Ruins

In this poetry collection, Margaret Randall uses the metaphor of ruins to meditate on time's movement-through memory, through cities, through the leavings of history, and through the bodies of people who have experienced time's transformations and traumas. Randall's ruins include not only Chaco Canyon, Hovenweep, Teotihuacan, Machu Picchu, Kiet Siel, Petra, and sites in ancient Greece and Egypt, but also Auschwitz-Birkenau and lives shattered by torture and oppression.

Writer and social activist Margaret Randall is the author of many books, including To Change the World: My Years in Cuba (2009) and, most recently, As if the Empty Chair/ Cmo si la silla vaca (a bilingual book of poetry) and First Laugh (essays). She lives in Albuquerque.