Minnie Bruce Pratt – Poet Activist LGBTQ+ Anti-Racist Anti-Imperialist (original) (raw)
CELEBRATING THE LIFE OF Minnie Bruce Pratt
9/5/2023 Please join us for a celebration of the life of Minnie Bruce Pratt on Saturday, September 30th, at 2 p.m. at the May Memorial in Syracuse, NY (3800 E. Genesee St). For the latest information about the memorial, please see MBP’s social media accounts https://www.facebook.com/minniebruce.pratt/ and https://twitter.com/MBPratt where live streams will be made available.
For those of you unable to attend in person, we hope to stream the event online and will post those details here when they are available. Please address any questions to Ben Weaver at [email protected].
Welcome
Come in and make yourself at home. If we haven’t met before, then the first thing you should know about me is my name. I go by Minnie Bruce—it’s a double-first-name, just like Fannie Lou or Ana María—so do call me by both—“Minnie Bruce.” I hope you enjoy all the connections here to art, politics, love and life. Browse my writing, find out about political struggles, and meet my beloved Leslie Feinberg, trans writer and activist.
Come back soon and visit often! I look forward to meeting you down the road–at a poetry reading, a Pride Rally, or the next street demonstration for justice and liberation.
“I knew you, you knew me. We looked at each other, shining on each other. Shining-on sun. Sailing-on moon. ”
– from MAGNIFIED
MAGNIFIED by Minnie Bruce Pratt
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. She 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 poetry is testimony to the generative power of love that continues after death.
Published by Wesleyan University Press
Available at HFS Books at Charis Books & More.
“Once in a blue moon a love like this comes along.”
– from MAGNIFIED
FROM MAGNIFIED
forthcoming Spring 2021, from the Wesleyan Poetry Series
Sleeve
I lie in the dark, listening to a pulse of sound,
letters in an unknown alphabet spelling out words
hat come and go through a sorrowful labyrinth.
And out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse you
passing down the dim-lit hallway, the edge of you.
Your sleeve, perhaps.