But the beauty and sadness of the language draw us into another world, far away from a newspaper report, where emotion is valuable.

In Pratt’s work, poetry is made useful, in an almost journalistic sense. The individual is never irrelevant, and the stories of individuals are told with a sense that the poet has asked questions because she cares, and listened carefully because she wants to help. Where one might have expected personal complaint, one finds a selfless observer, determined to witness and record misfortune and misery. Where one might have expected loud political protest, one finds instead a quiet voice of unrelenting strength. Pratt’s style is “poetic” in the best sense, “having an imaginative or sensitively emotional style of expression,” as the New Oxford American Dictionary would define it. One finds delicate linguistic surprises, sensuous attention to overlooked details and uncommon compassion for the invisible poor and working-class women. Inside the Money Machine is a decidedly un-machine-like collection of poems. Pratt’s eleven polished, articulate essays offer a striking example of everyday philosophy at work: a feminist assessing her experiences and learning from them. According to the Poetry Foundation, she is “recognized as an eminent poet in the United States … an essayist, activist, lesbian-feminist and educator.” And as a critic from Publishers Weekly commented on her book Rebellion: Essays, 1980-1991, Pratt has been writing poetry since the 1970s, and was a pioneer poetic spirit of the women’s and gay liberation movements. On April 19, Minnie Bruce Pratt’s latest collection, Inside the Money Machine, won the 2011 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry from The Publishing Triangle, whose annual Awards honor the best lesbian and gay nonfiction, poetry and fiction.

National Poetry Month may be over, but it’s never too late to recognize a wonderful poet and her poems.

S he by minnie bruce pratt