Something's Wrong with the Cornfields

by Margaret Randall

"I think of these as my 'impossible poems,' poems made from the battered language they are leaving us with, the torn and devastated language, the words twisted to mean the opposite of what they have always meant...turning language back on itself, as if going home..." Margaret Randall's Something's Wrong with the Cornfields offers an array of sacred spaces, evocative landscapes, historical acts, and personal infusions. The poems augur around the ability to alternate between the universal and the obscure, between personal orbit and cultural aura. Some poems constrict like bloodward spirals, and others unravel from their topical moorings. As with earlier volumes like Stones Witness, hers is a language in flux, where the willingness to yield alephs and symbols over time gives the poet a new scope to write beyond fixity.

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 31, 2011

About the author

Margaret Randall is a feminist poet, writer, photographer and social activist. She has lived for extended periods in Albuquerque, New York, Seville, Mexico City, Havana, and Managua. Shorter stays in Peru and North Vietnam were also formative. In the turbulent 1960s she co-founded and co-edited EL CORNO EMPLUMADO / THE PLUMED HORN, a bilingual literary journal which for eight years published some of the most dynamic and meaningful writing of an era. From 1984 through 1994 she taught at a number of U.S. universities.

Margaret was privileged to live among New York’s abstract expressionists in the 1950s and early ’60s, participate in the Mexican student movement of 1968, share important years of the Cuban revolution (1969-1980), the first four years of Nicaragua’s Sandinista project (1980-1984), and visit North Vietnam during the heroic last months of the U.S. American war in that country (1974). Her four children—Gregory, Sarah, Ximena and Ana—have given her ten grandchildren: Lia, Martin, Daniel, Richi, Sebastian, Juan, Luis Rodrigo, Mariana, Eli, and Tolo. She has lived with her life companion, the painter and teacher Barbara Byers, for almost a quarter century.