ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

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

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

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