Stone, Paper, Knife

Marge Piercy's eighth poetry collection cuts with the precision its title promises. This 1983 First Edition from Alfred A. Knopf (ISBN 0394712196) arrived as Piercy had fully matured into one of American poetry's most vital political voices. The three elements - stone's permanence, paper's malleability, knife's transformation - structure poems that move between the personal and political with characteristic fearlessness.

Piercy explores domesticity and revolution, Jewish identity and feminist consciousness, always grounding abstraction in visceral imagery. Her poems from this period refuse the either/or of academic versus accessible poetry, achieving both intellectual rigor and emotional immediacy. For readers who discovered Piercy through her novels like "Woman on the Edge of Time," this collection reveals the compressed power of her poetic voice. For poetry collectors, it represents a pivotal moment when feminist poetry claimed its place in the American canon without softening its critique.