"I think of these as my 'impossible poems,' poems made from the battered language they are leaving us with, the torn and devastated language, the words twisted to mean the opposite of what they have always meant... turning language back on itself, as if going home..."
Margaret Randall's Something's Wrong with the Cornfields offers an array of
sacred spaces, evocative landscapes, historical acts, and personal infusions. The poems augur around the ability to alternate between the universal and the obscure, between personal orbit and cultural aura. Some poems constrict like bloodward spirals, and others unravel from their topical moorings. As with earlier volumes like Stones Witness, hers is a language in flux, where the willingness to yield alephs and symbols over time gives the poet a new scope to write beyond fixity.