Magnified (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Once in a blue moon, a love like this comes along This collection of love poems draws us into the sacred liminal space that surrounds death. With her beloved gravely ill, poet and activist Minnie Bruce Pratt turns to daily walks and writing to find a way to go on in a world where injustice brings so much loss and death. Each poem is a pocket lens "to swivel out and magnify" the beauty in "the little glints, insignificant" that catch her eye: "The first flowers, smaller than this s." She also chronicles the quiet rooms of "pain and the body's memory," bringing the reader carefully into moments that will be familiar to anyone who has suffered similar loss. Even as she asks, "What's the use of poetry? Not one word comes back to talk me out of pain," the book delivers a vision of love that is boldly political and laced with a tumultuous hope that promises: "Revolution is bigger than both of us, revolution is a science that infers the future presence of us." This lucid poetry is a testimony to the radical act of being present and offers this balm: that the generative power of love continues after death. Oh Death Someone sang, Oh death! Oh death! Won't you pass me over for another day? Someone said, I dreamed of you last night. I dreamed you were telling me your whole life story. Whole. Whorled. Welkin, winkle, wrinkle. The loop of time holds us all together. The pile of laundry on the bed. You folding socks one inside the other. We have had this day, and now this night. The clothes are put away, and from the bed we see the moon folding light into darkness, not death.

Biographies & Memoirs

Pratt, Minnie Bruce

Arts & Literature

Wesleyan University Press

Once in a blue moon, a love like this comes along\nThis collection of love poems draws us into the sacred liminal space that surrounds death. With her beloved gravely ill, poet and activist Minnie Bruce Pratt turns to daily walks and writing to find a way to go on in a world where injustice brings so much loss and death. Each poem is a pocket lens "to swivel out and magnify" the beauty in "the little glints, insignificant" that catch her eye: "The first flowers, smaller than this s." She also chronicles the quiet rooms of "pain and the body's memory," bringing the reader carefully into moments that will be familiar to anyone who has suffered similar loss. Even as she asks, "What's the use of poetry? Not one word comes back to talk me out of pain," the book delivers a vision of love that is boldly political and laced with a tumultuous hope that promises: "Revolution is bigger than both of us, revolution is a science that infers the future presence of us." This lucid poetry is a testimony to the radical act of being present and offers this balm: that the generative power of love continues after death.\nOh Death\nSomeone sang, Oh death! Oh death! Won't you 
pass me over for another day? Someone said, I\ndreamed of you last night. I dreamed you 
were telling me your whole life story.\nWhole. Whorled. Welkin, winkle, wrinkle. 
The loop of time holds us all together.\nThe pile of laundry on the bed. You 
folding socks one inside the other. We 
have had this day, and now this night.\nThe clothes are put away, and from the bed we see 
the moon folding light into darkness, not death.

In Pratt's fourth collection of poetry, Walking Back Up Depot Street, we travel to a land we have lived in, but never seen. We are led by powerful images into what is both a story of the segregated rural South and the story of a woman named Beatrice who is leaving that home for the post-industrial North. As Beatrice searches for the truth behind the public story -- the public history -- of the land of her childhood, she hears and sees the unknown past come alive. She struggles to free herself from the lies she has been taught while growing up -- and finds others who are also on this journey.In these dramatically multivocal narrative poems, we hear the words and rhythms of Bible Belt preachers, African-American blues and hillbilly gospel singers, and of sharecropper country women and urban lesbians. We hear the testimony of freed slaves and white abolitionists speaking against Klan violence, fragments of speeches by union organizers and mill workers, and snatches of song from those who marched on the road to Selma.Lillian Smith once wrote, "Your poet and demagogue -- and mine -- inhabit the same terrain; poet transforming, bringing new forms out of chaos, demagogue destroying. Each day, one or the other wins a small battle inside us". Walking Back Up Depot Street reclaims history from the hands of the demagogues of the twentieth century.

Walking Back Up Depot Street: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Univ of Pittsburgh Pr

Selected as ForeWord Magazine’s 1999 Gay/Lesbian Book of the Year In Pratt's fourth volume of poems, Walking Back Up Depot Street, we are led by powerful images into what is both a story of the segregated rural South and the story of a white woman named Beatrice who is leaving that home for the postindustrial North. Beatrice searches for the truth behind the public story-the official history-of the land of her childhood. She struggles to free herself from the lies she was taught while growing up-and she finds the other people who are also on this journey. In these dramatically multivocal narrative poems, we hear the words and rhythms of Bible Belt preachers, African-American blues and hillbilly gospel singers, and sharecropper country women and urban lesbians. We hear the testimony of freed slaves and white abolitionists speaking against Klan violence, fragments of speeches by union organizers and mill workers, and snatches of songs from those who marched on the road to Selma. Beatrice walks back into the past and finds the history of resistance that she has never been taught; she listens to her fellow travelers as they all get ready to create the future.

