What Are Big Girls Made Of? : Poems by Marge Piercy

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.


Table of Poems
After The Wind Abated, He Walked Out And Died
All Day All Night Talk Radio
All Lovers Have Secret Names
All Systems Are Up
Ancient Wood
The Art Of Blessing The Day
Belly Good
Between Two Hamlets
Beytzeh: Season Of The Egg
Breadcrumbs
Brother-less Five: Truth As A Cloud Of Moths
Brother-less Four: Liars' Dance
Brother-less One: Sun God
Brother-less Seven: Endless End
Brother-less Six: Unconversation
Brother-less Three: Never Good Enough
Brother-less Two: Palimpsest
Coming Up On September
Crow Babies
Dance Of The Trees
A Day In The Life
Death Of A Doe On Chequesset Neck
The Descent Of Orphee
Diana Inaccessible
Duet That Trails Off
Elegy In Rock, For Audre Lorde
The Flying Jew
For Two Women Shot To Death In Bookline, Massachusetts
The Grey Flannel Sexual Harassment Suit
Growing Up Haunted
Half Vulture, Half Eagle
If We Can't Find It, We Make It
In June, The Young Deer Are Almost Tame
Kaddish
The Level
Liars' Dice
Little Acts Of Love
A Little Monument
March Comes In On Cleft Hooves
Matzoh
The Mean
Moonburn
My Boa
My Rich Uncle, Whom I Only Met Three Times
The Negative Ion Dance
The New Rock Island Line
October Eclipse
Off Season Rental
On Guard
On The Road In Middle Age
Pop-sicle
The Price Begins To Mount
The Promotion
The Puzzle
A Quick And Quiet One
Reflections On A Mirror
Reshaping Each Other
The Retreat
Salt In The Afternoon
Season Of Breakage: 1.
Season Of Breakage: 2.
The Sky Changes
Syzygy
Targets
The Thief
Thousands Of Morning Moths
Transfixed On The Bank
Trying Our Metal
A Twitch In Time
The Visitation
The Voice Of The Grackle
A Warm Place Becomes A Cold Place
What Are Big Girls Made Of
The World From Below
The World Unbandaged
Your Standard Mid Life Crisis


 


OxfordBooks.com / Oxford, MS
 

 

 

 

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