#kathe koja

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) by Audre Lorde

If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

A little black girl opens her eyes in 1930s Harlem. Around her, a heady swirl of passers-by, car horns, kerosene lamps, the stock market falling, fried bananas, tales of her parents' native Grenada. She trudges to public school along snowy sidewalks, and finds she is tongue-tied, legally blind, left behind by her older sisters. On she stumbles through teenage hardships—suicide, abortion, hunger, a Christmas spent alone—until she emerges into happiness: an oasis of friendship in Washington Heights, an affair in a dirty factory in Connecticut, and, finally, a journey down to the heat of Mexico, discovering sex, tenderness, and suppers of hot tamales and cold milk. This is Audre Lorde's story. It is a rapturous, life-affirming tale of independence, love, work, strength, sexuality and change, rich with poetry and fierce emotional power.

Nonfiction, memoir, biomythography, 1950s

Skin (1993) by Kathe Koja

Tess spends her days picking through scrap yards and arc-welding her strange, jagged metal sculptures. Bibi is a dancer, who pushes her hardened body beyond endurance, sculpting every movement and every muscle, basking in the warmth of the pain…Then the two women come together, and together they create a new underground art form of metal and flesh, a dance of whirling bodies and whirling sculpture, a dance of pain and blood…

Breaking the boundaries of art, Tess and Bibi are plunged deeper and deeper into a realm of obsession - until the lust for pain grows beyond all their control…