by Minnie Bruce Pratt
Carolina Wren Press 2011
Reviewed by Alyse Bensel
“…my tongue and brain at a low wage”
Minnie Bruce Pratt, winner of the 1989 Lamont Poetry Prize for her collection Crime Against Nature, continues her engagement with American political discourse in her tenth book, Inside the Money Machine. With this collection, Pratt takes a firm stance on minority rights and generally tackles the enormous political reality of American capitalism. She takes on a rich source, Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, which shapes the arc of the book.
By viewing American capitalism through a Marxist lens, Pratt questions the monotony of labor—tasks repeated day after day in a mailroom, or a tollbooth, or a salon—inviting the reader to rethink the tenets of capitalism. Readers will empathize with workers who are trying to make enough money to survive. To thematically center these poems, Pratt frames each section of the book around questions and phrases such as “Are You Ready, Willing, Able to Work?” The dependent clause “If We Jump Up Now” asks the reader to take direct action in response to the poems. Each section builds as a call to action, similar to Marx’s call for new political and economic systems to shape the future.
Shaping her poems around Marx’s words, Pratt critiques capitalism in a distinctive voice. “Getting Money at the ATM” examines the intersection of convenience and labor. When the speaker goes to the ATM, the “screen blinks and promises me any time, any where,” and the money “dispense[s] quick as candy.” This poem drives to the heart of the book, revealing the illusory promise of access and the convenience of paper bills.
Pratt’s economic focus produces poems of narrative strength and reflection. In “Getting a Pink Slip,” the narrator receives one, then watches others who “lean into each other, staggered by catastrophe.” They mourn the loss of “My job, my other self.” While waiting in line at “The Unemployment Office,” the narrator boldly claims:
No machine can do my job, the torque of my words
in someone’s ear, but I cost money, the benefits package,
subsistence, flesh. Still, I’m not dead labor yet, a profit edge
to be made, my tongue and brain at a low enough wage.
Pratt uses the bureaucratic language of a human resources department to make her critique. In these poems, people become interchangeable, valued as dollars; they add up to cost, time, and labor, rather than more traditionally “human” qualities. Through her portrayal of a mechanized and reductive world, Pratt shows that the human soul still survives within a struggling global and national economy.
Each poem depicts a clear, particular picture of the present state of the American economy (visible and invisible) through the lives and experiences of individuals. The power behind these poems accumulates. People slowly grind down like cogs even though they survive as flesh and blood. For example, the woman telemarketer in “Making Another Phone Call” claims that “every day pulls her chest open and looks / at a ruined life. The heart all bloody.” Humanity shines through in “Distribution.” A tollbooth attendant, on the phone with her distressed daughter, attempts to comfort her while stuck in the booth, an “island wedged between the cars / flowing up the Bayonne bridge.” The narrator in “All That Work No One Knows” speaks about the energy her body spends during her two pregnancies. In the narrator’s mind, uncountable labor, the labor of the mother caring for her children, remains invisible and irrelevant in capitalism, counting for nothing. Our speaker demands a radical change: acknowledge all labor.
*
Key Bridge, which crosses the Potomac and connects Arlington, VA to Washington D.C. (more specifically, to Georgetown), is kind of an underwhelming bridge when compared to, say, the Golden Gate or Brooklyn Bridges. This adds a peculiar degree of levity to Key Bridge, Ken Rumble’s book-length abstract ode to the U.S. capitol.