Marge Piercy is a forceful, direct and widely read feminist poet. In ["Stone, Paper, Knife"], her ninth volume of verse, Piercy continues to write about the suffering of women, particularly at the hands of men, about love, sex, failed relationships, and living in the natural world. She voices the legitimate need for day care services, so that women with infants need not retreat from the world…. In many poems she strives for an understanding of love, calling it pleasure, work, studying, two rivers that flow together … and she bemoans the frequent cooling of passion after marriage…. And in "What's that smell in the kitchen?"—a poem for the subjugated women across America, full of hatred and hostility—she ventures that these women would really like to serve their husbands a dead rat, or grill them instead of a steak. These wry, tender, angry poems are accessible and at times moving, but often the point of view is predictable, the imagery redundant.
A review of "Stone, Paper, Knife," in Publishers Weekly (reprinted from the January 7, 1983 issue of Publishers Weekly, published by R. R. Bowker Company, a Xerox company; copyright © 1983 by Xerox Corporation), Vol. 223, No. 1, January 7, 1983, p. 67.
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