![]() ![]() Together with her older brother Grant, her mother's son by a previous marriage, Marge Piercy grew up in a working-class neighborhood marked by racial tension. Her mother, Bert Bernice Bunnin, from an observant, working-class Jewish family in Cleveland, received only a tenth-grade education. ![]() Her father, Robert Douglas Piercy, from a working-class Presbyterian family in a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania, installed and repaired heavy machinery for Westinghouse. Piercy was born March 31, 1936, in Detroit, Michigan. Her novels explore “the choices people make, out of their characters and their time and their class and their social circumstances.” Novels persuade readers “to cross those borders of alienation and mistrust” and empathize with “characters whom the reader would refuse to know in ordinary life.” Piercy’s poetry fuses the political, domestic, and autobiographical spheres, with imagery drawn from nature, sensual and dream memories, and Jewish mysticism. By articulating their experiences, poetry gives “validation and dignity” to the disenfranchised. Above all else, Piercy wishes her work to be “useful” to people’s inner and political lives. ![]() Grounded in feminism, political activism, and Jewish spirituality, more than thirty volumes comprise Piercy’s oeuvre. In Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt, a collection of autobiographical essays, novelist and poet Marge Piercy admonishes, “Pay sharp attention to that trouble looming but don’t let it taint your Sabbath celebration.” This tension between celebration and disquietude marks Piercy’s life and work. ![]()
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