North Carolina LGBTQ+ Literature
And this is true. Even the deepest fear and grief can’t occupy every moment of seven years; even the longest book of poems couldn’t begin to include all the moments. Nor do cruelty or greed suddenly cease because their victims fall ill. In a 2021 interview for Lambda Literary Review, Pratt explained, “[M]y work, as I understand it, as a poet, is at least in part to try to make poems that reestablish the link between the sensuous external world and our daily human life, which is battered under capitalism.”2 Living while dying, wavelength and wave, political and personal, outer lives and inner, sensuousness and the quotidian, are all inseparable here, which means that to a great extent this is a book about inseparability. Consider the short poem “Licked”:
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It’s also, though, as one can see from this poem (or indeed from any of them), a profoundly crafted book whose concerns both span the years of anticipated grief and spin the sufferings and insights of those years out into broader planes. I’ve seldom read a collection with tighter, more complex connections between poems, or whose concerns and images recur so strongly. For instance, we can certainly read the book’s central subject as the rending that comes when the inseparable and imbricated are forcibly torn apart; its progression and its imagery strongly support such a reading. However, it’s almost equally true that this is a book about time: the time that’s lost, the time that’s left, the time we get with one another, exterior and interior time. The first sec-
tion is titled “Hourglass” from the poem of the same title, in which “Time tumbles us back and forth in its giant hourglass” and “Time rattles at our window, trying to get in.” Poem after poem interrogates Pratt’s and Feinberg’s concepts and awareness of time. As Pratt told Sarah Heying, “[T]he eternal time of death, the short intense time of work, and the focused, magnified time of the intimacy between us – there was a lot of back and forth. I think what readers have to remember when they’re reading Magnified is that I didn’t – we didn’t – know the outcome while I was writing the poems.” In “Saved [Voice] Messages,” for example, the speaker tries to preserve her spouse’s voicemails: “I hit save, save, save, but I can’t save everything. / Today I have eleven messages of us traveling / through time together, when there is yet no end.” Here time is an almost physical medium through which the couple travels together, as if through space or water or a tunnel; it’s also recursive, replicative. The voice messages were recorded at particular moments of the marriage, moments, when the end was as yet unknown to both spouses; at those points in time, there is/ was “yet no end.” The key word is yet, meaning both that there is still no end and that at some point, the end is coming, just not yet. And yet the moments also reach past Feinberg’s death into the ongoing present which follows it. No amount of writing or “saving” can preserve the moments at which the messages were spoken – and also, and still, and yet, there are the messages, belonging to both times at once. Neither experience of time counters or cancels the other; both experiences of time are real, and, in the seconds of listening to the recorded voice messages, simultaneous. Both/ and. And/yet. Likewise, the poems often figuratively treat time as space into which people can physically move, as in “Do Not Seek to Remain,” in which “the words are ripping up / the moment and I fall into a tomorrow without you.” But as the savage image
MINNIE BRUCE PRATT (1946–2023) is an Alabama native. She earned her PhD in literature from UNC Chapel Hill, where she helped to found WomanWrites, a Southeastern lesbian writers ‘conference and spent five years as a member of Feminary, a Southern feminist writing collective based in the area (read an article on it in NCLR 2000). She co-founded Night Heron Press, spent many years as contingent faculty at various universities, and ended her academic career as a professor in the writing
program and gender studies department at Syracuse University, where she participated in the development of Syracuse’s LGBT studies program. She is the author of five poetry collections. Her honors include the Lambda Literary Award for Poetry, in ForeWord magazine’s Gay/Lesbian Book of the Year, the Academy of American Poets’ Lamont Poetry Selection, the Lillian Hellman-Dashiell Hammett award, and the American Library Association’s Gay and Lesbian Book Award for Literature.
The people we were, the people we are now. The apple blossoms blown, flowers fallen, blight biting into every leaf, skin scaling on the trunk and branches, skeletal shadows on the walk as I pass, grieving and loving this boney brittle world that breaks and opens day after day, the bees gnawing at the red-hearted rose-of-sharon, licked, sticky all over from flower tongues, pollen bristle, until it’s hard to tell the flower from the bee, the insect from the tree, me from you, you from me.