Crooked Inheritance : Poems

by PIERCY, MARGE

• ISBN13: 9780307265074
• ISBN10: 0307265072
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-10-31
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

In these powerful, often funny, sometimes lyrical, and down-to-earth poems, Marge Piercy writes of her "crooked inheritance"physical and personality traits from wildly mismatched parents, and in a larger sense the marvelous half-broken world we inherit. Even her hometown Detroit provides a double legacya slum girlhood that breeds in her both wild ambition and, where you would least expect it, a love of nature, which she discovers in the city's elms, "the thing of beauty on grimy smoke-bleared streets." Some of Piercy's strongest poems have always been political, and here are important new verses raging against the war in Iraq, the abandonment of Katrina's victims ("People penned to die in our instant / concentration camps, just add water"), and the ongoing attempts to suppress womentheir rights, their bodies, their minds, their very being: "The CIA should hire as spies / only women over fifty, because we are the truly invisible." Other poems are about her life on Cape Cod, where she finds sanctuary in the long natural rhythms of the year's cyclegardening, making pesto, hearing coyotes in the winter "yelping in chorus after a kill," a place where after weeks of rain and snow, the "sun gives birth to rosebushes," and "everything revealed is magical, splendid in its ordinary shining." Here, too, are wonderful love songs, about friends, lovers, a beautiful day, animals, making bread. Deep connections to Jewish life and ritual reveal themselves in poems about her Lithuanian grandmother, about holidays, about the peace in a time of war that ceremony can bring, "an evening of honey on the tongue . . . a puddle of amber light . . . faces of friends . . . darkness walling off the room from what lies outside." These marvelous poems remind us anew of the breadth and strength of Marge Piercy's poetic vision. A superb collection to read and treasure.

Author Biography

Marge Piercy is the author of sixteen previous books of poetry. She has also written seventeen novels, including Woman on the Edge of Time; Gone to Soldiers; He, She and It; City of Darkness, City of Light; and Sex Wars, as well as a memoir entitled Sleeping with Cats. With Ira Wood, she is the coauthor of So You Want to Write: How to Master the Craft of Fiction and the Personal Narrative, now in its second edition. Her work has been translated into sixteen languages, and she has won many honors, including, in 1990, the Golden Rose, the oldest poetry award in the country. She lives on Cape Cod with her husband, Ira Wood, the novelist and publisher of Leapfrog Press.

Table of Contents

A vision of horses and mules	p. 3
Tracks	p. 5
The crooked inheritance	p. 7
Seven horses	p. 9
Muttering	p. 11
Talking with my mother	p. 12
Swear it	p. 14
The streets of Detroit were lined with elms	p. 15
Dress up	p. 17
Minor street flooding is expected	p. 18
Motown, arsenal of democracy	p. 19
Portrait of the poet as a young nerd	p. 21
In the raw	p. 23
Phantom pain	p. 25
Pick a number	p. 26
Dislocation	p. 27
The closet of doom	p. 29
The Hollywood haircut	p. 30
Minor characters	p. 32
In praise of joe	p. 34
The special one	p. 36
The wind of saying	p. 38
The good, the bad and the inconvenient	p. 43
The orphan	p. 44
A long and busy night	p. 46
Buried	p. 48
February ground	p. 49
The stray	p. 50
The month of aspirin	p. 51
More than enough	p. 53
Intense	p. 54
How to make pesto	p. 55
Well done	p. 56
Hurricane warning	p. 57
The moon as cat as peach	p. 58
August like lint in the lungs	p. 59
Fagged out	p. 60
October nor'easter	p. 61
The dawn of nothing	p. 62
Metamorphosis	p. 63
Choose a color	p. 67
Choices	p. 69
Mighty big	p. 71
Security bottle	p. 72
Counting the after-math	p. 74
Your proper place	p. 77
Rotten	p. 78
Tanks in the streets	p. 79
Sur l'ile Saint Louis	p. 81
Deadlocked wedlock	p. 83
National monument : Castle Clinton	p. 85
I met a woman who wasn't there	p. 87
Morning's e-mail	p. 89
Absolutely safe	p. 91
Money is one of those things	p. 93
Less than you bargained for	p. 95
White night	p. 96
Buyer beware	p. 98
Sneak and peek	p. 100
In our name	p. 103
In St. Mawes	p. 109
Not knowing what I know	p. 110
The young and the stupid	p. 111
Many, many loves	p. 112
Bashert	p. 113
Bread dreams	p. 115
Train from Nice	p. 116
Famous lovers stumbled upon	p. 118
The house is empty	p. 119
The lived in look	p. 121
Making love new	p. 123
Hot heart	p. 124
Falling uphill	p. 125
At the core of loving, fear	p. 127
Mated	p. 128
The poetry of flesh	p. 129
The mystery of survival	p. 131
My grandmother's song	p. 137
The late year	p. 140
The birthday of the world	p. 142
Ne'ilah	p. 144
A horizon of ghosts	p. 146
In the sukkah	p. 147
Season of skinny candles	p. 149
The full moon of Nisan	p. 151
The seder's order	p. 152
Peace in a time of war	p. 153
The cup of Eliyahu	p. 154
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