Walking Back Up Depot Street (Pitt Poetry Series)

University of Pittsburgh Press

Inside the Money Machine is poetry for the immense majority for those who work for a living, out of the house or at home, from the laundromat to the classroom, from blue-collar construction sites to white-collar desk jobs. These fresh, gritty and passionate poems are about the people who survive and resist inside the money machine of 21st-century capitalism: those who've looked for work and not found it, who've held a job but wanted more out of life, who believe a better world is still possible. Inspired by the poetic prose of The Communist Manifesto, Inside the Money Machine draws its power from Pratt s own working life and grass-roots organizing, and the struggles of neighbors, co-workers, political activists and loved ones. Pratt writes from inside the failing money machine: The problem is, the plan is not ours. In the tradition of the socially engaged poetry of Muriel Rukeyser and Langston Hughes, Nazim Hikmet of Turkey and Pablo Neruda of Chile, these poems speak to the unfinished work of this moment in history, in a way that poetry seldom does. Inside the Money Machine urges: Let us follow ourselves into a present not ruled by the past.

Inside the Money Machine (The Carolina Wren Press Poetry Series, 13)

Business & Money

Economics

Carolina Wren Press

Politics. Cultural Writing. New to SPD. The award-winning feminist and lesbian press Firebrand Books closed its doors last year after sixteen years in the business. The authors of YOURS IN STRUGGLE -- Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith -- have now made the 1988 Firebrand edition of their collaborative work available through SPD. They write, YOURS IN STRUGGLE happened because we were able to talk to each other in the fist place, despite our very different identities and backgrounds -- white Christian-raised Southerner, Afro-American, Ashkenazi Jew. Each of us speaks only for herself, and we do not necessarily agree with each other. Yet we believe our cooperation on this book indicates concrete possibilities for coalition work.

Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism

Politics & Social Sciences

Bulkin, Elly

Smith, Barbar

Social Sciences

Firebrand Books

Poetry. LGBT Studies. The first title from Sapphic Classics, a co-edition between Sinister Wisdom Magazine and A Midsummer Night's Press to reprint seminal works of lesbian poetry. "In spare and forceful language Minnie Bruce Pratt tells a moving story of loss and recuperation, discovering linkages between her own disenfranchisement and the condition of other minorities. She makes it plain, in this masterful sequence of poems, that the real crime against nature is violence and oppression.--From the Judges' Statement, Lamont Poetry Prize 1989, CRIME AGAINST NATURE "Minnie Bruce Pratt's CRIME AGAINST NATURE is, for a number of reasons, a work at the poetic crossroads. It extends the subject of love poetry; it extends the subject of feminist and lesbian poetry; it looks in several directions through the lens of a strong, sensuous poetics, through that fusion of experience with imagination that is the core of poetry, and through cadences founded in the music of speech, tightened and drawn to an individual pitch."--Adrienne Rich

Crime Against Nature: The Lamont Poetry Selection for 1989

Contemporary

Crime Against Nature

This brave memoir chronicles Pratt’s struggle to overcome the repressive traditions of Southern womanhood and live her life honestly. It chronicles her youth, her marriage, her eventual decision to come out as a lesbian, and her life with transgendered activist and author Leslie Feinberg.
Minnie Bruce Pratt is the author of We Say We Love Each Other, Rebellion, Crime Against Nature, Walking Back Up Depot Street, and The Dirt We Ate.

S/he

Community & Culture

Alyson Pubns

Rebellion: Essays 1980-1991

Essential reading exploring the wild terrain of personal and political change.

Essays & Correspondence

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pratt, Minnie Bruce. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Pratt, Minnie Bruce

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pratt, Minnie Bruce. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Magnified (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Magnified (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Walking Back Up Depot Street: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)

Walking Back Up Depot Street (Pitt Poetry Series)

Inside the Money Machine (The Carolina Wren Press Poetry Series, 13)

Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism

Crime Against Nature: The Lamont Poetry Selection for 1989

Crime Against Nature

S/he

Rebellion: Essays 1980-1991