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by: Marge Piercy
List Price: $16.00Amazon.com's Price: $12.48 You Save: $3.52 (22%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN: 9780679765943
ISBN: 0679765948
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 176
Publication Date: March 04, 1997
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: March 04, 1997
Sales Rank: 666573
Studio: Knopf
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Editorial Review:
Amazon.com:
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 mask 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
Product Description:
Opening with 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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - she's the best
Marge Piercy is one of my favorite poets. She make no apologies for her past or opinions, and uses her poetry to share equally her disillusions with family members, her disgust with our society, and her deep love for her cats. If you have problems with strong women who say what they mean then don't bother reading this. You won't appreciate it, and you'll probably make up false reasons for hating it.
She is a "real" person...I saw her at a reading and was struck by her voice ... Read More
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