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Hey, Everybody, Happy Holidays. It's been a long time since the last newsletter. The trouble with writers who write a lot of poetry and fiction, tour around the country, and even run a pubishing company is that they don't have time left for much else. But since the response to the last newsletters were so positive we wanted to express our best wishes for a healthy, productive new year and to let you know what Marge is up to.
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| New
Poems
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Since it's the Hanukah season here's a poem from Marge's new poetry collection, The Crooked Inheritance:
Season of skinny candles
A row of tall skinny candles
burn quickly into the night
air, the shamesh* raised
over the rest
for its hard work.
Darkness rushes in
after the sun sinks
like a bright plug pulled.
Our eyes drown in night
thick as ink pudding.
When even the moon
starves to a sliver
of quicksilver
the little candles poke
holes in the blackness.
A time to eat fat
and oil, a time to gamble
for pennies and gambol
around the table, a light
and easy holiday.
No disasters, no
repentance, just remember
and enjoy. The miracle
is really eight days
and nights without trouble.
*shamesh: the middle candle that lights the others every night
Copyright 2006 Marge Piercy, THE CROOKED INHERITANCE, Alfred A. Knopf.
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| New Poetry Book |
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 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 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 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.”
"I look forward to each new installment of Marge Piercy's poetry. I always appreciate her unique mixture of common sense with uncommon joyful insight. She's political and sensual, astute and wild, truthful and always a step beyond the last. . . The Crooked Inheritance is her best yet."
--Joy Harjo
More on The Crooked Inheritance
Here's a poem from The Crooked Inheritance that Garrison Keillor
read on his radio show The Writer's Almanac:
Swear It
My mother swore ripely, inventively
a flashing storm of American and Yiddish
thundering onto my head and shoulders.
My father swore briefly, like an ax
descending on the nape of a sinner.
But all the relatives on my father's
side, gosh, they said, goldarnit.
What happened to those purveyors
of soft putty cussing, go to heck,
they would mutter, you son of a gun.
They had limbs instead of legs.
Privates encompassed everything
from bow to stern. They did
number one and number two
and eventually, perhaps, it.
It has always amazed me there are
words too potent to say to those
whose ears are tender as baby
lettuces—often those who label
us into narrow jars with salt and
vinegar, saying, People like them,
meaning me and mine. Never say
the K or N word, just quietly shut
and bolt the door. Just politely
insert your foot in the Other's face.
Copyright 2006 Marge Piercy, THE CROOKED INHERITANCE, Alfred A. Knopf.
Available Now
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
164 pp. / ISBN: 0-307-26507-2
Click Here to Buy this Book: The Crooked Inheritance: Poems
As always, you're welcome to send a book to Marge to inscribe. Remember to send along a Self-Addressed Envelope with the Proper Postage so we can get it back to you. Send it to:
Marge Piercy
Middlemarsh, Inc.
P.O. Box 1473
Wellfleet, MA 02667-1473
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| A
Note From Marge |
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 All last year with the exception of June, I was on the road at least a third of the time and sometimes more. After a month of October spent headlining a literary conference in Mobile Alabama and doing five gigs in five days in Wisconsin and Minnesota, I was exhausted and ready to stay home for a few months.
I broke a tooth during that time at the gumline, so I have been having oral surgery, which was extremely painful – so much so that for eight days I couldn’t write and for the first five days I couldn’t even read. It is healing now but I don’t know what they will do to me next.
Anyhow, I am taking some time off from traveling and giving readings, workshops, speeches, what have you. I have started a new book, which is a very personal nonfiction book. I have also been writing a lot of poems...
READ THE WHOLE NOTE FROM MARGE
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| New Passover Book |
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 We're starting the drum beat for Marge Piercy’s s upcoming PESACH FOR THE REST OF US: MAKING THE PASSOVER SEDER YOUR OWN, a book that gathers together personal memories, recipes, poems from her own home-made hagadah, and fresh interpretations of the rituals and symbols of the seder. It offers us a warm and welcoming guide to creating a meaningful Passover for non-Orthodox Jews, progressives and non-Jews alike.
Marge Piercy believes that everyone should celebrate Passover in a way that is relevant and honest--for themselves, their family, and their friends. In her delightfully straightforward voice ("Why should you do all the work?" she asks. "Get your people involved."), she discusses each element of the seder in terms of symbolism, tradition, variation, and preparation. In talking about the egg, for example, she points out the inherent overtones of birth and separation, gives us her recipe for egg salad with fennel and cucumber, and includes her own poem about berzah, the egg on the seder plate. She describes her heroic (and futile) attempts to make gefilte fish from scratch, considers the purpose of hiding the matzoh, and suggests alternative seder traditions, such as including "Miriam's cup" alongside Elijah's.
Brimming with favorite dishes, anecdotes, Passover poems and alternative blessings; with practical advice; and with a hearty appetite for life and learning, PESACH FOR THE REST OF US is a unique and enchanting invitation to the seder table.
Pesach for the Rest of Us: Making the Passover Seder Your Own
Available in Bookstores: Feb 20, 2007
Schocken / Random House
ISBN: 0805242422
/ 304 Pages
Click Here to Pre-Order this Book:
Pesach for the Rest of Us: Making the Passover Seder Your Own
We'll follow-up with another newsletter that includes recipes and excerpts from the book.
More Here
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| Contest |
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 In the last newsletter we asked the following question:
"Can anyone name ten of the cats in Marge Piercy's life?"
and offered this prize:
A copy of Eight Chambers
of the Heart, a volume of Marge's selected poems chosen especially
for the British market and published only in the United Kingdom
by Penguin. In fact, it has never been available in the United
States. Quite a collector's item.
The answer is any 10 of the following 14:
Dinah, Max, Malkah. Whiskers, Buttons, Arofa, Cho-Cho, Jim Beam, Colette, Oboe,
Efi, Fluffy, Noble Brutus, Boris
The winners are: Claire McGee and Natasha Beck.
(We've e-mailed you but if you didn't get the message would you please contact us at “newsletter@margepiercy.com” to give us your address? We'll send you your prize ASAP.
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