The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

Episode 136

Release Date: April 17, 2024

For national poetry month, your hosts discuss the Selected Works of Audre Lorde, edited by Roxane Gay. They talk about the autobiographical nature of poetry, how the collection was organized, and Lorde's occasionally depressing ability to predict the future. This episode also features a Pet Peeve segment.

Find us on discord: https://discord.gg/dpNHTWVu6b or support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/fictionfanspod

Thanks to the following musicians for the use of their songs:

- Amarià for the use of “Sérénade à Notre Dame de Paris” - Josh Woodward for the use of “Electric Sunrise”

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

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Episode Transcript*

*this transcript is AI generated, please excuse the mess.

Lilly: 0:04

Hello and welcome to Fiction Fans, a podcast where we read books and poetry too. I'm Lily.

Sara: 0:10

And I'm Sarah.

Lilly: 0:11

And today we will be discussing Audre Lorde, except there's a specific title for the work we actually were reading.

Sara: 0:18

Um, I believe it's the, the selected works of Audre Lorde.

Lilly: 0:22

I believe, Edited by Roxane Gay. Does that sound right? Yeah. At least I got the author's name right first try.

Sara: 0:30

True. That is important.

Lilly: 0:33

Yes, this week Sarah is indulging me for National Poetry Month.

Sara: 0:38

Well, yes I am, but also I'm the one who selected this book, so mutual, mutual indulgence?

Lilly: 0:45

Yeah, except I think I ended up liking it more than you.

Sara: 0:48

I think so too, but I'm,

Lilly: 0:50

deeply ironic mutual indulgence.

Sara: 0:53

I'm still glad we read it, like, I would select it again, even if I didn't necessarily enjoy it as much as I'd hoped I would, but we're getting ahead of ourselves just a little bit.

Lilly: 1:04

Yes, before we talk about the selected works of Audre Lorde, what's something great that happened recently?

Sara: 1:10

Uh, something great that happened recently is I bought a yarn ball winder off of Etsy, which means I no longer have to, like, hand wind my hanks of yarn, and it saves me so much time and effort. It's magical, miraculous, I love it. I should have done this so much sooner.

Lilly: 1:31

You sent me a picture of it, and it looks delightfully like something that belongs in a reenactment house.

Sara: 1:38

It does. So you can buy, like, modern looking, like, plastic ones. And metal ones that are not actually that much cheaper, but I don't like the look of those. So I was like, I want to buy something nice. And some Reddit post linked to this seller on Etsy who makes these beautiful wooden yarn winders and swifts. And so I was like, that's the one I'm going to get. And they're made in India. And it, I received it within like three days. So shipped incredibly quickly. And it's beautiful and delightful and wonderful. And I'm very, very pleased.

Lilly: 2:17

My good thing, I think, is a little bit silly,

Sara: 2:20

I mean, mine's silly too.

Lilly: 2:22

I know, but it's, I, whenever I have to give a bunch of caveats, I'm like, does that really make it a great thing? It is not the fact that the cats have puked on our couch, like, three times in the last week.

Sara: 2:34

Oh no, poor babies.

Lilly: 2:37

It's a normal level of puke, uh, for cats.

Sara: 2:41

I guess cats do puke a little more than pugs do.

Lilly: 2:45

Yeah, but like why on the couch? What are you doing? Why are you doing this to me, specifically? I

Sara: 2:54

much of a mess as possible.

Lilly: 2:57

guess, anyway, so You know, when you're woken up at 3 a. m. and trying to, like, clean it up as quickly as possible to go back to bed, you don't do a great job. And we have friends coming over today, and I was like, I'm not inviting our friends to sit on this visibly pukey couch. So I steam cleaned it, and it worked great.

Sara: 3:19

Oh, that's fantastic.

Lilly: 3:20

Yeah, so I feel silly having my good thing be I did housework, but My couch is now significantly less pukey.

Sara: 3:29

That is indeed a good thing.

Lilly: 3:32

Yeah! So, yeah. I'm I'm pleased. I've bought that couch another couple of years.

Sara: 3:41

Always a good thing.

Lilly: 3:43

What are you drinking tonight?

Sara: 3:44

It is gray and rainy out, so I've got a mug of mystery black tea.

Lilly: 3:50

Is that the name of it? Or is it a mystery because you don't know the name of it?

Sara: 3:53

It's a mystery because I don't know the name of it. It's a tea bag that came with a clothing order my mother made from, like, an online shop. And apparently they send bags of tea with your order. Just like just one bag and they don't sell their tea online. So I can't tell you like what blend it is, but it's a, it's a nice black tea.

