Walking Back Up Depot Street

Selected as ForeWord Magazine's 1999 Gay/Lesbian Book of the Year In Pratt's fourth volume of poems, Walking Back Up Depot Street , we are led by powerful images into what is both a story of the segregated rural South and the story of a white woman named Beatrice who is leaving that home for the postindustrial North. Beatrice searches for the truth behind the public story-the official history-of the land of her childhood. She struggles to free herself from the lies she was taught while growing up-and she finds the other people 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 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 songs from those who marched on the road to Selma. Beatrice walks back into the past and finds the history of resistance that she has never been taught; she listens to her fellow travelers as they all get ready to create the future. ForeWord Magazine said of these poems, "This is an exceptional collection in every way: broad in subject, skilled inc raft, divese in its population and conscious of the tragic world." Pratt has created a Beatrice as momentous as Dante's." Lillian Smith once wrote, "Your poet and demagogue-and mine-inhabit the same terrain; poet transforming, bringing new forms out of chaos, demagogue destroying." Walking Back Up Depot Street is the act of one poet reclaiming her land and her history from the demagogues of the 20th century.

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.

A Study Guide for Minnie Bruce Pratt's "The Great Migration", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

"In these lyrical vignettes, Pratt expands the boundaries of gender and its theory. She explores the inconsistencies, the infinities, the fluidity of sex and gender, and asks intriguing questions: How many ways are there to be girl, boy, man, woman? Is there a connection between feminine, masculine, lesbian, heterosexual, between desire and liberation? How many ways can the body's sex vary---by chromosomes, hormones, genitals? How many ways can our gender expressions multiply---between home and work, at the computer and when we kiss someone, in our dreams and when we walk down the street? What is our dream of who we want to be? Pratt's stories are part of new theory appearing at the intersections---of the feminism of U.S. women's liberation, the writings of women of color in the U.S. and internationally, the queer ideas of lesbian and gay liberation, and the emerging thought of transgender liberation. S/HE helps move these ideas into action by giving us theory that has flesh and breath, that exists in all of our eccentric, complicated, daily lives."--BOOK JACKET.

An inspiring anthology that celebrates our nation with more than one hundred of the greatest poems ever written about the landscapes, institutions, and transforming events of America. This remarkable volume commemorates our country's struggles and triumphs with poems chronicling the American experience in all its vastness, from the late seventeenth century through the present day. Alongside poems about New York, Florida, and California are descriptions of railroads, amusement parks, hotels, and road trips; scenes of rural and western life; vivid descriptions of our grandest cities; and poems that illuminate the complexity of the most shameful chapters in U.S. history, such as slavery and the oppression of Native Americans. Taken together, these poems -- whether voices of celebration or dissent -- honor the astonishing and enduring spirit of our nation. Here are classics such as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," and "Paul Revere's Ride"; works by American masters, including Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, and Elizabeth Bishop; and lesser-known gems by important American writers, such as Ernest Hemingway's "I Like Americans" and Henry David Thoreau's "Our Country." Also featured are poems by contemporary talents, including Richard Wilbur, Philip Levine, Adrienne Rich, Yusef Komunyakaa, Rita Dove, and Sherman Alexie. A timeless volume that traces the history of the United States through verse, Poems for America is essential for poetry lovers and for anyone who appreciates the rich and fascinating story of our nation.

The Index of American Periodical Verse is an important work for contemporary poetry research and is an objective measure of poetry that includes poets from the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean as well as other lands, cultures, and times. It reveals trends in the output of particular poets and the cultural influences they represent. The publications indexed cover a broad cross-section of poetry, literary, scholarly, popular, general, and little magazines, journals, and reviews.

This new edition of Southern Writers assumes its distinguished predecessor's place as the essential reference on literary artists of the American South. Broadly expanded and thoroughly revised, it boasts 604 entries-nearly double the earlier edition's-written by 264 scholars. For every figure major and minor, from the venerable and canonical to the fresh and innovative, a biographical sketch and chronological list of published works provide comprehensive, concise, up-to-date information. Here in one convenient source are the South's novelists and short story writers, poets and dramatists, memoirists and essayists, journalists, scholars, and biographers from the colonial period to the twenty-first century. What constitutes a "southern writer" is always a matter for debate. Editors Joseph M. Flora and Amber Vogel have used a generous definition that turns on having a significant connection to the region, in either a personal or literary sense. New to this volume are younger writers who have emerged in the quarter century since the dictionary's original publication, as well as older talents previously unknown or unacknowledged. For almost every writer found in the previous edition, a new biography has been commissioned. Drawn from the very best minds on southern literature and covering the full spectrum of its practitioners, Southern Writers is an indispensable reference book for anyone intrigued by the subject.

Finalist for Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, given by The Publishing Triangle, 2022 This collection of love poems draws us into the sacred liminal space that surrounds death. With her beloved gravely ill, poet and activist Minnie Bruce Pratt turns to daily walks and writing to find a way to go on in a world where injustice brings so much loss and death. Each poem is a pocket lens "to swivel out and magnify" the beauty in "the little glints, insignificant" that catch her eye: "The first flowers, smaller than this s." She also chronicles the quiet rooms of "pain and the body's memory," bringing the reader carefully into moments that will be familiar to anyone who has suffered similar loss. Even as she asks, "What's the use of poetry? Not one word comes back to talk me out of pain," the book delivers a vision of love that is boldly political and laced with a tumultuous hope that promises: "Revolution is bigger than both of us, revolution is a science that infers the future presence of us." This lucid poetry is a testimony to the radical act of being present and offers this balm: that the generative power of love continues after death. Oh Death Someone sang, Oh death! Oh death! Won't you pass me over for another day? Someone said, I dreamed of you last night. I dreamed you were telling me your whole life story. Whole. Whorled. Welkin, winkle, wrinkle. The loop of time holds us all together. The pile of laundry on the bed. You folding socks one inside the other. We have had this day, and now this night. The clothes are put away, and from the bed we see the moon folding light into darkness, not death.