SOURCE: “Bearing Hope Back into the World: Marge Piercy's Stone, Paper, Knife,” in Ways of Knowing: Essays on Marge Piercy, edited by Sue Walker and Eugenie Hamner, 1991, pp. 60-71.

In the following essay, Lebow asserts that “the publication of Stone, Paper, Knife marks Piercy's full evolution into a doer, a user of tools, a woman who has created her own vision of the world on paper.”

In “Through the Cracks: Growing Up in the Fifties,” a 1974 essay in Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt, Marge Piercy felt that “Success was telling some truth, creating some vision on paper” (207); however, she did not have hope of altering the world around her: “For if you cannot conceive of doing anything to alter your world, you reserve your admiration for manipulating concepts about those who have done something, or even for those who manipulate concepts about others who have manipulated concepts” (205).

Now...