Skylight Press is proud to introduce Something’s Wrong with the Cornfields, a collection of new poems by renowned poet, essayist, photographer, and social activist – Margaret Randall. This unique book draws from a series of sacred landscapes, personal and shared histories, but also the slow erosion of both at the hands of clumsily progressing humanity. For Simon J. Ortiz, they are the songs of the “female, child, adult, marginal, concerned, urgent, afraid, angry” – which Diane Wakosi says “celebrates the lives of workers and oppressed peoples, as well as poets and intellectuals.”
In Margaret’s own words: “These are the impossible poems, the ones some say are not poems. They are made with words retrieved from the deception and double-speak invented to kill our spirit and curiosity, doom our dreams, control us completely. They are written in the face of persistent lies, memory erasure, noise pollution and cooptation of language; shaped with the clichés that thrive in a culture of death, the terminology invented by moguls of violence and greed.”
Places Between
Places between the desert you breathe
and centuries of broken promises,
undulating wall of hollow steel poles
solid with poured concrete
in the narrow space
between one pole and the next
where we glimpse rusting bedsprings
like fallen dominoes among the sage
and beyond the bedsprings
coils of barbed wire:
all those failures
replaced by the strength
of a nation built by immigrants
keeping immigrants out,
desire gutted in the thirst and heartbreak
of the places between.
.
What an auspicious time to bring this out. With the world watching a the oppression of Egypt lifts, many spirits lift with it. Thank you for your beautiful work.