Review
“In Minnie Bruce Pratt's Walking Back Up Depot Street we meet one of the most perceptive characters to populate contemporary poetry, a woman named simply Beatrice who acts both as initiator and vehicle in these moving poems. ...This is an exceptional collection in every way: broad in subject, skilled in craft, diverse in its population and conscious of the tragic world. It could be overwhelming and general, but because readers see it through the eyes of Beatrice, readers come to care for her and her vision. In that sense, Pratt has created a Beatrice as momentous as Dante's. Her Beatrice has not turned away from, but embraced, as clear-eyed as she can, that harsh history which includes everyone. Because of that, readers will walk with her into hell—even in to our own roles in the story.”
--ForeWord
“Minnie Bruce Pratt's poems engage the tangled skeins of race, sexuality, and class in a context of historical struggle, demonstrating that these tangles and knots cannot be thinned out and seperated. . . . I wish I could just quote the whole book to show you the passion and guts, the honesty and fear, the complexity and struggle, the historical and sexual permutations that gird these poems. so you can see for yourself. If you haven't already bought Walking Back Up Depot Street, I encourage you to do so.”
--Lesbian Review of Books
From the Publisher
In this work, Minnie Bruce Pratt 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 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." 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.
