About the Book
In these powerful, often funny, sometimes lyrical, and down-to-earth poems, Marge Piercy writes of her crooked inheritance--physical and personality traits from wildly mismatched parents, and in a larger sense the marvelous half-broken world we inherit. Even her hometown Detroit provides a double legacy--a slum girlhood that breeds in her both wild ambition and, where you would least expect it, a love of nature, which she discovers in the city's elms, the thing of beauty on grimy smoke-bleared streets. Some of Piercy's strongest poems have always been political, and here are important new verses raging against the war in Iraq, the abandonment of Katrina's victims (People penned to die in our instant / concentration camps, just add water), and the ongoing attempts to suppress women--their rights, their bodies, their minds, their very being: The CIA should hire as spies / only women over fifty, because we are the truly invisible. Other poems are about her life on Cape Cod, where she finds sanctuary in the long natural rhythms of the year's cycle--gardening, making pesto, hearing coyotes in the winter yelping in chorus after a kill, a place where after weeks of rain and snow, the sun gives birth to rosebushes, and everything revealed is magical, splendid in its ordinary shining. Here, too, are wonderful love songs, about friends, lovers, a beautiful day, animals, making bread. Deep connections to Jewish life and ritual reveal themselves in poems about her Lithuanian grandmother, about holidays, about the peace in a time of war that ceremony can bring, an evening of honey on the tongue . . . a puddle of amber light . . . faces of friends . . . darkness wallingoff the room from what lies outside. These marvelous poems remind us anew of the breadth and strength of Marge Piercy's poetic vision. A superb collection to read and treasure.
Review :
"The title of this new collection-"The Crooked Inheritance"-is a reminder of how much we inherit from these poems: eloquent outrage against war and injustice; vivid evocations of a working-class family; gritty recollections of the city; a passionate appreciation for mature love. Every poem burns with an intelligence that cannot be extinguished; everywhere a delightfully subversive sense of humor unleashes itself. May the poems of Marge Piercy be the legacy this generation leaves to the world; these poems represent the best of who we are."--Martin Espada"Marge Piercy, spokesperson for the under-dog and under-privileged, has a unique gift for making political poetry gutsy, even fun, and nature writing palpably sensual." -- Diana Der-Hovanessian, president of New England Poetry Club and author of "The Second Question""Marge Piercy's appetite in this new collection of poems is robust, vigorous and hybrid. Like a lightning rod, she brings large energies to ground, looking with her customary
"Marge Piercy, spokesperson for the under-dog and under-privileged, has a unique gift for making political poetry gutsy, even fun, and nature writing palpably sensual."
-- Diana Der-Hovanessian, president of New England Poetry Club and author of "The Second Question"
"Marge Piercy's appetite in this new collection of poems is robust, vigorous and hybrid. Like a lightning rod, she brings large energies to ground, looking with her customary directness at exactly what is, yet transforming it by her looking as well. Piercy's poetry raises hope, and raises also the deep hungers that affirm life's presence in all its fullness-hunger for mangoes, love, work, light, beeswax, usefulness, plungings of language, openness, mystery, peaches, peace."
--Jane Hirshfield
"Marge Piercy's appetite in this new collection of poems is robust, vigorous and hybrid. Like a lightning rod, she brings large energies to ground, looking with her customary directness at exactly what is, yet transforming it by her looking as well. Piercy's poetry raises hope, and raises also the deep hungers that affirm life's presence in all its fullness-hunger for mangoes, love, work, light, beeswax, usefulness, plungings of language, openness, mystery, peaches, peace."
--Jane Hirshfield
