Paper is neither kind nor cruel
 only white in its neutrality
 and I have for reality now
 the brown bar of my arm
 moving in broken rhythms
 across this dead place.

All the poems I have ever written
 are historical reviews of a now absorbed country
 a small judgement
 hawking and coughing them up
 I have ejected them not unlike children
 now my throat is clear
 perhaps I shall speak again.

All the poems I have ever written
 make a small book
 the shedding of my past in patched conceits
 moulted like snake skin, a book of leavings
 now
 I can do anything I wish
 I can love them or hate them
 use them for comfort or warmth
 tissues or decoration
 dolls or Japanese baskets
 blankets or spells;
 I can use them for magic
 lanterns or music
 advice or small council
 for napkins or past-times or
 disposable diapers
 I can make fire from them
 or kindling
 songs or paper chains

Or fold them all into a paper fan
 with which to cool my husband’s dinner.

“After a first book” was published in Lorde’s second poetry chapbook, Cables to Rage, in 1970. In this short poem, Lorde describes her connection to the process of producing writing as one of intense necessity. She expresses the agency and freedom she feels once her poems have been composed and collected. Once they have been externalized–“moulted like snake skin” as she puts it–she asserts, “I can do anything I wish.”

Linguistically “After a first book” is a manifestation of Lorde’s views on the inseparability of identity. As evidenced by the title, in this piece, Lorde, first and foremost, directly addresses her identity as a writer. The initial word of the poem is “paper” and the work is full of other blatant references to writing. This reality is most obviously demonstrated by the repeated line, “All the poems I have ever written.” Despite this pronounced focus, however, Lorde is compelled to reference other aspects of her identity. In the first stanza, through references to “white” paper and “the brown bar of my arm,” Lorde incorporates race into the image she paints of her experience of being a poet. Similarly, in the second stanza, she integrates her status as a mother, writing of her poems, “I have ejected them not unlike children.” Lastly, in the final line of the piece, Lorde makes a critical, powerful reference to her “husband’s dinner,”* marking her status as a woman as fundamental to the piece. This final punch gives the poem relevance by revealing Lorde’s feeling that her creativity is muddled by society’s expectations of her as a wife, a mother, and a black woman.

Once again, in “After a first book” Lorde stresses the innate connectivity of the aspects of the self and the power of social labels. This piece exemplifies something Lorde said in a commencement speech she gave at Harvard in 1982: “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” “After a first book” shows that Lorde does not simply talk of the need for self-definition but that she does it, consistently and visibly, over and over again in her writing.

*Note that at this time, Lorde was married to Edwin Rollins. They got divorced the same year Cables to Rage was published, and it was then that Lorde began openly identifying and writing prolifically about being a lesbian.

Source: Lorde, Audre. “After a first book.” Cables to Rage. 1st ed., Paul Breman, 1970.