Seven Parts Woman, Poems by Marjorie Power

The complexity of women's experience and lives, their nuance and essence, are the topic of Marjorie Power's artful Seven Parts Woman.

Sample Poems by Marjorie Power

“Marjorie Power is gifted with double vision. In this book, one has the impression that everywhere is home, and simultaneously, everywhere is foreign. A raven says, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you dusk./ I bring shadows as large and clumsily shaped/ as your most secret hopes. I bring an unlit path…’. To read Power is to take on a specific, but also broad engagement with the world. ‘It’s a lifting-out-of,/ placing me in a world/ where my brother moves,/ AIDS has died off,/ and there’s silence in the Gaza Strip, broken/ by birdsong.’”—Pat Schneider

“Among the many energies Marjorie Power’s poetry taps into are the healing ones of humor, friendship, intimacies physical and spiritual, and abiding love for the natural world. Earnest and playful by turns, her poems refuse to shout or make feeling submit to cleverness. She says what she means and what living means to her, and reminds us of the luminous worth at the heart of it all.”—Joseph Hutchison

“In Seven Parts Woman, Marjorie Power tackles difficult subject matter, including breast cancer, aging, and poverty. She emerges carrying a new aesthetic. Power’s poems are rare delicacies filled with color and song, poised against fragile landscapes of eroding beaches and ruined haciendas. There is a lightness in her shawls and ropes; she is a true original with her shoe girl and deaf percussionist. These poems waken whatever is missing in your life, and they do so with aplomb. A must-read.”—Judith Skillman

“In these vibrant poems of nature and biography, Power showcases a true talent for imbuing the smallest human details – ‘Steam. Skin. Pulse. Breath.’ – with authenticity and layered meanings. Filled with rich and accessible language, Seven Parts Woman is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging, and Power details loss and personal struggle with clear eyes and an open, curious heart.”—John Sibley Williams

“With poems poised precariously on ‘the edge’ (of the North American continent and also of various certain and uncertain futures: her own, and those shared by us all), Power weaves for us a comforting shawl of memories that could be ours, and of lively, complex observations on all that changes, over time. At once both wellsprings of courage and road maps to what lies ahead, these poems give me new understandings. They give me strength (and a few laughs, along the way). They help me to be ‘at one with the flow that bonds all sentient things.’ Seven Parts Woman is a wise and wonderful book.”—Ingrid Wendt

Marjorie Power grew up in Stamford, Connecticut and graduated in 1969 from San Francisco State College (now, San Francisco State University). She spent most of her adult life in Washington and Oregon, and moved to Denver, Colorado in 2015.

Her poetry appears in six chapbooks and one full length collection, all from small presses: Faith in the Color Turquoise, Pudding House; The Complete Tishku, Lone Willow Press; Birds on Discovery Island, Main Street Rag Publishing Company; and others. Over 400 of her poems have been published in journals and anthologies, some of which are listed on the Acknowledgments page of this collection. She enjoys reading her work aloud and has given many readings.

Marjorie and her husband, Max, enjoy dancing, hiking, attending the theater, travel, and family time. They have six grandchildren.

ISBN-13: 978-1625492012, 102 pages, $19

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