Marge Piercy now has eight books to her credit, four novels and four books of poetry. Her work has always had the courage both of her convictions and of its own (the difference between the two has occasionally been one of her problems), and [Woman on the Edge of Time and Living in the Open] are no exception. She is a serious writer who deserves the sort of considered attention which, too often, she does not get.

For instance, none of the reviews of Woman on the Edge of Time I've read to date even seems to have acknowledged its genre….

Some reviewers treated [the] part of the book [when the protagonist is visited by a being from the future] as a regrettable daydream or even a hallucination caused by Connie's madness. Such an interpretation undercuts the entire book…. Other reviewers did not see Connie as insane but took Luciente and her troupe to be a pointless exercise in "science fiction," an exercise which should have no place in a piece of social realism. But Piercy is not that stupid. If she had intended a realistic novel she would have written one. Woman on the Edge of Time is a utopia, with all the virtues and shortcomings of the form, and many of the things reviewers found irksome are indigenous to the genre rather than the author….

[It] is to Piercy's credit that she has given us a very human and rather grouchy traveler and a guide who sometimes loses her temper. (p. 601)

Piercy expends a good deal of energy trying to get every last detail in, to get it right, and to make rather too sure we get the point.

Numerous dangers await the author of a utopia. For one thing, inhabitants of utopias somehow cannot help coming across as slightly sanctimonious and preachy; they've been like that since More. And in addition all utopias suffer from the reader's secret conviction that a perfect world would be dull, so Piercy is careful to liven things up with festivals, ceremonies, nice clothes, and a hopeful description of untrammeled sexual interchange….

This is a genre more at home in 19th-century England than in the America of the 1970s, where moral earnestness seems to have gone out of fashion. It's a daring thing for Piercy to have attempted, and it's entirely in keeping with her previous literary production that she should have done so. Woman on the Edge of Time is like a long inner dialogue in which Piercy answers her own questions about how a revised American society would work. The curious thing about serious utopias, as opposed to the satirical or entertainment variety, is that their authors never seem to write more than one of them; perhaps because they are products, finally, of the moral rather than the literary sense.

To turn from Piercy's utopia to her poetry is to turn from an imagined world to an imagination, from a sense to a sensibility…. I find the poetry more convincing. Piercy is committed to the search for honesty, however painful; to action, however futile; to getting it said and getting it done, however awkward the results may be. She's a feminist and a radical, but her poetry fleshes out these concepts in complex and sometimes startling ways, and she's no simple-minded sloganeer. "I ram on," she says of herself and her poetry; "I must make from this soft body some useful thing."…

Her poetry is "unfashionable," in that it is not flattish, understated, careful or bled. It reads as if she's never been in a creative writing class. The words crowd, lavish and lush, metaphors logjam, polemic rages, similes breed similes and sometimes unconscious puns, and its all part of Piercy's earthy aesthetic…. [Out] of all the surge and flux, the sometimes dutiful rhetoric, Piercy can build moments and sometimes whole poems that she would not have achieved with careful elegance. "People of the Shell," for instance, is superb, and it is not alone. Lines and aphorisms surface, flash and sink, poems transform themselves, words swirl. The literary ancestor here is not Dickinson but Whitman, and the vision is finally, despite the small ironies, a romantic one.

Like Whitman, Piercy must be read in chunks, not sips, and appreciated for her courage, gut energy and verbal fecundity, not for laconic polish. Dancing is hard and you may fall down, her poetry implies, but she is going to dance anyway. She rams on, and the reader can only applaud. (p. 602)