Lilly: 4:17

That is mysterious. I love it.

Sara: 4:19

It's very mysterious. And the bags are heart shaped. It's very cute.

Lilly: 4:22

Aw. I am drinking mango juice.

Sara: 4:26

Ooh, mango juice is nice.

Lilly: 4:28

Yes, it's very good. I do mix it with bubbly water to make it last longer.

Sara: 4:33

Ah, that makes me think of Okinawa when I would go and buy fresh mango juice and it was a delightful experience.

Lilly: 4:42

Yeah, this is not fresh. It is from the grocery store.

Sara: 4:45

Still lovely.

Lilly: 4:46

Well, have you read anything good lately?

Sara: 4:48

I read another chapter of, I'm not sure if I've talked about this on the podcast before or not, I read another chapter of Fox and I, An Uncommon Friendship by Catherine Raven, which is a nonfiction story about the author making friends with a wild fox in her backyard. I'm only on like, chapter three, because it's not very fast going, thanks to podcast reading. But a friend gave me this, and I'm enjoying reading it.

Lilly: 5:15

It sounds like it's either going to be sweet or absolutely depressing. I feel like animal stories are just one of those two things.

Sara: 5:24

So far it's sweet, uh,

Lilly: 5:28

I don't trust it, though.

Sara: 5:29

but it could be, it could take a turn for the depressing, you're correct. I mean, presumably the fox is gonna die at some point, because it's a fox, and they do die.

Lilly: 5:41

I don't think I've read anything. We've been reading Solstitious Submissions, and it was perhaps unfair to our submitters that I was going back and forth between reading Audre Lorde and their work.

Sara: 5:57

Maybe a little bit. I mean, we had some good submissions, but we did not have Audre Lorde submissions, it's true.

Lilly: 6:05

At least not the bulk of them. Which is not to say I didn't enjoy them. But, like I said, unfair comparison.

Sara: 6:11

Yeah.

Lilly: 6:12

So, Audre Lorde. This collection started with several essays and I think speeches? Or at least they felt like they meant were meant to be delivered.

Sara: 6:24

essays, speeches, and then diary excerpts at the very end of this, like, prose section.

Lilly: 6:30

And I would say about half of it was prose. I think.

Sara: 6:34

I think so, too.

Lilly: 6:35

And it's a pretty good estimate because I did read the e book. It's a good book. So it tells me.

Sara: 6:40

Yeah, it was actually quite a long prose section. I had been expecting more poetry, to be honest, when I suggested that we read this, but I was happy to read her prose. I think I ended up liking the essays on the whole a little more than I liked her poetry, which is not to say that her poetry was bad. We'll talk about poetry later. We're going to talk about the essays first because that's how the book was structured.

Lilly: 7:05

Yeah, I, the content of her essays was very engaging. I didn't really love the style of her prose, but I think that's definitely just a my personal taste thing.

Sara: 7:17

Right.

Lilly: 7:19

Very good. They're just not to my taste.

Sara: 7:22

Right.

Lilly: 7:23

And I do think, especially the speeches, probably would have been more enjoyable. actually hearing her read them. It did feel like that was the format they were intended for.

Sara: 7:35

Yeah. I also think that, I mean, I knew nothing of Audre Lorde when I picked up this book. I saw it recommended in an email that my local bookstore put out about, like, this was a recent book that came out, and they were recommending it, and that's why I became interested in it. And I didn't know anything about Audre Lorde beforehand, and I feel like I maybe would have appreciated some of the work more if I had had more of a context for who she was. I did eventually read her Wikipedia page or some of her Wikipedia page, but I would have liked to, I don't know. I wanted to read a biography of her.

Lilly: 8:17

I felt kind of the same way, but in a different direction. I have read some of her poetry before, but like, I had a one semester class on American poets, so I read like two Audre Lorde poems. You know?

Sara: 8:32

Right.

Lilly: 8:34

that I actually felt like I would have enjoyed her essays much more if I had read more of her poetry first. But sort of in that same vein, like, I wanted to get a better sense for who she was as a poet before I gave a shit about her essays.

Sara: 8:50

I think that makes sense given our different focuses. Like you, you tend to be a much more poetry oriented person in general than I am, I think.

Lilly: 9:01

Yeah, I think that's fair.

Sara: 9:03

so I, I think it makes sense.

Lilly: 9:05

also, her poetries are autobiographical, so it also would have been some of that, like, you know.

