The Dirt She Ate: Selected And New Poems (Pitt Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Minnie Bruce Pratt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 20, 2003 | Series: Pitt Poetry Series

Suffused with pain and power, Minnie Bruce Pratt's poetry is as evocative as the swamps and streets of the American south 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.

The Dirt She Ate features thirteen new poems as well as selections from Minnie Bruce Pratt's previous collections of poetry - The Sound of One Fork (1981); We Say We Love Each Other (1985); Crime Against Nature (1990), winner of the Lamont Poetry Award 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 and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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."
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Review

"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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 136 pages
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press; 1 edition (July 20, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822958260
• ISBN-13: 978-0822958260
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,685,319 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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