Something's Wrong with the Cornfields

"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.

'Poet Margaret Randall says "these are the impossible poems." But she goes ahead and says them because they are hers and they are from her cultural community in which they were forged. These are poems from her person as a female, child, adult, marginal, concerned, urgent, afraid, angry. And, yes, loving, gentle, strong, solid, yet, also, always afraid, angry. And even then, she says "thank you for caring, really caring." To herself for reassurance and reaffirmation. And to the cultural-social-political source in this too-present world that angers us and makes us afraid. So these poems are not impossible because they are the voice we need to say. So we can truly and necessarily face the 21st century. And, like the poet, say what must be said. And do what must be done.' - Simon J. Ortiz, author of Out There Somewhere, The Good Rainbow Road, from Sand Creek. 'Better than a memoir, Margaret Randall's collection of unpublished poems, "Something's Wrong with the Cornfields" celebrates the lives she has observed, of workers and oppressed peoples, as well as poets and intellectuals. The passion expressed in Meg Randall's long career as a poet, editor, and activist comes tumbling out of this huge collection, brimming over the edges of every poem.' - Diane Wakoski, author of The Diamond Dog.

Margaret Randall is a feminist poet, writer, photographer and social activist born in New York City, and author of more than 80 published books. 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, and share important years of the Cuban revolution. In the 1960s she co-founded and co-edited THE PLUMED HORN, a bilingual literary journal which for eight years published some of the most dynamic and meaningful writing of an era. In 1984 Margaret went home to the United States, only to be ordered deported when the government invoked the 1952 McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act, judging opinions expressed in some of her books to be "against the good order and happiness of the United States." The Center for Constitutional Rights defended her and many writers and others joined in an almost five-year battle for reinstatement of citizenship. She won her case in 1989. In 1990 she was awarded the Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett grant for writers victimised by political repression.