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Book Cover for: What Are Big Girls Made Of?: Poems (ALA Notable Books for Adults), Marge Piercy

What Are Big Girls Made Of?: Poems (ALA Notable Books for Adults)

Marge Piercy

Winner:ALA Notable Book -Poetry (1998)
What Are Big Girls Made Of? is full of poems - funny, serious, angry, delightful - that illumine the experience of being a woman. The title poem is a lament for women who allow themselves to be caught in the painful dilemma of being "retooled, refitted and redesigned" to match the style of every decade. Others extol the salty pleasures of middle age: making love with a familiar and adored partner; the ease with which one comes to accept one's body - a good belly, for example, is "a maternal cushion radiating comfort, " handed down from mother to daughter like a prize feather quilt. Some of the book's most beautiful poems are about the precarious balance of nature: white butterflies mating "in Labor Day morning steam" (a poem for Rosh Hashana); a little green snake slithering back to the camouflage safety of grass; the cool song of an October lunar eclipse, as opposed to the dangerous implications of the sun's disappearance; the death of an exquisite doe. Appropriately, from a poet who so winningly celebrates life in all its many variations, the book ends with the moving and simple "The Art of Blessing the Day": "Bless whatever you can/with eyes and hands and tongue. If you/can't bless it, get ready to make it new."

Book Details

  • Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
  • Publish Date: Mar 4th, 1997
  • Pages: 176
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.26in - 5.48in - 0.49in - 0.48lb
  • EAN: 9780679765943
  • Categories: American - GeneralWomen AuthorsSubjects & Themes - Places

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, Knife; 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.