Overview

We live in a moment of authoritarian takeovers happening around the world. In such times, we turn to the creative arts. We turn to poets. Margaret Randall has lived and written in the United States, Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua during years of great social change. Her own home country ordered her deported for her writings; she won her case, and her citizenship was restored. Here, Randall explores how poets in other times and other places have responded to forces that would diminish or destroy them. She draws on Bertolt Brecht, Carolyn Forché, Nâzım Hikmet, Roque Dalton, Gioconda Belli, Juan Gelman, Raul Zurita, and Zeina Azzam to understand, as she says, how ""a poem works by virtue of its ability to lift us out of complacency, to let us see and feel through the smoke screen intentionally erected to keep us in line.""

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9781956375589

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Margaret Randall is a U.S. American poet, essayist, oral historian, translator, photographer, and social activist. She lived in Latin America for twenty-three years (in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua). From 1962 to 1969, she and Mexican poet Sergio Mondragón co-edited El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn, a bilingual literary quarterly that published more than eight hundred writers and visual artists from thirty-five countries: some of the best new work of the sixties. When she came home in 1984, the government ordered her deported because it found some of her writing to be ""against the good order and happiness of the United States."" With the support of many writers and others, she won her case, and her citizenship was restored in 1989. Randall is the author, editor, and translator of more than two hundred books. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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