The Dirt She Ate: Selected And New Poems

by Minnie Bruce Pratt

Overview

Suffused with pain and power, Minnie Bruce Pratt's poetry is as evocative of the swamps and streets of the southern United States as it is of the emotional lives of those too often forced into the margins of society. Vivid, lush, and intensely honest, these poems capture the rough edges of the world and force us to pay attention.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822980872
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	10/31/2014
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	136
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Minnie Bruce Pratt, a member of the graduate faculty at the Union Institute and University, is the author of four previous books of poetry, including Crime Against Nature, chosen as the Lamont Poetry Selection by the Academy of American Poets and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Walking Back Up Depot Street, ForeWord Magazine's Gay/Lesbian Book of the Year.

Table of Contents

Contents Author’s Note and Acknowledgments Learning to Write The Sound of One Fork, 1981 Cahaba My Cousin Anne My Mother Loves Women Elbows Romance The Sound of One Fork from The Segregated Heart We Say We Love Each Other, 1985 Sharing the Eye Sharp Glass Waulking Song: Two We Say We Love Each Other Your Hand Opens Me The Fact of the Garden Reading Maps: Three Crime Against Nature, 1990 Poem for My Sons Justice, Come Down Declared Not Fit No Place Down the Little Cahaba All the Women Caught in Flaring Light The Place Lost and Gone, the Place Found A Waving Hand from Shame The First Question Motionless on the Dark Side of the Light My Life You Are Talking About I Am Ready to Tell All I Know In the Waiting Room at the Draft Board from At Fifteen, the Oldest Son Comes to Visit Talking to Charlie The Laughing Place Another Question Crime Against Nature Walking Back Up Depot Street, 1999 Walking Back Up Depot Street Red String Eating Clay The Remnant Shop New Poems Learning to Talk Cutting Hair Doing Physical Therapy Shoveling Sand Day Off Breakfast Picking Up a Job Application Getting Money at the ATM Playing the Lottery Giving a Manicure Picketing the Bargain Store, They Said Chopping Peppers

Editorial Reviews

Pratt's nationwide reputation rests not only on her four previous books of poems (among them the Lamont Award-winning Crime Against Nature) but also on her tireless work as a feminist and queer activist, and on her courageous prose about gender, sexuality and politics (much of it collected in S/he). This volume gathers 25 years' worth of clear, confident, often autobiographical verse. Poems from her 1981 debut The Sound of One Fork consider her background in the rural South; We Say We Love Each Other (1985) includes a ringingly angry anti-rape ode, constructed around a Hebridean weaving song. Pratt's declarations show how "History speaks like a voice through our bodies"; here it speaks through landscapes that have seen their share of violence, and in Pratt's commitment to storytelling. The stories in Crimes concern sons whom her speaker had left behind when she ended her marriage; poems like "At Fifteen, the Oldest Son Comes to Visit" record both grief and later rapprochement. Pratt's poems can suffer from a formal sameness-almost all of them use the same few tones and the same few kinds of line (though the new, shorter poems offer some technical variety). Yet Pratt's audience will not be disappointed by her unshakable integrity: "What I left I will not return to," she declares, "yet I live in it every day." (Nov.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

"Hard-edged and provocative.  . . . Never sentimental or histrionic, Pratt’s poems deal directly and explicitly with issues of anger, shame, sexuality, and injustice."
—Publishers Weekly

“Minnie Bruce Pratt is one of those rare poets who can take on the world of the deep interior self, and the world of ‘issues’ and current events, with equal lyricism and power. . . . Pratt’s poems seem to be hymns to this need to taste the world, to glory in the experience of living, even when that living is painful.”
—San Francisco Bay Area Reporter

“Pratt writes with candescent intensity, almost unfettered feeling and graphic frankness. . . . She is slave to passion and proud of the fact.”

—Raleigh News & Observer

“Like a long-awaited visit from a dear friend,  a new volume of poems by Minnie Bruce Pratt is always a time to celebrate. . . . Each of these poems is its own painting, its own snapshot, a light turned on some unexpected longing.”

—Lambda Book Report

From the Publisher