Margaret Randall, 2 New Books: Out of Violence Into Poetry & Thinking About Thinking

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Out of Violence Into Poetry, was written over these past few years when language itself was violated by a president who lied until each lie, repeated often enough, resembled a terrible truth in the public discourse. Reality, sanity, beauty: all bend and run the risk of breaking when distorted beyond recognition. These poems consciously restore language to its natural habitat. They deal with history, memory, loss, life, death and promise. They address love and aging. They become a welcome refuge at a time of uncertainty and take us on disparate journeys that often have surprising twists. There is humor as well as rage. We cannot leave it to the politicians alone to give words their meaning back. That is the job of poets, and this book does that job well.  Pre-purchase Out of Violence Into Poetry from CW.

In Thinking About Thinking, Margaret Randall, turns her mind to the process of thinking - the purpose of which is to engage in the act of curiosity, inquiry, and examination. What results is an intimate, keen, and far-ranging collection of exploration from one of the great minds of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These thirty-one pieces range from current political events to the history of communication, from deciphering the Maya code to a childhood admiration of Elizabeth Taylor, from Alan Turing to the New York City subway maps. And each one concerns itself more with the act of thinking than reaching conclusions, engaging readers with their own ability to think. Pre-purchase Thinking About Thinking from CW.

About the Author

Long known and honored for her work throughout the Americas, Margaret Randall was born in New York City in 1936, and has lived for extended periods in Albuquerque, New York, Seville, Mexico City, Havana, and Managua. Shorter stays in Peru and North Vietnam were also formative. In the 1960s, with Sergio Mondragón she founded and co-edited El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn, a bilingual literary journal which for eight years published some of the most dynamic and meaningful writing of an era. Randall was privileged to live among New York’s abstract expressionists in the 1950s and early ’60s, participate in the Mexican student movement of 1968, share important years of the Cuban revolution (1969-1980), the first three years of Nicaragua’s Sandinista project (1980-1984), and visit North Vietnam during the heroic last months of the U.S. American war in that country (1974). Upon Randall’s return to the United States from Nicaragua in 1984, she was ordered to be deported when the government invoked the 1952 McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act, judging opinions expressed in some of her books to be “against the good order and happiness of the United States.” The Center for Constitutional Rights defended Randall, and many writers and others joined in an almost five-year battle for reinstatement of citizenship. She won her case in 1989. In 1990 Randall was awarded the Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett grant for writers victimized by political repression. In 2004 she was the first recipient of PEN New Mexico’s Dorothy Doyle Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing and Human Rights Activism.

For more information about the author, visit her website at www.margaretrandall.org.