Something’s Wrong with the Cornfields by Margaret Randall

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.

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