Writings and Books

This section's articles

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  My Town: A Memoir of Albuquerque, New Mexico in Poems, Prose and Photographs

  Nothing was What it Pretended
  Words I’d never heard took up residence in my mouth. Montaño, even if city signage refused to put the tilda over the n, names like De Vargas, Cabeza de Vaca or Juan Tabó, shepherds and assassins enshrined on street corners unquestioned and mispronounced.
  Indian words like Acoma, Navajo—now Diné— or place names like Canyon de Chelly the conquerors left us with when they couldn’t speak what they couldn’t hear.
  Names imposed: Oñate, Coronado, Santa Fe. Another’s holy (...)
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  AS IF THE EMPTY CHAIR / COMO SI LA SILLA VACIA

  Bilingual limited edition of 400 numbered and signed copies. Spanish translations by Leandro Katz and Diego Guerra. Photographs by Annabella Balduvino and Margaret Randall
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  First Laugh: Essays 2000-2009

  Pumping Gas
  Again I am somewhere else. Or everywhere at once. But as always, every word has its color. Sometimes, when I lose one now, the color rises behind my eyes but the word still plays hide and seek. Taunts me from the sidelines. Or a vast rainbow looms, and I must find my way through hues and the language they mask. Sometimes I sit for long minutes sifting through color on my way to word. Word may try to resist, but synapse eventually takes me home. I am seventy-three. My father (...)
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  LOST & FOUND: Selections from EL CORNO EMPLUMADO / THE PLUMED HORN 1962-1964

  LOST AND FOUND: Pages from EL CORNO EMPLUMADO / THE PLUMED HORN (English, first three years: 1962-1964, selection and commentary by Margaret Randall)
  EL CORNO EMPLUMADO / THE PLUMED HORN was a bilingual quarterly of poetry, short story, essay, visual art, letters and various combinations of these, published out of Mexico City from 1962 to 1969. Mexico had long been rich in artistic tradition and the sixties was a decade in which young artists in many parts of the world pushed the limits of (...)
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  RUINS - poems

  In Search of the Next Sun
  At Teotihuácan I watch helpless as you slip away, are sucked, taken from this time into that other. You walk beside me, children and grandchildren scattered oblivious between pyramids of Sun and Moon along broad Avenue of the Dead, but I know it is only your shell accompanies me silent and pale as chalk.
  Later you try to describe the place you escaped with such effort: brittle and cold between two millennia gone and now. How you tore yourself from the witness (...)
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  RUINS CD

  Selection of poems from Margaret Randall’s RUINS (University of New Mexico Press, 2011) recorded by Daniel Staniforth and Rebsie Fairholm. Original music composed and/or arranged by Staniforth and performed by Staniforth and Fairholm, with vocals, cello, double bass, guitars, ukulele, synthesizers, drums and Celtic harp.
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  SOMETHING’S WRONG WITH THE CORNFIELDS: new poems

  Vallejo’s Man Passes with a Loaf of Bread
  Menacing courtroom scent of polished wood invades my skin when I revisit that no-man’s land and all its questions.
  Stench of Bismuna’s battlefield floats faint on trickster wind. Where I wandered and with whom one ferocious November day, shame of a slap I cannot take back.
  More distant yet, mist rises from orchid-lined ravines on the road to Cuetzálan, Totonacan women sit in silence, green and purple yarn woven into their hair.
  Mexico 1968, (...)
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  Testigo de Piedra

  Prefacio
  Testigo de piedra nació en Kiet Seel, una ruina de nuestros ancestros pueblo ubicada en la parte norte del estado de Arizona cerca de la frontera con Utah. Se encuentra bajo la jurisdicción del Navajo National Monument y la maneja el Servicio Nacional de Parques y la Nación Navajo. Cada año, desde fines de mayo hasta los primeros días de septiembre, el parque permite que veinte personas caminen diariamente las 18 millas de ida y vuelta, y que de cinco en cinco entren en la ruina (...)
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  Their Backs to the Sea

  Easter Island, Rapa Nui, or simply the land your ancestors felt no need to name, place that receives me now eager and awkward: my eyes hauling picture-book images, mouth filled with questions juggling answers as I breathe.
  I will think of you as an island without color on a map, your first people dizzied in harmony, clothed by the land itself: no reason to signify that which receives and gives, asks nothing in (...)
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  To Change the World: My Years in Cuba

  Excerpt from Prologue
  Fidel Castro came to New York City in the summer of 1960, fresh from his guerrilla triumph. I was a young writer and soon-to-be single mother, enormously pregnant with Gregory—my son who, forty-six years later, would suggest we write about Cuba together—but I longed to see the hero up close, applaud his stance, express my personal appreciation. Carefully, lovingly, I prepared a platter of Spanish paella; not such a tropical staple perhaps, but my signature dish at the (...)

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