Made in Detroit, Marge Piercy, 2015 

Piercy’s 19th poetry collection is a beauty,  full of perfect lines and wonderful observations on aging, growing up Jewish in Detroit, being a poet, living on the Cape with its natural beauty, and our current political disasters (ignoring the poor, treating corporations like citizens, the income gap, the destruction of the environment).  A long and happy marriage is a constant theme as are references to a failed early one and many former relationships.  A particularly funny poem is all about her ample breasts.  She writes most movingly of loss and aging as in The Late Year, “Then I study the rock face/of my life, its granite pitted/and pocked and pickaxed,/eroded, discolored by the sun/and wind and rain—-/my rock emerging/from the veil of greenery/to be mapped, to be/examined, to be judged.”   Things That Will Never Happen Again refers to everyday happenings during her early years and ends with “I miss none of this. They were chores/not pleasures, but still I remember/and my age hangs on me like icicles/that bear down the branches of pine.”  This is a wonderful collection highlighting the mature work of an accomplished poet.