Once a blue moon, a love like this comes along.
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.
Once a blue moon, a love like this comes along.
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.
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 Yo
"Every leaf, flower, snowflake, butterfly in Magnified is
impeccably coated and coded with existential time, anti-capitalist
time. Magnified is a profoundly intimate record of personal sorrow
as well as 'poetry to action'--in its resistance against empire's
economic and military destruction."--Don Mee Choi, author of DMZ
Colony
"The poems in Magnified model a fearless relation with lost
beloveds that is gorgeous, queer and fiercely alive. Minnie Bruce
Pratt, who always writes verse with palpating radical breath, here
ignites it with a vision for revolutionary afterlife."--Rachel
Levitsky, author of The Story of My Accident Is Ours
"'Revolution is bigger than both of us, revolution is a science
that infers the future presence of us, ' writes Pratt. Magnified is
a history of the beloved's last days, and in crafting that history
Pratt has crafted posterity, sending revolutionary love into the
future that we may learn from it."--Kerri Webster, Visiting
Assistant Professor, Boise State University
"In this elegiac and essential book, Minnie Bruce Pratt focuses a
Dickinsonian extreme attention on the natural world, its changes
magnified by an approaching death, with the human exchanges
essential to her activism as much in focus as a walnut shell, a
poplar leaf, the breath of the beloved."--Marilyn Hacker, author of
Blazons
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