.com Review
-----------
When a talented writer and feminist thinker
like Marge Piercy asks What Are Big Girls Made Of?, the wise
reader pays attention. Piercy gives plenty of answers in this
many-faceted book. As in her previous 12 poetry collections, as
well as her 14 novels, she creates edgy, funny surfaces that
deeper inquiries. For instance, she offers several elegies to her
apparently nasty half brother; though the poems roll the cadences
of sad family stories often retold, they're made fresh by
Piercy's search for some angle to celebrate, until she is finally
only able to say, in "Brother-less Six: Unconversation,"
I was a white cedar swamp you traversed
on a wooden walkway above the black water.
You were a closet from which odd toys
and bizarre tools fell out on my head.
Though these elegies begin What Are Big Girls Made Of?, the
rest of the book is a lively entanglement with sex, middle-aged
love, and politics. Piercy's wit can sever pretension, as in "The
Promotion," in which she tells how a friend's new job turned him
into a murderer, or in "The Gray Flannel Sexual Harassment Suit,"
in which an Audenish third-person omniscient voice delineates the
sort of woman "we" allow to file such suits: upwardly mobile
white virgins. Piercy diagnoses social problems, but she also
advances, in "The Art of Blessing the Day," a sense of politics
derived from experience, an awareness "[t]hat things / work in
increments and epicycles and sometimes / leaps that half the time
fall back down." Ultimately, What Are Big Girls Made Of? concerns
itself with the precarious balances of middle age: what to
forgive, what to condemn, and how to talk about it. --Edward
Skoog
Read more ( javascript:void(0) )
From the Inside Flap
--------------------
a powerful cycle of elegies for her
long-distant, half-brother, this major new collection by one of
our bestselling poets then goes on to include both serious and
funny poems about women and poems about the precarious balance of
nature, ending with the beautiful, life-affirming "The Art of
Blessing the Day." 160 pp.
Read more ( javascript:void(0) )
P.when('A').execute(function(A) {
A.on('a:expander:toggle_description:toggle:collapse',
function(data) {
window.scroll(0,
data.expander.$expander[0].offsetTop-100);
});
});
About the Author
----------------
Marge Piercy is the author of fifteen
collections of poetry, including The Art of Blessing the Day;
Early Grrrl; Mars and Her Children, My Mother’s Body; Available
Light; Stone, Paper, ; The Moon Is Always Female; and her
selected poems, Circles on the Water. Her book of craft essays,
Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt, is part of the Poets on Poetry
series of the University of Michigan Press, and she edited a
poetry anthology, Early Ripening. In 1990 her poetry won the
Golden Rose, the oldest poetry award in the country. She has
written fourteen novels, including He, She and It (winner of the
Arthur C. Clarke Award), The Longings of Women and City of
Darkness, City of Light. The novel Storm Tide, co-authored with
her husband, Ira Wood, was published in June 1998. Her fiction
and poetry have been translated into sixteen languages. She and
her husband live on Cape Cod.
Read more ( javascript:void(0) )
See more ( javascript:void(0) )