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The Crooked Inheritance: Poems
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 legacy—a 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 women—their rights, their bodies, their minds, their very “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 cycle—gardening, 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.
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 women—their rights, their bodies, their minds, their very “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 cycle—gardening, 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.
- GenresPoetry
176 pages, Hardcover
First published October 24, 2006
6 people are currently reading
78 people want to read
About the author
Marge Piercy
108 books928 followersMarge Piercy is an American poet, novelist, and social activist. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Gone to Soldiers, a sweeping historical novel set during World War II.
Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, to a family deeply affected by the Great Depression. She was the first in her family to attend college, studying at the University of Michigan. Winning a Hopwood Award for Poetry and Fiction (1957) enabled her to finish college and spend some time in France, and her formal schooling ended with an M.A. from Northwestern University. Her first book of poems, Breaking Camp, was published in 1968.
An indifferent student in her early years, Piercy developed a love of books when she came down with rheumatic fever in her mid-childhood and could do little but read. "It taught me that there's a different world there, that there were all these horizons that were quite different from what I could see," she said in a 1984 interview.
As of 2013, she is author of seventeen volumes of poems, among them The Moon is Always Female (1980, considered a feminist classic) and The Art of Blessing the Day (1999), as well as fifteen novels, one play (The Last White Class, co-authored with her third and current husband Ira Wood), one collection of essays (Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt), one non-fiction book, and one memoir.
Her novels and poetry often focus on feminist or social concerns, although her settings vary. While Body of Glass (published in the US as He, She and It) is a science fiction novel that won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, City of Darkness, City of Light is set during the French Revolution. Other of her novels, such as Summer People and The Longings of Women are set during the modern day. All of her books share a focus on women's lives.
Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) mixes a time travel story with issues of social justice, feminism, and the treatment of the mentally ill. This novel is considered a classic of utopian "speculative" science fiction as well as a feminist classic. William Gibson has credited Woman on the Edge of Time as the birthplace of Cyberpunk. Piercy tells this in an introduction to Body of Glass. Body of Glass (He, She and It) (1991) postulates an environmentally ruined world dominated by sprawling mega-cities and a futuristic version of the Internet, through which Piercy weaves elements of Jewish mysticism and the legend of the Golem, although a key story element is the main character's attempts to regain custody of her young son.
Many of Piercy's novels tell their stories from the viewpoints of multiple characters, often including a first-person voice among numerous third-person narratives. Her World War II historical novel, Gone To Soldiers (1987) follows the lives of nine major characters in the United States, Europe and Asia. The first-person account in Gone To Soldiers is the diary of French teenager Jacqueline Levy-Monot, who is also followed in a third-person account after her capture by the Nazis.
Piercy's poetry tends to be highly personal free verse and often addresses the same concern with feminist and social issues. Her work shows commitment to the dream of social change (what she might call, in Judaic terms, tikkun olam, or the repair of the world), rooted in story, the wheel of the Jewish year, and a range of landscapes and settings.
She lives in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, Massachusetts with her husband, Ira Wood.
(from Wikipedia)
Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, to a family deeply affected by the Great Depression. She was the first in her family to attend college, studying at the University of Michigan. Winning a Hopwood Award for Poetry and Fiction (1957) enabled her to finish college and spend some time in France, and her formal schooling ended with an M.A. from Northwestern University. Her first book of poems, Breaking Camp, was published in 1968.
An indifferent student in her early years, Piercy developed a love of books when she came down with rheumatic fever in her mid-childhood and could do little but read. "It taught me that there's a different world there, that there were all these horizons that were quite different from what I could see," she said in a 1984 interview.
As of 2013, she is author of seventeen volumes of poems, among them The Moon is Always Female (1980, considered a feminist classic) and The Art of Blessing the Day (1999), as well as fifteen novels, one play (The Last White Class, co-authored with her third and current husband Ira Wood), one collection of essays (Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt), one non-fiction book, and one memoir.
Her novels and poetry often focus on feminist or social concerns, although her settings vary. While Body of Glass (published in the US as He, She and It) is a science fiction novel that won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, City of Darkness, City of Light is set during the French Revolution. Other of her novels, such as Summer People and The Longings of Women are set during the modern day. All of her books share a focus on women's lives.
Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) mixes a time travel story with issues of social justice, feminism, and the treatment of the mentally ill. This novel is considered a classic of utopian "speculative" science fiction as well as a feminist classic. William Gibson has credited Woman on the Edge of Time as the birthplace of Cyberpunk. Piercy tells this in an introduction to Body of Glass. Body of Glass (He, She and It) (1991) postulates an environmentally ruined world dominated by sprawling mega-cities and a futuristic version of the Internet, through which Piercy weaves elements of Jewish mysticism and the legend of the Golem, although a key story element is the main character's attempts to regain custody of her young son.
Many of Piercy's novels tell their stories from the viewpoints of multiple characters, often including a first-person voice among numerous third-person narratives. Her World War II historical novel, Gone To Soldiers (1987) follows the lives of nine major characters in the United States, Europe and Asia. The first-person account in Gone To Soldiers is the diary of French teenager Jacqueline Levy-Monot, who is also followed in a third-person account after her capture by the Nazis.
Piercy's poetry tends to be highly personal free verse and often addresses the same concern with feminist and social issues. Her work shows commitment to the dream of social change (what she might call, in Judaic terms, tikkun olam, or the repair of the world), rooted in story, the wheel of the Jewish year, and a range of landscapes and settings.
She lives in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, Massachusetts with her husband, Ira Wood.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 24, 2016
This collection by Piercy covers a little of this and a whole lot of that: Judaism (especially focusing on Jewish holidays), Detroit, her life and family, lots of nature, feminism, violence, the state of the world, the moon, history, her youth, cooking, and soul searching, just to name a few topics. I love free-ranging poetry collections, but it can make it harder to rate and review the book. I particularly enjoy how often cats parade through her poems, even when they’re not the focus – so like them.
I’ve been a fan of Piercy for some time, and her nature poems are perhaps the main reason for that. For me, the most touching poem in the book is “The Orphan,” about a young deer who wanders into her yard, his mother likely shot. It begins, “I see all four cats lined up/on a level with the eastern windows.” Looking out, she sees the deer grazing. She ends:
“Not until he is full does he turn,
white tail rising, and that’s why
I say he. Finally then he is ready
to walk off stately as the buck
he will never become.”
Of course, I especially enjoyed “The Stray,” which came at the end of a brutal-winter poem series:
“The starving cat on the porch arches
into my hand, saying I survived
cold blasts and ice frozen in my
matted tail, coyotes and the great
horned owl, all hunting my flesh,
hiding under long Maine coon
black hair, as black as yours,
so I must belong to you….”
I admit I’m seeking animal videos and poems as an escape from the current horror of daily news. Piercy also has plenty of poems for readers lamenting the state of the world and sins of our human past. I especially liked “The Birthday of the World” (Rosh Hashanah), in which she calls herself to action, making readers feel we’ve been called, too:
“No, this year I want to call
myself to task for what
I have done and not done
for peace. How much have
I dared in opposition?”
I’ve been a fan of Piercy for some time, and her nature poems are perhaps the main reason for that. For me, the most touching poem in the book is “The Orphan,” about a young deer who wanders into her yard, his mother likely shot. It begins, “I see all four cats lined up/on a level with the eastern windows.” Looking out, she sees the deer grazing. She ends:
“Not until he is full does he turn,
white tail rising, and that’s why
I say he. Finally then he is ready
to walk off stately as the buck
he will never become.”
Of course, I especially enjoyed “The Stray,” which came at the end of a brutal-winter poem series:
“The starving cat on the porch arches
into my hand, saying I survived
cold blasts and ice frozen in my
matted tail, coyotes and the great
horned owl, all hunting my flesh,
hiding under long Maine coon
black hair, as black as yours,
so I must belong to you….”
I admit I’m seeking animal videos and poems as an escape from the current horror of daily news. Piercy also has plenty of poems for readers lamenting the state of the world and sins of our human past. I especially liked “The Birthday of the World” (Rosh Hashanah), in which she calls herself to action, making readers feel we’ve been called, too:
“No, this year I want to call
myself to task for what
I have done and not done
for peace. How much have
I dared in opposition?”