Sara: 9:12

Right.

Lilly: 9:13

I, she quoted her own poetry in one of her speeches, and I was like, oh my god, the guts.

Sara: 9:21

That is a boss move.

Lilly: 9:23

to do that. So I think if I had read that poem before reading that essay, it would have landed better.

Sara: 9:32

Yeah.

Lilly: 9:34

So I also read her Wikipedia page after reading this collection, but mostly because I'm a nosy bitch, and I was really curious how she had kids.

Sara: 9:43

Hmm.

Lilly: 9:44

She is very outspoken lesbian, and I was like, there is something missing in this equation. But it turned out she married a gay man for a couple of years, and they had two kids together. And I was like, oh, that works. Okay.

Sara: 9:58

That's one way to do it.

Lilly: 10:00

Curiosity satiated. I also, it was interesting reading her essays. Where she, she identifies so much as a lesbian first, like, in all of her speeches, she starts off by introducing herself like, I am a black lesbian woman. And having, like, no baseline for her work, I was just like, okay, great! Also it being 2024. Like, I knew, intellectually, That that was a very bold statement to make in the 70s. But then reading her poetry, which is, you know, extremely sapphic, I was like, oh, okay. You are a lesbian. I believe you now. It doesn't feel like you're trying to convince me.

Sara: 10:41

Yeah, I, I guess I had a little bit of the same reaction to that statement. It was a very bold thing to say in the 70s, and it feels like it is less or should be less of a statement that one has to make in 2024. But yeah.

Lilly: 10:58

I think also because the whole selection is introduced that way, and we're reading all of these pieces back to back, it's like, you just told me that. You just told me that. Which is not her

Sara: 11:10

Like, we know this.

Lilly: 11:12

Yeah, that's just a quirk of it being a selection, right?

Sara: 11:16

Right.

Lilly: 11:17

And all of this content condensed, and then reading it back to back instead of maybe, like, I'm thinking maybe I should have hopped around a little bit, read a couple poems, read an essay, read a couple poems, read an essay, or maybe it should have been organized that way. I think I might have had a more enjoyable reading experience.

Sara: 11:34

I don't know. I liked having the poems and the prose organized together, on the one hand, just because that kind of neat organization fits with how I like things. But I think it would have been interesting to have everything organized by year.

Lilly: 12:00

Yeah.

Sara: 12:02

the poetry was with the essays that came out around that time period. And that was the organization. And maybe that would have provided a better kind of like overview of the evolution of her writing than having the two different styles separated.

Lilly: 12:20

It also would have given a very interesting sort of autobiographical pull. journey that we don't get the way it's set up now.

Sara: 12:28

Mm hmm.

Lilly: 12:28

I found myself flipping back to her diary selections because the poems were organized by their original collection dates. So it would be like excerpts from this collection, excerpts from that collection. And so we have the years that those came out. So I would then go back and like read a diary entry from that same year to try to like place what was going on in her life when she wrote it.

Sara: 12:50

Mm hmm.

Lilly: 12:51

Which. Was, like, very fun and made me feel like a super sleuth, but the collection could have done that for me.

Sara: 12:59

True.

Lilly: 13:01

So, it was very interesting reading her essays and kind of picking up threads of feminist theory and how it has evolved over time. And especially, you read the foreword by the editor, right?

Sara: 13:13

Yeah, I did. I mean, I will say that I read this book like two weeks ago, two and a half weeks ago, and so it has been superseded by more recent reading in my mind, so I'm not gonna, not gonna have the strongest memories of everything.

Lilly: 13:30

That's fine. I just wanted to credit Roxane Gay with what I'm about to say because it was not an observation I made on my own. Because she calls out how a lot of the concepts that Lorde talks about in her essays is recognizable today as, uh, oh shit, what's the intersectional feminism? That's not the word.

Sara: 13:52

I think it

Lilly: 13:53

Is that the word?

Sara: 13:54

Andrew, yeah, I thought that she was talking about intersectional feminism and how it related to Audre Lorde in the foreword.

Lilly: 14:02

But that's not the phrase that Audre Lorde uses in her writing, but that's what we recognize it as today. And so, like, that was really cool. And then there were some moments that were, like, sadly still relevant, especially about, like, white fragility.

