The Dirt She Ate: Selected And New Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)
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."Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.