"Winner of the 2000 Paterson Poetry Prize <BR>About Marge Piercy's collection of her old and new poems that celebrate the Jewish experience, the poet Lyn Lifshin writes: "The Art of Blessing the Day is an exquisite book. The whole collection is strong, passionate, and poignant, but the mother and daughter poems, fierce and emotional, with their intense ambivalence, pain and joy, themes of separation and reconnecting, are among the very strongest about that difficult relationship. <BR>"These striking, original, beautifully sensuous poems do just that. Ordinary moments--a sunset, a walk, a private religious ritual--are so alive in poems like 'Shabbat moment' and 'Rosh Hodesh.' In the same way that she celebrates ordinary moments, small things become charged with memories and feelings: paper snowflakes, buttons, one bird, a bottle-cap flower made from a ginger ale top and crystal beads. <BR>"She celebrates the body in rollicking, gusto-filled poems like 'Belly good' and 'The chuppah, ' where 'our bodies open their portals wide.' So much that is richly sensuous: 'hands that caressed you, . . . untied the knot of pleasure and loosened your flesh till it fluttered, ' and lush praise for 'life in our spines, our throats, our knees, our genitals, our brains, our tongues.' <BR>"I love the humor in poems like 'Eat fruit, ' the nostalgia and joy in 'The rabbi's granddaughter and the Christmas tree, ' the fresh, beautiful images of nature--'In winter . . .the sun hangs its wizened rosehip in the oaks.' <BR>"I admire Piercy's sense of the past alive in the present, in personal and social history. The poems are memorials, like the yahrtzeit candle in a glass. 'We lose and we go on losing, ' but thepoems are never far from harsh joy, the joy that is 'the wine of life.' <BR>"Growing up haunted by Holocaust ghosts is an echo throughout the book, and some of the strongest poems are about the Holocaust, poems that become the voices of those who had no voice: 'What you carr

"Accessible, transformative, thrilling. Marge Piercy teases out the spiritual lights hidden within the most ordinary events. Here is poetry so reverent and disturbing that it borders on liturgy."

-Rabbi Lawrence Kushner

From the Trade Paperback edition.

"An exquisite book...Strong, passionate and poignant. Marge Piercy's words make a moving variety of experience beautifully and forcefully real."

-Lyn Lifshin

"Keep her volume near your home altar; Marge Piercy will give wings to your heart's stirrings."

-Rabbi Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi

"Marge Piercy's superb spiritual powers are up to their elbows in the lived world, bringing a liberated and grounded wisdom to everything they touch. Behind this book one hears the great embracing toast of Jewish tradition: 'L'Chaim!' — 'to life!' In its pages the work of the heart and the work of the spirit are visibly, passionately advanced."

-Jane Hirschfield