Sara: 14:16

Yeah, I thought actually there was a lot that was still relevant in her essays. And like you say, that is kind of sad given that she was writing these 30, 40 years ago. And you would think that as a society, maybe we would have done a little bit better in improving, but no. Or,

Lilly: 14:35

that felt relevant in a way that did not make me sad, that made it more feel like she could predict the future. I'm specifically thinking she has a section in one of her essays How Discord I should actually find the quote and not just try to make it up off the top of my head. We live in a very fractured time, one where difference has become weaponized, demonized, and where discourse demands allegiance to extremes instead of nuanced points of view. And it feels like she was putting Twitter on blast like 30 years before it was invented.

Sara: 15:13

like political discourse these days, which is not restricted to Twitter.

Lilly: 15:18

no, it's not. But I was thinking of theoretically progressive spaces that just tear into each other for being progressive the wrong way or a different way. Lorde speaks out a lot about how we can't let our, our differences prevent us from working together. And that feels very relevant, but not in a way that makes me sad, the same way some of her other relevant points do. I

Sara: 15:43

I mean, I think that still makes me feel a little sad, to be perfectly honest, because there are so many bad things happening in the world right now and in politics where I feel like if people could work together a little bit more, even just progressives working together a little more, it would be less worrisome. But, um,

Lilly: 16:06

mean, of course, that's a problem we should work on. But I guess. Maybe the fact that it's not a new problem. is more comforting to me because it's not, oh god, look how, like, low we have come. It's, no, no, it's been like this for a while, and yet we've still been managing to muddle along. So,

Sara: 16:26

yeah, maybe that's a nicer way of looking at it than my glass half empty way of looking at it.

Lilly: 16:36

in the foreword, Roxane Gay introduces a, an essay about eroticism. Uses of the erotic, the erotic as power. And my comment was, ooh, I'm excited to read this one. And then I got to it, and it actually wasn't my favorite. So that was funny.

Sara: 16:53

It wasn't my favorite either, but that wasn't a surprise, because I was not thinking it would be, because that's just not my jam, usually.

Lilly: 17:02

Yeah. But ah, it is my jam, so I thought I would be very into that essay, and I ended up being sort of lukewarm on it. But again, I just, I'd like her poetry more in general. I feel like it made a lot of similar points, but in a more elegant way. But again, I just like poems better than essays, maybe.

Sara: 17:22

Yeah, I, I think that her essays were more blunt about the point that she was making because of the format, right? Like, like not to say that her poetry wasn't very clearly making points, but I think just the format makes the message a little more diffuse, whereas in a prose essay, you can make very pointed statements about what you're trying to say. Okay.

Lilly: 17:51

and that's especially why I think the format is best suited for oratory delivery. Like, I think in a, in a speech, if she was reading these to me, or to a crowd, it would feel so much less hitting me over the head with the point.

Sara: 18:07

Mm hmm.

Lilly: 18:08

Because I just think that kind of straightforwardness fits better in that format.

Sara: 18:12

Yeah, maybe.

Lilly: 18:13

I'm sure there's recording Well, there's probably recordings online. I bet I could find.

Sara: 18:18

You might even be able to find some YouTube videos, maybe.

Lilly: 18:21

That's what I meant.

Sara: 18:22

Yeah. Ha ha ha. Ha ha

Lilly: 18:26

think my last point about the essays was the very, very ironic observation I made. Because there are times where she's talking about white feminists and, you know, ways they can be better allies. And I had some notes in the margins like, I am in this picture and I don't like it. But of course, Her criticism is, stop making this about you, which is what I was doing in that moment, so. Thanks, Audrey.

Sara: 18:56

I think that's the mark of a good essayist, though, when you can hear what they're saying and reflect on it and take it in, so. I think that just speaks to the power of her words and how good of a writer she was.

Lilly: 19:11

Oh, absolutely. And she talks a lot about how feminists and black feminists shouldn't have to sugarcoat their words for people to listen to them. just because I'm angry doesn't make my point any less poignant. But then, perhaps ironically, she is writing about this in such a beautiful way that is very easy to identify with, even if I am living, you know, 50 years later in a very different circumstance. So while she is correct, she shouldn't have to sugarcoat her words for people to ingest them. It's, they're still very digestible. And that, that was too, too long of a food metaphor, and I'm sorry.

Sara: 19:51

That food metaphor did kind of go on for a little bit.

Lilly: 19:54

Yeah, any one of those would have been fine alone, but like, it just kept compounding and I couldn't stop.

Sara: 20:03

Couldn't get off that food metaphor train.

Lilly: 20:06

but that doesn't make my point any less true. Well, before we talk about poetry, should we give a quick little shout out to our patrons who make this episode possible and all of our episodes possible? If you go over to our Patreon and you subscribe at 1 a month or more, you can see our most recent post, which was a discussion about the adaptation of Poor Things. We did a whole episode on it for the book, but then Sarah watched the movie recently and we talked about it from that angle a little bit, so.

