Piercy's poetry reflects the immediate, specific experiences of daily life—eating breakfast, making love, going to work. It is concerned with the routine business of living and feeling and doing, and it is concerned with these things from a woman's point of view. There is always a danger that poems about little occurrences will become poems of little consequence, that poems which deal with current issues and topics will become mere polemic and propaganda, that poems of the everyday will become pedestrian. To a very large extent, however, Marge Piercy avoids these dangers because most of her poetry contributes to and extends a coherent vision of the world—as it is now and as it should be.

Piercy's desire is for a world of wholeness and completeness, where natural growth and development can lead to a satisfying participation in the fulness of life. As individual poems recount instances in which a sense of wholeness is attempted or gained or lost, they also explore the attitudes and actions necessary for a state of sustained community…. Each thing is connected with every other thing to comprise a unified whole. When one part of the organism is distorted, maimed, or broken off, the integrity of the whole is affected. In her poems, Piercy strikes out at the attitudes, institutions, and structures which impede natural growth and development and thus destroy wholeness; she also celebrates the moments when life is consummate and joyful.

As a woman, Piercy is particularly concerned about women and their ability to participate with integrity in a fully-realized life. In a number of poems, she examines the female growing-up process in America; in each case, the young girl is shown to possess great potential strength and individuality which is slowly but surely diverted or covered over. (pp. 193-94)

Particularly insidious is the loving manner in which the warping of the female's individual integrity and wholeness is carried out. The gardener in "A work of artifice" … diminishes the soaring height and strength which is the birthright of the bonsai tree while crooning tenderly, "It is your nature / to be small and cozy, / domestic and weak." But this is not the nature of the tree—or of the woman—however much it pleases the gardener to think so. (p. 195)

As Piercy sees it, the young girl's integrity of self, her sense of who she really is and what is natural and right for her, is hard to obliterate entirely. It can be covered over, distorted, and violated, but it stubbornly resists complete extinction. The need to be whole and strong hides itself in self-preservation, longing for an opportunity to come forth proudly in full bloom…. (pp. 195-96)

If the fulfillment of healthy growth is the good to be striven for, then how can women … ever hope to achieve a mature strength, a unified wholeness? Piercy believes that first there must be a conscious experience of self-realization; a woman must become aware of herself as independent person. The woman must acknowledge that even though she has been formed in large part out of the pervading culture, she is still finally responsible for herself. (p. 197)

Man equals mind equals significant mode of knowing and being; woman equals body equals lesser mode of knowing and being. What Piercy wants to do is to change the value assigned to these two modes; and, in addition, she wants to synthesize and unify the separate parts to form whole people: thinking, feeling men and women, confident in mind and body. (pp. 201-02)

The love between two people would seem to be a very private thing, whether in its success or failure. Piercy acknowledges the intimacy, but she is also quite aware that these two people live in a particular society, the structure of which is most often antithetical to the vision of wholeness essential for satisfying love…. What begins as a desire for personal integrity and wholeness which can in turn reach out with confident strength to another person must eventually and inevitably extend itself into a concern for the society in which individuals live.

Piercy views contemporary America as a dream turned nightmare. The fertile land which once offered a place of freedom and tolerance—a place of growth—has now become full of death and destruction…. Piercy argues that each of us is in some way culpable, if only because we passively and acquiescently continue to participate in this society…. (pp. 203-04)