Where They Left You for Dead: Halfway Home

Where They Left You for Dead is a series of thirty-eight poems written to the poet's lifetime companion who suffers chronic pain. In them, author Margaret Randall looks honestly at the ways in which pain claims its own space in a relationship, and how deeply committed partners can make choices that lead to acceptance and transcendence rather than frustration or denial. In the second part of the book, Halfway Home, Randall turns her attention to her own process of aging, replete with astonishment, humor, and gratitude. Together these "books within a book" weave a contrapuntal tapestry of search and retrieval, question and possible answers, awareness and joy. There is nothing predictable about this work. Randall's world is always larger than the immediate problem to be solved, so many of these poems also reach out to embrace the global questions that concern us all: memory, injustice in all its forms, and women's place within the human whole. But the poems are, first and foremost, poetry, in which Randall makes the connections we often fail to see because they are so intimately and integrally a part of our lives. Book jacket.