January 3, 2020
First read of 2020. The poems about Bush and Iraq seem oddly prescient in light of current events. As always the poems about nature, cats, gardening and love are my favorite.
April 7, 2025
This book was an easy read and I felt invited into her life in a way that doesn't often happen with poetry despite how personal its subject matter often is. Piercy writes of everyday life, both the mundane and extraordinary aspects of it, in a very personable way. So this is likable poetry but not more than that.
Still, there were a few poems I marked as those that stood out to me. I was a bit surprised that two of them were in the section devoted to her family religious practices. Here are the last two stanzas of "The Late Year," which is about Rosh Hashanah:
I repent better in the waning
season when the blood
runs swiftly and all creatures
look keenly about them
for quickening danger.
Then I study the rockface
of my life, its granite pitted
and pocked and pick-axed
eroded, discolored by sun
and wind and rain--
my rock emerging
from the veil of greenery
to be mapped, to be
examined, to be judged.
I also particularly like how she writes about relationships. In "The Lived in Look" she differentiates in a humorous way the difference between a time when women were solely responsible for cleaning the house and placed too much of their self-esteem on it.
Women came with umbilical cords
leading to vacuum cleaners. You
plugged in a wife and she began
a wash cycle while her eyes spun.
Every three weeks we shovel out
the kitchen and bath. Spanish moss
of webs festoon our rafters. Cat hair
is the decorating theme of our couches.
I will turn this book loose in my city's library or best book thrift shop in part because I think it's a great introduction for anyone who is mildly scared of poetry but curious. I think anyone who picks this up will find it an unintimidating, friendly first book that has many relatable poems.
Still, there were a few poems I marked as those that stood out to me. I was a bit surprised that two of them were in the section devoted to her family religious practices. Here are the last two stanzas of "The Late Year," which is about Rosh Hashanah:
I repent better in the waning
season when the blood
runs swiftly and all creatures
look keenly about them
for quickening danger.
Then I study the rockface
of my life, its granite pitted
and pocked and pick-axed
eroded, discolored by sun
and wind and rain--
my rock emerging
from the veil of greenery
to be mapped, to be
examined, to be judged.
I also particularly like how she writes about relationships. In "The Lived in Look" she differentiates in a humorous way the difference between a time when women were solely responsible for cleaning the house and placed too much of their self-esteem on it.
Women came with umbilical cords
leading to vacuum cleaners. You
plugged in a wife and she began
a wash cycle while her eyes spun.
Every three weeks we shovel out
the kitchen and bath. Spanish moss
of webs festoon our rafters. Cat hair
is the decorating theme of our couches.
I will turn this book loose in my city's library or best book thrift shop in part because I think it's a great introduction for anyone who is mildly scared of poetry but curious. I think anyone who picks this up will find it an unintimidating, friendly first book that has many relatable poems.
August 19, 2025
"I'm a mule:
stubborn, dragging heavy grudges,
joys and lost friends from the alkaline
mines of my past across the bleak
present to some future vital use."
stubborn, dragging heavy grudges,
joys and lost friends from the alkaline
mines of my past across the bleak
present to some future vital use."
April 13, 2016
As is emblematic of Piercy's work, this collection features many poems that are blatantly political in nature. Piercy aims most of that anger at then President Bush for his politics on war and his and FEMA's lack of response after Hurricane Katrina (which was still a major issue when this was published in 2006). Though I still have a few more collections to read, this is the first collection I have read that features one or more poems on LGBT rights. Perhaps she has and I somehow missed these poems. If not, I'm glad she has started advocating more openly.
Please comment or send me a message if you know of more of Piercy's poems that have an LGBT theme. I would love to be proven wrong!
Please comment or send me a message if you know of more of Piercy's poems that have an LGBT theme. I would love to be proven wrong!
January 29, 2009
I'm sorry, folks, I must have a genetic defect--I can't get into this poetry. I quit after 30 poems or so. I know, my bad.
October 30, 2010
Review pending.
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January 7, 2013811.54 P618cr 2006
July 3, 2015
The Mystery of Survival one of my favorite poems here... Enjoyed The Moon is Always Female quite a bit more than this collection.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews