Luck

Margaret Randall is a feminist poet, essayist, and oral historian with a long history of social activism (in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua, as well as the United States). More than 200 published books reflect her personal experience and generational struggles. She has also translated much poetry by others. In Mexico, she co-founded El Corno Emplumado, a bilingual journal that published more than 700 writers from 35 countries. Returning to the US in 1984, the government ordered her deported, claiming her writing subversive. She won her case in 1989. Among her recent awards are the Poet of Two Hemisphere Prize (Quito, Ecuador 2019) and the 2020 George Garrett Award given by AWP.

"Margaret Randall has an uncanny ability to verbalize the pressing thoughts and questions that often elude us. . . . opening us to possibilities that we might otherwise never encounter, inviting us to come to our own conclusions. Partnering and paralleling Randall's words are the powerful, evocative drawings of Barbara Byers, the two creating together a work summed up perfectly by the final words of Luck: 'no metaphor… only untiring passion carrying creativity on its wings.'" - Susan Sherman, founding editor of IKON Magazine and author of America's Child "With essays on everything from Aging to 9/11 to a manifesto/litany on Anger, from poetic meditations on the weather to memory itself, Truth is Margaret Randall's essential philosophy. She is there in the pantheon with Gwendolyn Brooks, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, Wanda Coleman, Audre Lorde. Her humanity and humor, her comedy and tragedy, her activism and her love, all that Margaret Randall is, is the definition of a poet." - Bob Holman (poet, filmmaker, and founder of the Bowery Poetry Club) "Luck is both a collection of concise and adventurous philosophical essays by one of the modern world's great poets, Margaret Randall, and a series of equally adventurous visual thought drawings by her life partner, the master generative artist and teacher, Barbara Byers. Both explore territory that cannot be experienced without the willing energy and daring that takes them beyond what even they might have expected from themselves in a process of creative exploration." - V.B. Price (author of Memoirs of the World in 10 Fragments and Lucretius and the Logic of Venus)