About Little Charlie Lindbergh and Other Poems

Overview

About Little Charlie Lindbergh, like earlier Margaret Randall poetry collections, presents a unique poetic voice by a revered elder in the genre. These poems are all about making connections, many of them unexpected. Randall links national events with intimate family moments, ancient ruins with present-day communities, and prehistory with history (making a convincing argument for the former as a part of the latter). Everyday speech and expressions that have become social clichés or advertising banter find their way into these poems and acquire the precision of literary elegance. Straightforward speech becomes passionate lyricism. This book gives lie to the notion that so-called political poetry must by nature come off as propagandistic; complexity and grace are always present. The poems collected here pay attention to birth, love, loss, Jewish identity, domestic and international violence, the environment, language, art, class, race, gender, and sexual identity. All these seemingly disparate subjects are linked by an empowering way of seeing and saying. This is social justice poetry that packs a wallop and moves the reader deeply.

Reviews

"Margaret Randall is an international treasure, and About Little Charlie Lindbergh may be her very best book. If you don't know her work, here's the place to start. . . . With wisdom and humor, with grace and pain and music and sanity, this is a poetry to live by."  —Bob Holman, poet, Picasso in Barcelona

" 'Harmony enters only where something stolen/ s replaced by risk.' Words that are as much a poetics as they are advice in these poems that make meaning of risk and tell the truth of the stolen. Just as a life lived in the open in a philosopher's quest for the Good and True takes risk, these poems face fear and loss, always historicize—and steal away with Beauty, always a risk; poems of intimate 'interlocking scenes' of a life which 'invites us/ to make one last chance/ our best.' Margaret Randall has (finally) come into her age to show us how: 'We are more than the sum/ of paltry choices available at birth.'"  —Lorna Dee Cervantes, poet, Emplumada

"Margaret Randall's latest collections of poetry are, as usual, boldly political and deeply personal . . . . Like most of Randall's poetry, these collections — About Little Charlie Lindbergh and Beneath a Trespass of Sorrow — reflect the outsider's view of the injustices undermining our sense of humanity." —Roberto Bonazzi, San Antonio Express-News

Author Biography

Margaret Randall is a feminist poet, writer, photographer, and social activist. She is the author of more than 100 books, including The Rhizome as a Field of Broken Bones, Sandino's Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle, Stones Witnesses, and Their Backs to the Sea: Poems and Photographs, and the cofounder and coeditor of El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, a bilingual literary journal. She is also the first recipient of the PEN New Mexico's Dorothy Doyle Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing and Human Rights Activism. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.