Marge Piercy is the author of seventeen novels including The New York Times Bestseller Gone To Soldiers; the National Bestsellers Braided Lives and The Longings of Women and the classic Woman on the Edge of Time; eighteen volumes of poetry, and a critically acclaimed memoir Sleeping with Cats. Born in center city Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan, the recipient of four honorary doctorates, she has been a key player in many of the major progressive political battles of our time, including the anti-Vietnam war and the women's movement, and more recently an active participant in the resistance to the war in Iraq.

A popular speaker on college campuses, she has been a featured writer on Bill Moyers’ PBS Specials, Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion, Terri Gross’ Fresh Air, the Today Show, and many radio programs nationwide including Air America and Oprah & Friends.

Praised as one of the few American writers who are accomplished poets as well as novelists — Piercy is one of our country's best selling poets — she is also the master of many genres: historical novels, science fiction (for which she won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction in the United Kingdom), novels of social comment and contemporary entertainments. She has taught, lectured and/or performed her work at well over 400 universities around the world.

"Marge Piercy is not just an author, she's a cultural touchstone. Few writers in modern memory have sustained her passion, and skill, for creating stories of consequence."
-The Boston Globe

The Hunger Moon: New & Selected Poems, 1980-2010

This new gathering of Marge Piercy’s poems—funny, angry, in awe of life, compassionate—brings us the heart of her mature work, the first selected since Circles on the Water in 1982.

“The selected poems deserve to be read over and over. They remind readers why Marge Piercy is a literary icon whose work and career are unmatched.”—The Christian Science Monitor

The Tao of Touch
What magic does touch create
that we crave it so. That babies
do not thrive without it. That  
the nurse who cuts tough nails
and sands calluses on the elderly  
tells me sometimes men weep
as she rubs lotion on their feet.

Yet the touch of a stranger
the bumping or predatory thrust
in the subway is like a slap.
We long for the familiar, the open
palm of love, its tender fingers.
It is our hands that tamed cats
into pets, not our food.

The widow looks in the mirror
thinking, no one will ever touch
me again, never. Not hold me.
Not caress the softness of my
breasts, my inner thighs, the swell
of my belly. Do I still live
if no one knows my body?

We touch each other so many
ways, in curiosity, in anger,
to command attention, to soothe,
to quiet, to rouse, to cure.  
Touch is our first language
and often, our last as the breath
ebbs and a hand closes our eyes.

Circles on the Water: New and Selected Poems 1960 - 1980
Now in its 15th Printing

Gathered from her first six books, Breaking Camp, Hard loving, 4-Telling, To Be of Use, Living in the Open, The Twelve Spoked Wheel Flashing, and The Moon is Always Female, this collection is home to some of Marge Piercy’s best loved and most requested poems, including: “To Be of Use,” ”A Work of Artifice,” ”The Secretary Chant,” ”Barbie Doll,” ”Unlearning Not to Speak, ” "For the Young Who Want To," ”Laying Down the Tower” (the complete Tarot Deck sequence), ”Rape Poem, ” ”The Poet Dreams of a Nice Warm Motel, ” ”Attack of the Squash People, ” ”For Strong Women, ” ”What’s That Smell in the Kitchen?,” ”Right to Life,” and an introduction in which Piercy talks about how and why she writes poems.

Ethics for Republicans: A New Poem in In These Times Magazine