Lorde's works "Coal" and "The Black Unicorn" are two examples of poetry that encapsulates her black, feminist identity. Each poem, including those included in the book of published poems focus on the idea of identity, and how identity itself is not straightforward. Many Literary critics assumed that "Coal" was Lorde's way of shaping race in terms of coal and diamonds. Lorde herself stated that those interpretations were incorrect because identity was not so simply defined and her poems were not to be oversimplified.