audre Lorde's "Hanging Fire"

    Related ebooks

    Teaching Methods & Materials For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Teaching Toni Morrison

      Aug 13, 2019

      Every year, I get goosebumps. “Here is your copy of Beloved or Song of Solomon or Home,” I say to my high-school students. And in that moment I am struck again by my awesome and humbling role in this seemingly mundane ritual: My God, I’m the person—m

      2 min read

    • Article

      YA Novel 'The Poet X' Is An Elegiac Meditation On Poesy And Religion

      Mar 23, 2018

      Young poet-protagonist Xiomara must dig deep to reclaim her identity and her voice, in spite of her rough circumstances.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Reenvisioning theWriters Group

      Feb 16, 2022

      IF YOU’RE like me, the only thing more difficult than struggling to revise a draft that’s stalled is struggling to revise someone else’s draft that’s stalled. Let’s face it: Reading other people’s writing for the sole purpose of giving them feedback

      7 min read

    • Article

      'Invisible No More' Examines Police Violence Against Minority Women

      Nov 5, 2017

      Author Andrea Ritchie wants the incidents of police violence involving women of color and transgender women to get as much attention as black men and boys have received in recent years.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Generation X

      Apr 12, 2019

      Generation X
      5 min read

    • Article

      Akala, Bernardine Evaristo, Ben Okri And More Pick 20 Classic Books By Writers Of Colour

      Oct 3, 2021

      It wasn’t until I started university in 2008 that I truly realised how little regard there was for Black authors. My creative writing lecturer was a Black poet, whose teaching material and reading lists were saturated with authors of colour, but each

      16 min read

    • Article

      My Past And Future Assassin

      Jun 13, 2018

      My Past And Future Assassin
      16 min read

    • Article

      Blackness in Bedlam: On Toni Morrison’s ‘The Origin of Others’

      Sep 14, 2017

      It can be incapacitating, seeing your suffering in the mirror. The post Blackness in Bedlam: On Toni Morrison’s ‘The Origin of Others’ appeared first on The Millions.

      9 min read

    • Article

      On Carmen Maria Machado’s Body Horrors

      Jan 12, 2018

      In her introduction to the 2015 reissue of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, an exhilarating collection of literary retellings of fables and fairy tales, Kelly Link describes the book’s indelible effect on her work: The things tha

      5 min read

    • Article

      De-Mythologizing the Drunk Genius

      Jan 18, 2019

      THE FIRST TIME Leslie Jamison shared her story of addiction in an AA meeting, spilling her guts to a group of strangers in folding chairs, a man in the back of the school gymnasium started to yell at her. She’d been saying something about learning to

      17 min read

    • Article

      Dreaming Up Her Own Salvation

      Oct 11, 2023

      Dreaming Up Her Own Salvation
      14 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for A Study Guide for Audre Lorde's "Hanging Fire"

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Audre Lorde's "Hanging Fire" - Gale

      10

      Hanging Fire

      Audre Lorde

      1978

      Introduction

      Hanging Fire, a poem about teenage angst by Audre Lorde, first appeared in her poetry collection The Black Unicorn in 1978. The poem has been reprinted in several literary anthologies, such as the Norton Introduction to Literature (9th edition, 2005) and the 1997 edition of The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde.

      In Conversations with Audre Lorde (2004) Joan Hall reports that Lorde was a self-described Black lesbian feminist poet warrior mother who liked to focus on differences while disputing notions of universality, and the book in which Hanging Fire first appeared is noted for its evocation of African spirituality. Yet Hanging Fire is not overtly about the African American experience, and its one apparent reference to romance seems to be heterosexual. It is true that there is a feminist suggestion in the poem's closing stanza, but for the most part the poem speaks in a broad way to the anguish and anxiety of adolescent life generally; some readers even mistake the speaker for male.

      The poem coincides with Lorde's usual concerns in its depiction of the speaker as a lonely, unhappy outsider and in its suggestion of a difficult mother-daughter relationship. However, its evocation of the adolescent condition has a universal quality not usually associated with Lorde, though it is this quality that no doubt accounts for the poem's inclusion in anthologies and classroom

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1