"Her work has always had the courage both of her convictions and of its own (the difference between the two has occasionally been one of her problems), and the present books are no exception. She is a serious writer who deserves the sort of considered attention which, too often, she does not get... out of all the surge and flux, the sometimes dutiful rhetoric, Piercy can build moments and sometimes whole poems that she would not have achieved with careful elegance. “People of the Shell,” for instance, is superb, and it is not alone. Lines and aphorisms surface, flash and sink, poems transform themselves, words swirl. The literary ancestor here is not Dickinson but Whitman, and the vision is finally, despite the small ironies, a romantic one. Like Whitman, Piercy must be read in chunks, not sips, and appreciated for her courage, gut energy and verbal fecundity, not for laconic polish. Dancing is hard and you may fall down, her poetry implies, but she is going to dance anyway. She rams on, and the reader can only applaud."
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Novelists from the United StatesSocial activists20th-century poets from the United StatesFeminists from the United StatesWomen activists from the United States
Original Language: English
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Sources
Margaret Atwood, "Marge Piercy: Woman on the Edge of Time, Living in the Open (1976), collected in Second Words: selected critical prose
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Marge_Piercy
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Marge Piercy
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