Writings and Books

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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

• CHE ON MY MIND

  Ernesto Che Guevara occupies a place in our emotional iconography unsurpassed by anyone with the exception of Buddha, Mohammed, Marx, Mary or Jesus of Nazareth. Still contemporary—his death at thirty-nine isn’t yet half a century behind us—he is a figure revered in equal measure by both convinced revolutionaries and apolitical youth at the farthest reaches of our planet. All see in him a symbol of nonconformity and resistance. And, like so many humans we’ve embalmed in myth, scholars and those (...)
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  COMO SI LA SILLA VACIA / AS IF THE EMPTY CHAIR

  Do I Get Out of Bed This Morning?
  Memory moves across a map like the lines in a face spread and deepen, souring testimony to the smile gone, the unheard laughter and cheek offered up for a kiss that will not come.
  Skin fades imperceptibly, its colors hesitate unsure if they will cling to heat or sink to the pale pulse of resignation. Do I get out of bed this morning yet again? Do I wash my face? Do I (...)
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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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  MORE THAN THINGS: Essays

  Things
  “No ideas but in things” —William Carlos Williams
  The wooden apple If I cup my palm around this wooden apple, my flesh knows a heft just a bit too light, a texture not moist or juicy enough. Not the life of living fruit but the history of art, of making things. Who recognized the raw possibility, held the chunk of local pine, whittled the navel of its stem, the indentation of seeds and marks along the edges of the cut? Imagined teeth bit desire along those edges, going all the way (...)
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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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