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NORTH CAROLINA L ITE R A R Y RE V IE W O N L INE
reports from underground a review by Deborah Hooker Minnie Bruce Pratt. Inside the Money Machine. Durham: Carolina Wren Press, 2011. Deborah Hooker is Teaching Associate Professor of English at NC State University, where she also serves as Director of Women’s and Gender Studies. Her most recent ar ticle, “The Woman in the Race: Racing and Re-racing Thomas Hardy’s ‘Pure Woman’ in Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” appeared in the Spring 2011 issue of NineteenthCentury Gender Studies. The author of six collections of poetry, Minnie Bruce Pratt received her PhD in English at UNC-Chapel Hill.
1
Christina G. Bucher, “A ‘book of pages waiting to be turned,’” rev. of The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems, by Minnie Bruce Pratt, NCLR 15 (2006): 164.
2
Minnie Bruce Pratt,“New Book – Anti-Capitalist Poetics in Action,” Minnie Bruce Pratt, Blogspot 10 Feb. 2011, web.
3
For more about Pratt and the Feminary newsletter and collective, see “‘Hearing Me Into Speech’: Lesbian Feminist Publishing in North Carolina” by Wynn Cherry and “Look What Happened Here: North Carolina’s Feminary Collective” by Tamara M. Powell, both in NCLR 9 (2000). Pratt’s “Identity” essay is in Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (Ithaca: Firebrand, 1984).
4
Minnie Bruce Pratt, Rebellion: Essays 1980–1991 (Ithaca: Firebrand, 1991) 185.
When Christina Bucher reviewed Minnie Bruce Pratt’s The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems for NCLR in 2006, the sampling of new poems at the end of that collection struck her as “lovely [and] evocative.” She wondered if these “poetic snapshots” of working-class men and women struggling to find and keep work would provide the substance of Pratt’s next volume.1 They do. The eleven poems from that 2003 volume join fifty-eight others to flesh out Inside the Money Machine, an extraordinarily crafted, deceptively plain-spoken series of portraits of the economically disenfranchised and more. Much more. Although Pratt tells us that this collection was inspired by reading “The Communist Manifesto for the first time – very late in life,”2 she needs no primer on economic marginalization. From her first volume of poetry, The Sound of One Fork (Night Heron, 1981), through her work on the Feminary newsletter with the Durham/Chapel Hill women’s collective in the 1970s, to her well-known essay, “Identity: Skin Blood Heart,”3 through her more recent poetry and nonfiction, Pratt has consistently illuminated the intersecting streams of racism, sexism, and imperialism that create cultural and economic dispossession. For example, her collection Rebellion: Essays 1980-1991 reprints a 1989 speech, “Money and the Shape of Things,” whose concluding questions clearly portend the concerns of Inside the Money Machine: What do we have yet to learn about sharing our money? How do we figure out the way to do more than share our windfall, the rare winnings? How do we do more than sit and wait for people’s luck to change? And how do we learn to change the shape of things so that money is not
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what determines how people live, or if they die, or whether we live our life out bent to someone else’s use, instead of in meaningful work and in joy?4
While the more incendiary poems in this new volume’s final section, “If We Jump Up Now,” urge us to action, the poems preceding it quietly mount one argument after another against the dehumanizing pressures that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described in 1848 and which persist across the globe today. Sometimes reported from a more distanced third-person perspective, sometimes voiced in the more immediate first person, poems like “Getting a Pink Slip,” “Looking for Work,” “Walking Home from Work,” and “Collecting Social Security” focus on daily struggles; they document not merely a will to survive but a will to resist the circumscribed version of humanity offered by “the money machine.” Pratt’s new collection immediately denounces that reductiveness in her first poem, “All That Work No One Knows”: “We’re not machines, you know. There’s only so much we can take, / always more than we can, until we can’t.” That plaintive protest from a collective “we” starkly contrasts with the “muffled clanking[s]” of the “money machine” in “Getting Money at the ATM.” In Pratt’s hands, the products dispensed by that robotic staple of modern convenience and the accompanying description of a transcriptionist at work become reciprocal images, one “translated” magically into the other according to the arcane formula cloaked by the machine. When the transcriptionist visits the ATM, for example, “[t]he screen blinks and promises me any time, / any where.” From its “hidden vault,” money, “this