"Minnie Bruce Pratt’s Crime Against Nature is for a number of reasons a work at the poetic crossroads. It extends the subject of love poetry; it extends the subject of feminist and lesbian poetry; it looks in several directions, and does so through the lens of a strong, sensuous poetics, through that cohesion of experience with imagination which is the core of poetry, and through cadences founded in the music of speech, tightened and drawn to an individual pitch….Against a system of thinking where women are either mothers fulltime, and "fit," or "non-mothers" (by default, or because ruled "unfit") she reveals another possibility: a motherhood whose meaning has to be constructed, invented, by the forbidden mother, in collusion with her children. And, because the mother is a poet, this invention is made not only in life, but in poetry. This, then, is the narrative of the transgressor mother."

Adrienne Rich, American Poetry Review, September/October 1990

"In this essential book, Minnie Bruce Pratt has written a new page of old history. It belongs to us all, lesbian and heterosexual, mother and the woman who chooses not to have children, our brothers too, our children. This is a document of rage and healing."

From Margaret Randall, Sojourner, June 1990

Selections from Crime Against Nature

Reviews of Crime Against Nature

 

Crime Against Nature by Minnie Bruce Pratt

is currently out-of-print. Occasionally copies can be found at the used book site http://www.abebooks.com.
 

An extensive selection of poems from this book is available in

The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems by Minnie Bruce Pratt (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003).
http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressIndex.aspx