The Morning After

The Morning After is Margaret Randall's 30th poetry collection and eleventh with Wings Press. The title poem was written, as so many in this country were, the morning after the November 8, 2016 presidential election: "I wish there was a pill for that," is one of its lines. But Randall doesn't stay with anger, irony, or a pamphleteering voice. Her work goes much deeper, grappling with ageless concerns and unexpected details. Throughout this volume there is a concern with time, place, and memory; intimate landscape; mature love; the current threat to the richness of language; global consciousness; a mapping of human questioning and exploration of identity. In these pages the reader will find George Zimmerman's gun, a herd of buffalo at Standing Rock, rebar, the Super Moon, "reptile dysfunction," and multiple choice vs. Socratic wisdom. Reflecting Randall's recent work with translation, several poems take on that practice in its broadest sense. Stylistically, for the first time in half a century she has gone back to her modus of the 1960s and mixed story and prosody with poetry; only now the result is more sophisticated and much harder hitting. The title poem of The Morning After first appeared in two anthologies of poetry responding to the January 2017 presidential inauguration: Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance and Truth to Power; and in Spanish translation in Revista Casa de las Américas, Havana, Cuba. The Morning After contains powerful poems of witness as well as personal poems, both of which soar through "limitless rooms, unfenced spaces / where our thoughts may procreate / before they change direction," as well as autobiographical prose pieces (that read like prose poems), recounting a life of resistance, the life of a life-long literary and political revolutionary. If ever there were a time for the words of Margaret Randall, it is now. Read this book. Howl this book!