payment page
Study Tools
Overview
“Hanging Fire” is a lyric poem by the prolific Black American poet Audre Lorde
. It appeared in The Black Unicorn, her seventh poetry collection, published in 1978. The poem’s speaker is a 14-year-old Black girl whose mother has withdrawn into her bedroom, leaving her daughter alone with her anxious thoughts. The speaker’s everyday worries about things like her skin and boys circle around repeated concerns about premature death. The disquieting preoccupation with death echoes the violence implied by the title. Though in idiomatic English the phrase “hang fire” refers to delayed progress, the term’s original meaning references the unexpected delay between the triggering and firing of a gun.Read a summary & analysis, an analysis of the speaker, and explanations of important quotes from “Hanging Fire.”
