Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy is the author of nineteen poetry collections, a memoir, four works of nonfiction, seventeen novels, and a new book of short stories. Her work has been translated into twenty-two languages, and she has won many honors, including the Gold Rose, the oldest poetry award in America. She lives on Cape Cod with her husband, Ira Wood, and has given readings, lectures, and workshops at more than five hundred venues in the States and abroad. 

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THE HOUR OF MY DEATH: A Journal of the Year After I Died

 Marge Piercy’s last work is a testament to her legacy

After revered poet, writer, and feminist icon Marge Piercy dies in a medical emergency in October 2022, only to be resuscitated, she wakes to create her legacy piece. The Hour of My Death: A Journal of the Year After I Died is a personal narrative in the Japanese Zuihitsu literary form that encompasses diary-style entries, recipes, gardening advice and her luminous poetry, all detailing a joyful year of living in her resurrected old age.

A beloved American progressive activist, feminist, and writer, her seminal work includes Woman On The Edge Of Time; He, She And It, which won the 1993 Arthur C. Clarke Award; and Gone To Soldiers, the New York Times bestseller and sweeping historical novel set during World War II. She has authored fifteen other novels and short story collections, and penned twenty volumes of poetry with poems regularly reprinted in anthologies, on artwork, as song lyrics, and more. Piercy also was a pioneer in the use of gender neutral pronouns in the 1970s and is a staple in Women’s Studies programs. Marge is now 90 and has completed her last work, The Hour of My Death, with her reflections on a life extended and the grace and wisdom that comes with that. 

(Sibylline Fall 2026)

Woman on the Edge of Time

Hailed as a classic of speculative fiction and an essential feminist text, this landmark Marge Piercy novel is a transformative vision of two futures—and what it takes to will one or the other into reality.

Connie Ramos, a Chicana woman in her mid-thirties, is committed to a mental institution in New York, despite the fact that she is overwhelmingly, heroically sane. Connie is unique, though, for she is able to communicate with the year 2137, where two different modes of life are competing. One is beautiful––communal, nonsexist, environmentally pure, open to ritual and magic––while the other is a horror––totalitarian, exploitative, rigidly technological.

(Ballantine, June 2016)

Braided Lives

Marge Piercy carries her portrait of the American experience back into the Fifties—that closed, repressive time in which forces for the upheavals of the Sixties ticked away underground. Spanning twenty years, and teeming with vivid characters, Braided Lives tells the powerful, unsentimental story of two young women coming of age.

Jill, fiercely independent, dark, Jewish, an intellectual with Detroit street smarts, is a poet, curious, avid of life—a “professional student” and sometime thief. Donna, Jill’s cousin and closest friend, is blond, pretty, and alluring. Together, they grow and change at college in Ann Arbor, where the life of poets and painters contrasts sharply with the working-class neighborhood where Jill’s family lives.

(Thomas Dunne Books, January 2015)

Circles On The Water

More than 150 poems from Marge Piercy’s seven books of poetry written between 1963 and 1982.

(Knopf, August 2013)

He, She and It

In the middle of the twenty-first century, life as we know it has changed for all time. Shira Shipman's marriage has broken up, and her young son has been taken from her by the corporation that runs her zone, so she has returned to Tikva, the Jewish free town where she grew up. There, she is welcomed by Malkah, the brilliant grandmother who raised her, and meets an extraordinary man who is not a man at all, but a unique cyborg implanted with intelligence, emotions—and the ability to kill. . . .

From the imagination of Marge Piercy comes yet another stunning novel of morality and courage, a bold adventure of women, men, and the world of tomorrow.

(Fawcett, November 2010)

On The Way Out, Turn Off the Light: Poems

A bountiful group of poems--direct, honest, and revelatory--that reflect on language, nature, old age, young love, Judaism, and our current politics, from one of our most read and admired poets.

"Words are my business," Marge Piercy begins her twentieth collection of poetry, a glance back at a lifetime of learning, loving, grieving, and fighting for the disenfranchised, and a look forward at what the future holds for herself, her family and friends, and her embattled country. In the opening section, Piercy tells of her childhood in Detroit, with its vacant lots and scrappy children, the bike that gave her wings, her ambition at fourteen to "gobble" down all knowledge, and a too-early marriage ("I put on my first marriage / like a girdle my skinny body / didn't need"). We then leap into the present, her "twilight zone," where she is "learning to be quiet," learning to give praise despite it all. There are funny poems about medicine ads with their dire warnings, and some possible plusses about being dead: "I'll never do another load of laundry . . ." There is "comfort in old bodies / coming together," in a partner's warmth--"You're always warm: warm hands / smooth back sleek as a Burmese cat./ Sunny weather outside and in."

Piercy has long been known for her political poems, and here we have her thoughts on illegal immigrants, dying languages, fraught landscapes, abortion, President-speak. She examines her nonbeliever's need for religious holidays and spiritual depth, and the natural world is appreciated throughout. On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light is yet more proof of Piercy's love and mastery of language--it is moving, stimulating, funny, and full of the stuff of life.

(Knopf, September 2020)