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:	9780822958260
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	07/20/2003
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

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

	Learning to Write	1
	The Sound of One Fork, 1981
	Cahaba	5
	My Cousin Anne	7
	My Mother Loves Women	8
	Elbows	9
	Romance	10
	The Sound of One Fork	12
	from The Segregated Heart	14
	We Say We Love Each Other, 1985
	Sharing the Eye	21
	Sharp Glass	25
	Waulking Song: Two	26
	We Say We Love Each Other	34
	Your Hand Opens Me	37
	The Fact of the Garden	38
	Reading Maps: Three	40
	Crime Against Nature, 1990
	Poem for My Sons	51
	Justice, Come Down	53
	Declared Not Fit	54
	No Place	56
	Down the Little Cahaba	58
	All the Women Caught in Flaring Light	59
	The Place Lost and Gone, the Place Found	63
	A Waving Hand	65
	from Shame	66
	The First Question	70
	Motionless on the Dark Side of the Light	72
	My Life You Are Talking About	73
	I Am Ready to Tell All I Know	78
	In the Waiting Room at the Draft Board	80
	from At Fifteen, the Oldest Son Comes to Visit	82
	Talking to Charlie	84
	The Laughing Place	85
	Another Question	87
	Crime Against Nature	89
	Walking Back Up Depot Street, 1999
	Walking Back Up Depot Street	99
	Red String	101
	Eating Clay	104
	The Remnant Shop	106
	New Poems
	Learning to Talk	113
	Cutting Hair	114
	Doing Physical Therapy	115
	Shoveling Sand	116
	Day Off	117
	Breakfast	118
	Reading the Classifieds	119
	Picking Up a Job Application	120
	Getting Money at the ATM	121
	Playing the Lottery	122
	Giving a Manicure	123
	Picketing the Bargain Store, They Said	124
	Chopping Peppers	125
	Author's Note and Acknowledgments	127

Editorial Reviews

"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

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