Sara: 20:40

I want to point out we watched the movie together on Discord, so if you join our Discord, you can do fun things like movie nights with us.

Lilly: 20:48

Yeah. And fun movies like Poor Things, which I liked quite a bit. And you liked well

Sara: 20:53

I enjoyed it, yeah. I enjoyed it.

Lilly: 20:56

So, a very different type of girl power, uh, I don't even want to say girl power, that's so trivializing and gross. I guess feminism is the word, huh? A very different type of feminism than Audre Lorde, but not entirely off track. I found myself asking so many questions in my head of Roxane Gay while I was going through this poetry selection.

Sara: 21:20

Yeah, I mean, I did wonder, not so much about the poetry selection because I didn't have a good enough grasp on her poetry or depth of knowledge of her poetry to wonder a lot about the selection of specific poems. But there is one poem that's repeated, which I noticed and was like, Hmm, this was an interesting choice. I don't know why you made this Roxane Gay.

Lilly: 21:46

Right? Like, that's the kind of thing, if this was a physical book, I think I would have tried to flip back and forth and compare them, but that was just too difficult to do in an ebook. I really, ugh, I've been reading more books in ebook format, which is fine, but it does not work for me for poetry. Specifically, because Okay, if there's a poem that's like three or four pages long, it's fine. But if there's a poem that should be all on one page, or at least like two facing pages, having to swipe and not being able to see the whole thing at once, I think is very detrimental to my experience.

Sara: 22:22

Interesting. I mean, I don't mind that at all, really. Yeah.

Lilly: 22:26

There were a couple, or there was just like two lines on the second page, and it was very abrupt, and like definitely affected the flow of the poem for me. I think I ended up going back and rereading those, just because, like, knowing where it ends changes the way you go through it, I think?

Sara: 22:45

Mm hmm.

Lilly: 22:45

And, like, if it's on two pages facing each other, visually you can see, like, oh, there's not a lot over there, you know? So you kind of know how much to expect. But that, yeah, that was a little, didn't quite work for me. But that's no one's fault except my own, for buying the e book.

Sara: 23:02

I mean, that's, that's just the format. You can't change that, really. I will say that I wasn't a huge fan of the poetry. Not because it wasn't good, because I do think the poems were good, but they were just too horny for me, and I got tired. I can only take a certain level of horniness. I think I'm too ace for a lot of Audre Lorde's poems.

Lilly: 23:25

That's fair. When you first said they weren't to your taste, I was like, Sarah, you have been repeating much over the last couple of weeks how much you prefer non rhyming poetry, and this is a such a good example of good non rhyming poetry, but then, yeah, the content not clicking totally makes sense, so

Sara: 23:45

Yeah, like,

Lilly: 23:46

my,

Sara: 23:47

like, I, I really appreciated Audre Lorde's writing skills. These were beautiful poems, it's just that they were too horny.

Lilly: 23:59

yeah.

Sara: 23:59

A lot of them were too horny. So this is entirely like a me issue and not an Audre Lorde issue.

Lilly: 24:07

And I mean, especially with poetry, it's so I feel like with prose It's easier to read something that's, like, not really for you and being able to appreciate it anyway.

Sara: 24:18

Yeah.

Lilly: 24:19

But with poetry, I mean, you can still do that on some level, of course, but it's a lot harder to get over that and really, like, engage with the text, I think.

Sara: 24:29

Yeah, I would agree with that.

Lilly: 24:31

Surprising no one. I quite enjoyed her lusty poems. Probably more than her rageful poems. They were very fun. I was definitely sleuthing, being like, Alright, who is this about? Can I tell which partner of yours you are writing this about? Based on, like, your diary entries and, like, when it was and what are the things you guys are doing together. I was being very invasive.

Sara: 24:56

But I mean, when you put out a collection of poetry and essays like this, I think you're allowed to do some sleuthing.

Lilly: 25:02

Yeah.

Sara: 25:04

You were almost invited to do sleuthing, in fact.

Lilly: 25:08

But that, so, the poems that we had in this selection definitely felt like they were on two sides, right? They were the lusty poems and they were the rageful poems.

Sara: 25:18

Yeah.

Lilly: 25:19

There were a couple about motherhood sprinkled in there, but even those ended up being a rage against an establishment that was going to ultimately harm her children, right?

