Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy carries her portrait of the American experience back into the Fifties—that closed, repressive time in which forces for the upheavals of the Sixties ticked away underground. Spanning twenty years, and teeming with vivid characters, Braided Lives tells the powerful, unsentimental story of two young women coming of age.

Jill, fiercely independent, dark, Jewish, an intellectual with Detroit street smarts, is a poet, curious, avid of life—a “professional student” and sometime thief. Donna, Jill’s cousin and closest friend, is blond, pretty, and alluring. Together, they grow and change at college in Ann Arbor, where the life of poets and painters contrasts sharply with the working-class neighborhood where Jill’s family lives.

In Michigan, and afterward in New York City, the two women taste love and betrayal, friendship and pain, independence and fear as they reach a deepening understanding that to control their lives they must fight. And though their fates differ as widely as their personalities, both reflect the danger that sex posed at a time when abortions were illegal and an affair could destroy a woman’s life, making the outcome of a chance encounter or a night of love a matter of life and death.

Braided Lives is an enduring portrait of the past that has led to our tenuous present. In her new introduction to this edition, Marge Piercy reflects on both the most autobiographical of her novels, and the ongoing battles to ensure the hard-fought victories of the Sixties and Seventies, particularly around sex and reproductive rights.

Marge Piercy’s debut collection of short stories, The Cost of Lunch, Etc., brings us glimpses into the lives of everyday women moving through and making sense of their daily internal and external worlds. Keeping to the engaging, accessible language of Piercy’s novels, the collection spans decades of her writing along with a range of locations, ages, and emotional states of her protagonists. From the first-person account of hoarding (“Saving Mother from Herself”) to a girl’s narrative of sexual and spiritual discovery (“Going over Jordan”) to a recount of a past love affair (“The Easy Arrangement”) each story is a tangible, vivid snapshot in a varied and subtly curated gallery of work. Whether grappling with death, familial relationships, friendship, sex, illness, or religion, Piercy’s writing is as passionate, lucid, insightful, and thoughtfully alive as ever.

The paperback edition contains two additional short stories and a new introduction from the author.

Originally published in 1970, Marge Piercy’s second novel follows the lives of four teenagers, in a near-future society, as they rebel against a military draft and “the system.” The occupation of Franklin High School begins, and with it, the open rebellion of America’s youth against their channeled, unrewarding lives and the self-serving, plastic society that directs them.

From the disillusionment and alienation of the young at the center of the revolt, to their attempts to build a visionary new society, the nationwide following they gain and the brutally complete repression that inevitably follows, this is a future fiction without a drop of fantasy. As driving, violent, and nuanced today as it was 40 years ago, this anniversary edition includes a new introduction by the author reflecting unapologetically on the novel and the times from which it emerged.

The 'Grrrl' phenomenon is a contemporary expression of young women's humor and rage exploding in books and zines, concerts, films, and the internet. In homage to a new generation of tough young feminists, Marge Piercy presents a gathering of poems that reveal the poet as an early 'Grrrl.' 

Comprising over ninety poems selected from four books now out of print; poems previously published in literary magazines but never before collected and very early poems never published, this volume presents the bold and passionate political verse for which Piercy is well known alongside poems celebrating the sensual pleasures of gardening and cooking and sex; funny poems about New Year's Eve and warring boom boxes; vulnerable poems in which a young working class woman from the Midwest takes stock of herself and the limits of her world. 

For longtime fans and those new to Piercy's early work, this volume is an indispensable addition to the oeuvre of one of America's best-known and best-selling poets.

Marge Piercy is the author of fifteen novels and fifteen books of poetry, most recently The Art of Blessing the Day (Knopf, 1999) a selection of Piercy's Jewish-themed poems. What Are Big Girls Made Of?(Knopf, 1997) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and selected as one of their Most Notable Books of the Year by the American Library Association. In October, 1999, she will be a featured poet on the Bill Moyers' PBS-TV poetry specials "Fooling with Words" and "The Sounds of Poetry" and her newest novel, Three Women will be published by William Morrow.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface, .xi

From THE TWELVE SPOKED WHEEL FLASHING

The meaningful exchange, 4
Five thousand miles, 5
The summer invasion, and the fall, 6
Nothing you can have, 9
Archipelago, 12
The first salad of March, 15
Exodus, 16
Ask me for anything else, 18
What is permitted, 20
A gift of light, 22
Short season, 27
Ghosts, 29
The new novel, 31
Women of letters, 32

From LIVING IN THE OPEN

The token woman, 37
The clearest joy, 39
Make me feel it, 40
Sage and rue, 42
River road, High Toss, 44
Paradise Hollow, 45

In a candid and intimate new collection of essays, poems, memoirs, reviews, rants, and railleries, Piercy discusses her own development as a working-class feminist, the highs and lows of TV culture, the ego-dances of a writer’s life, the homeless and the housewife, Allen Ginsberg and Marilyn Monroe, feminist utopias (and why she doesn’t live in one), why fiction isn’t physics; and of course, fame, sex, and money, not necessarily in that order. The short essays, poems, and personal memoirs intermingle like shards of glass that shine, reflect—and cut. Always personal yet always political, Piercy’s work is drawn from a deep well of feminist and political activism.

Also featured is our Outspoken Interview, in which the author lays out her personal rules for living on Cape Cod, finding your poetic voice, and making friends in Cuba.

Originally published in 1979, Vida is Marge Piercy’s classic bookend to the ’60s. Vida is full of the pleasures and pains, the experiments, disasters, and victories of an extraordinary band of people. At the center of the novel stands Vida Asch. She has lived underground for almost a decade. Back in the ’60s she was a political star of the exuberant antiwar movement—a red-haired beauty photographed for the pages of Life magazine—charismatic, passionate, and totally sure she would prevail. Now, a decade later, Vida is on the run, her star-quality replaced by stubborn courage. She comes briefly to rest in a safe house on Cape Cod. To her surprise and annoyance, she finds another person in the house, a fugitive, Joel, ten years younger than she, a kid who dropped into the underground out of the army. As they spend the next days together, Vida finds herself warming toward a man for the first time in years, knowing the dangers all too well.

As counterpoint to the underground ’70s, Marge Piercy tells the extraordinary tale of the optimistic ’60s, the thousands of people who were members of SAW (Students Against the War) and of the handful who formed a fierce group called the Little Red Wagon. Piercy’s characters make vivid and comprehensible the desperation, the courage, and the blind rage of a time when “action” could appear to some to be a more rational choice than the vote.

A new introduction by Marge Piercy situates the book, and the author, in the times from which they emerged.