Ruins

by Randall, Margaret; Price, V. B.

• ISBN13: 9780826350671
• ISBN10: 0826350674
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-09-15
• Publisher: Univ of New Mexico Pr

Summary

In this poetry collection, Margaret Randall uses the metaphor of ruins to meditate on time's movement-through memory, through cities, through the leavings of history, and through the bodies of people who have experienced time's transformations and traumas. Randall's ruins include not only Chaco Canyon, Hovenweep, Teotihuacan, Machu Picchu, Kiet Siel, Petra, and sites in ancient Greece and Egypt, but also Auschwitz-Birkenau and lives shattered by torture and oppression.

Author Biography

Writer and social activist Margaret Randall is the author of many books, including To Change the World: My Years in Cuba (2009) and, most recently, As if the Empty Chair/ Cmo si la silla vaca (a bilingual book of poetry) and First Laugh (essays). She lives in Albuquerque.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. xiii
Preface: An Arrival	p. xvii
Places We Call Home	p. 1
Survivor	p. 4
Carrying Dead Mothers at Our Breast	p. 6
Chocolate Zigzags	p. 10
Nankoweap	p. 12
Hovenweep	p. 14
Kiet Siel	p. 18
Before They Changed the Rules	p. 22
Chosen or Imposed	p. 25
I Happened to Look Out My Window	p. 26
Tanka	p. 29
Brazil Is the First to Fade	p. 30
Today It Is Haiti	p. 33
Offended Turf	p. 34
Vulva or Mouth	p. 38
Cursive Writing and Old Slide Rules	p. 40
The Algorithm Tells All	p. 44
Truth or Dare	p. 48
What It Means to Belong	p. 50
Evidence	p. 54
Palenque	p. 57
Xukpi or Corner Bundle	p. 60
Ready to Tell Almost Everything	p. 62
Man with a Crocodile Head	p. 65
Against the Weight of a Feather	p. 68
Thank You	p. 72
David	p. 74
Laurette at Teotihuácan	p. 76
In Search of the Next Sun	p. 79
Underground Astronomy	p. 83
Keeper of Art and Laughter	p. 85
Frida's Column	p. 88
Hermes, Shapeshifter	p. 90
Coming from Nothing, Going to Nothing	p. 92
We Are Hungry	p. 94
Peeling the Onion	p. 100
Real Books	p. 104
Ars Poetica	p. 107
Last Poem	p. 108
Socrates Walks Barefoot	p. 112
Perga Rests Its Broken Bones	p. 114
Separating Aspendos from Sky	p. 116
Where the Dead Lived Better than the Living	p. 118
Different on the Family Farm	p. 121
Grateful Without Knowing Why	p. 122
The Magic in What We Know	p. 124
Blood Lightning Speaks	p. 125
Landscape of Possibility	p. 130
Notes	p. 133
Photographs	p. 135
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