Walking Back Up Depot Street

Selected as ForeWord Magazine's 1999 Gay/Lesbian Book of the Year In Pratt's fourth volume of poems, Walking Back Up Depot Street , we are led by powerful images into what is both a story of the segregated rural South and the story of a white woman named Beatrice who is leaving that home for the postindustrial North. Beatrice searches for the truth behind the public story-the official history-of the land of her childhood. She struggles to free herself from the lies she was taught while growing up-and she finds the other people who are also on this journey. In these dramatically multivocal narrative poems, we hear the words and rhythms of Bible Belt preachers, African-American blues and hillbilly gospel singers, and sharecropper country women and urban lesbians. We hear the testimony of freed slaves and white abolitionists speaking against Klan violence, fragments of speeches by union organizers and mill workers, and snatches of songs from those who marched on the road to Selma. Beatrice walks back into the past and finds the history of resistance that she has never been taught; she listens to her fellow travelers as they all get ready to create the future. ForeWord Magazine said of these poems, "This is an exceptional collection in every way: broad in subject, skilled inc raft, divese in its population and conscious of the tragic world." Pratt has created a Beatrice as momentous as Dante's." Lillian Smith once wrote, "Your poet and demagogue-and mine-inhabit the same terrain; poet transforming, bringing new forms out of chaos, demagogue destroying." Walking Back Up Depot Street is the act of one poet reclaiming her land and her history from the demagogues of the 20th century.