Sound of One Fork by Minnie Bruce Pratt (electronic edition, October 2011)

Minnie Bruce Pratt is an American poet, educator, activist and essayist. Pratt has published seven books of poetry, including The Sound of One Fork, We Say We Love Each Other, Crime Against Nature, Walking Back Up Depot Street, The Money Machine, and The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems. Her most recent collection of poetry is Inside the Money Machine (Carolina Wren Press, 2010). Pratt received a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Fellowship in Poetry from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. After 30 years of adjunct teaching and several stints of standing on the unemployment line, she is at present Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies and Writing & Rhetoric at Syracuse University, where she also serves as faculty for a developing Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/ Transgender Studies Program.


Originally published in 1981 by Night Heron Press, The Sound of One Fork was Minnie Bruce Pratt’s first poetry chapbook. The Sound of One Fork represents a vibrant part of the history of lesbian print culture. In the new electronic edition, The Sound of One Fork is available again to all readers with an internet connection.


In the new foreword, Pratt writes, “In 1981 The Sound of One Fork was my first attempt as a poet to say who I was and where I was, precisely, in the great liberation struggles of my time.”

Reading The Sound of One Fork today with Pratt’s new foreword and editorial notes by Julie R. Enszer, the connections between Pratt’s earlier published work and her most recent work are evident. The new edition of The Sound of One Fork demonstrates the interconnected political movements of the past thirty years in powerful and meaningful ways. As Pratt writes, “In 2011 the link between there and here is traceable in me, in my poetry—and, more importantly, in the continuing world-wide movements against oppression and class exploitation.”


The book can be accessed in PDF format by clicking the cover image or scrolling down to the Attachments section of the website. Also available via issuu