Coal is a volume of poetry by Audre Lorde first published in 1976. The book reached a wider audience than her previous books had reached.
In Coal, feminist poet Audre Lorde continued exploring her many layers of identity as a black-woman-feminist-lesbian-urban-mother-warrior-poet. She often emphasized in her writing the need to consider whole identity and not reduce any poet or feminist to one label.
The title poem "Coal" begins:
I
is the total black, being spoken
from the earth's inside…
The poem continues with the metaphor of coal as a representation of blackness. It is the symbol of a person's blackness, which comes from within the nurturing earth, and it is an essence that provides fuel and a substance that becomes a diamond.
Another key feminist poem in Coal, "Story Books on a Kitchen Table," is often remembered for the line:
Out of her womb of pain my mother spat me
into her ill-fitting harness of despair
Audre Lorde's later work revealed ever more forcefully the complicated emotions of her relationship with her mother, a theme also explored in her memoir Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.
Both political and personal, the poetry in Coal expressed Audre Lorde's experience as a black feminist as she continued her struggle against prejudice and marginalization.