This collection of poems is about connectivity. We are all connected by concerns for global human rights and a sustainable global climate. A rhizome is a root system that connects seemingly separate plants, like a stand of aspen trees. These poems seek out and celebrate our common human roots.

Time's Language contains powerful poems of witness as well as personal poems, and autobiographical prose pieces (that read like prose poems), recounting a life of resistance, the life of a life-long literary and political revolutionary. As US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera writes, "Here are Margaret Randall's decades of love, ink, tears, contestation and light—let us bow in gratitude for this truth-telling, daring, border-breaking, pioneering long-time volume of soul fire."

Rant. Chant. Chisme. is the debut collection of poetry by south Texas native Amalia Ortiz, featuring writing from the first decade of her career. Readers will get a taste of life on the border from the perspective of a young woman of color struggling to write herself into existence. These poems introduce a unique new transcultural feminist viewpoint as the poems call for social and political change along the borderlands. Ortiz, an award-winning performance poet known for her dynamic delivery style, relinquishes control of her writing to the reader, but not without first imparting the theatrical stage directions stated in the book's title, which commands readers to recite these poems aloud in a spoken word celebration exploring culture, music, and place while encouraging the reader to embrace diversity and find their own storytelling voice.

As a farmer with decades spent working in fields, Scott Chaskey has been shaped by daily attention to the earth. A leader in the international Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, he has combined a longstanding commitment to food sovereignty and organic farming with a belief that humble attention to microbial life and diversity of species provides invaluable lessons for building healthy human communities. Along the way, even while planning rotations of fields, ordering seeds, tending to crops and their ecosystems, Chaskey was writing. And in this lively collection of essays, he explores the evolution of his perspective—as a farmer and as a poet. Tracing the first stage in his development back to a homestead in Maine, on the ancestral lands of the Abenaki, he recalls learning to cultivate plants and nourish reciprocal relationships among species, even as he was reading Yeats and beginning to write poems. He describes cycling across Ireland, a surprise meeting with Seamus Heaney, and, later, farming in Cornwall’s ancient landscape of granite, bramble, and windswept trees. He travels to China for an international conference on Community Supported Agriculture, reading ancient wilderness poetry along the way, and then on to the pueblo of Santa Clara in New Mexico, where he joins a group of Indigenous women harvesting amaranth seeds. Closer to home on the Southfork of Long Island, he describes planting redwood saplings and writing verse under the canopy of an American beech. “Enlivened by decades of work in open fields washed by the salt spray of the Atlantic”—words that describe his prose as well as his vision of connectedness—Scott Chaskey has given us a book for our time. A seed of hope and regeneration.

Against Atrocity is Margaret Randall's first large book of poems since Time's Language: Selected Poems 1959-2018, a major collection covering work from 30 of her books over a period of 60 years. This new book shows that this poet continues to be a relevant and inspiring voice in American letters. It is also a stellar example of contemporary, intelligent protest poetry by a significant writer. Long known and honored for her work throughout the Americas, she is also long admired in the LGBTQ community. Among numerous awards, Randall was awarded the Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett grant for writers victimized by political repression. In 2004 she was the first recipient of PEN New Mexico’s Dorothy Doyle Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing and Human Rights Activism. In 2017, she was only the second American to be awarded the prestigious Medal of Literary Merit by Literatura en el Bravo, Chihuahua, Mexico. Nicaraguan poet Daisy Zamora writes: "These poems restore language to its authentic meaning, remind us of the power of words when expressing the truth, and the redeeming potential of poetry in these terrible times." These are indeed terrible times, ones in which we increasingly find ourselves looking to art and creativity to lift us from the unchecked violence, everyday frustration of deaf governance, and an out-of-control profit motive that too often seems to bury us in a dangerous sense of futility. Randall writes as insightfully about the plight of a single woman or child as she does about global warming or the mysteries of aging. In these poems we find more questions than answers, but they are the questions we must continue to ask ourselves in order for our humanity to survive.Against Atrocity will also see publication this year, in completely bilingual format, by Aguacero in Buenos Aires, Argentina. And some of the poems are included in El lenguaje del tiempo, a book-length sampling of the poet's work coming out from El Angel Editor in Quito, Ecuador to coincide with that country's Poesía en paralelo cero (Poetry on the Equator), an important Latin American poetry festival. Randall's work is being published in Cuba, throughout South America, in Europe and Asia. She is someone who combines the intimate with the international, our small stories with the larger one that shapes us all. Here are poems that pierce complacency's thick skin and provide a road map to agency and hope.

Cross Words refers to cultural hybrids, trans-cultural alliances, and associations. This fascinating compendium documents—in essays, conversations, and socratic raps—the vital work poets perform when they write across borders. Anne Waldman is the author of more than forty collections of poetry, the editor of numerous anthologies, and, for The Iovis Trilogy, the winner of the Shelley Memorial Award and the USA PEN Center Award for Poetry. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Laura E. Wright is a poet, translator, and librarian. With Anne Waldman, she co-edited Beats at Naropa (Coffee House Press, 2009).

For nearly three centuries, Cuba's economy was based on a single crop -- sugar cane. After Fidel Castro's 1959 Revolution of 1959, despite serious attempts at diversification, the country continued to depend on the monocrop. Men and women cut cane by hand. City people who had never swung a machete spent long volunteer hours aiding the national effort. But the US embargo and diminishing international markets destroyed Cuba's economy. Gaudencio Rodr&íguez Santana's NATIONAL ECONOMY / ECONOMIA NACIONAL explores that collapse and its physical, emotional and psychic consequences. It is a powerful, insightful collection of eye-witness poems by one of Cuba's most celebrated contemporary poets. As translator and editor Margaret Randall writes in her introduction, Rodr&íguez Santana "uses the failure of sugar as a metaphor for the many revolutionary hopes that have been lost. He evokes landscapes, tastes, smells, a cartography that no longer exists. In these poems, metaphor moves beyond itself as it hits the reader with a profound and complex truth. This book is raw and painful. It contains a rare imagery in the voice of a poet who combines an intimate knowledge of what he writes about with a unique poetic voice and exquisite perfection of his craft."

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.

"A collection of intimate and conversational accounts of the artists that have impacted the poet activist Margaret Randall on her own creative journey. As makers of art, social commentators, women in a world dominated by male values, and in solitude or collaboration with communities, each artist is seen in the context of the larger artistic arena. Through her reflections, Randall also takes on questions about visual art as a whole and its lasting political influence on the world"--

Traces the remarkable life of a feminist poet through the items and images that have have defined her experiences My Life in 100 Objects is a personal reflection on the events and moments that shaped the life and work of one extraordinary woman. With a masterful, poetic voice, Margaret Randall uses talismanic objects and photographs as launching points for her nonlinear narrative. Through each “object,” Randall uncovers another part of herself, starting in a museum in Amman, Jordan, and ending in the Latin American Studies Association in Boston. Interwoven throughout are her most precious relationships, her growth as an artist, and her brave, revolutionary spirit. As Randall’s adventures often coincide with important moments in history, many of her objects provide a transcontinental glimpse into social upheavals and transitions. She shares memories from her years in Cuba (1969 to 1980) and Nicaragua (1980 to 1984), as well as briefer periods in North Vietnam (immediately preceding the end of the war in 1975), and Peru (during the government of Velasco Alvarado). In her introduction, Randall states, “objects and places have always been alive to me.” Her history too is alive, as much of a means to consider our own present as it is to glimpse her vibrant past.