Sara: 25:28

Yeah, I would say that those usually fell into the angry category.

Lilly: 25:33

A couple of them were very sweet, but like, overall,

Sara: 25:37

Yeah.

Lilly: 25:37

were, like, even the motherhood poems were rageful. And that is kind of what I wonder. Is that impression of her work because of this selection? Is that an accurate representation of her work as a whole? Maybe there were a lot more, like, really sweet motherhood poems that were neither lusty nor rageful that just weren't included, you know?

Sara: 25:59

Yeah, I mean, like, I will say that for, for all that this collection was not necessarily for me, I would still be interested in reading more of her work, because this is a fairly small sample size. She has a large body of work. She was a prolific author. And also because so much of this book was essays, I would be interested in reading more of her poetry and seeing whether or not my vibing with her work changes.

Lilly: 26:27

I also think how the selection is presented would affect your experience of it, right? Like, if I went through and read all of them and picked out like five I bet I could pick out five that you vibed a little bit better with Which would then overall give you like a different impression because like, you know The total is different from the sum of its parts or whatever. And so I think like Because it's like one after the other being so lusty, I'm reusing that word a lot, and I can't think of a better one.

Sara: 27:00

I mean, I'm saying horny, not lusty, but it's the same, the same difference.

Lilly: 27:05

It compounds, right? So by the third horny poem, you're like, oh my god.

Sara: 27:10

Yeah.

Lilly: 27:11

Or I imagine you were, because I was like, hell yeah,

Sara: 27:14

Yeah. I mean, like, you know, one, I can handle two. I'm like, okay, I get it. You're very much into sex and sexuality and that's great. Good for you. Like, no shame there, but it's not for me. And then by the third, I'm like, I'm so tired. This just makes me tired.

Lilly: 27:33

were a couple of poems that I absolutely loved. I mean, I don't think there were any that I disliked. There were some that I think had Well, there were ones that I personally identified with more than others, which does not make them good or bad, it just changes my reading experience.

Sara: 27:52

Right.

Lilly: 27:53

And then there were some that leaned more on imagery, which is to my taste in poems. And then there were some that came out and directly stated, or more directly stated, I mean they were still poetry. Which I think normally I would be more annoyed by, but because I was coming off of the essays, I was like, Yes, I like this so much better than the essays. Just as far as format goes.

Sara: 28:21

Right.

Lilly: 28:22

But I do think, I mean, I find a poem more meaningful than an essay, even when they have the same point. But writing it in a poem behind metaphors does make the content more work to engage with, which is a process I enjoy. But when she's trying to communicate with a large number of people and change hearts and minds, I can see why sometimes you need to just spoon feed it to people.

Sara: 28:49

Yeah. I mean, I tend to enjoy essays more than poetry in general. I just, I like prose more than poetry.

Lilly: 29:01

I did have a pet peeve should we do a pet peeve corner?

Sara: 29:05

Yeah, it's been a hot second since we've done a Pet Peeve Corner.

Lilly: 29:09

A golden scissors.

Sara: 29:11

A Golden Scissors?

Lilly: 29:13

golden scissors. That was from her poem, Chain. A very, very good poem. But she does use the phrase, a golden scissors, and I'm pretty sure that's just a regional thing. I just have in my head, like, it's a pair of scissors. Scissors is plural. And so I got to that and it completely took me out of the poem because then I had to sit there and go, I know what she means. I can get over it.

Sara: 29:39

Yeah.

Lilly: 29:39

give me a minute and I'll jump back in.

Sara: 29:42

It does sound a little weird.

Lilly: 29:44

And then especially like, that is one of her very heartbreaking poems about racism and dealing with a world that is not made to help you. And then I got to that line and I was like, oh no!

Sara: 29:59

I don't want to be pulled out of this poem.

Lilly: 30:02

Yeah. It is doing no one any credit to have to sit here and throw a tantrum about this perfectly fine use of language.

Sara: 30:12

Yep.

Lilly: 30:13

Everyone brings their own baggage to a poem, and sometimes that baggage is really dumb. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Fiction Fans.

Sara: 30:26

Come disagree with us! We're on Twitter, BlueSky, at FictionFansPod. You can also email us at FictionFansPod at gmail. com.

Lilly: 30:36

If you enjoyed the episode, please rate and review on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and follow us wherever your podcasts live.

Sara: 30:43

have a Patreon, where you can support us and find exclusive episodes on a lot of other nonsense.

Lilly: 30:48

Thanks again for listening, and may your villains always be defeated.

Sara: 30:52

Bye!