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The Coming Home Poems
Margaret Randall
A collection by Margaret Randall — poet, oral historian, photographer, and one of the more remarkable political lives in American letters. Randall spent decades in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua, close to the revolutionary movements of the Americas, before returning to the United States in the 1980s. Her poetry is plainspoken, witnessing, and unafraid of politics, rooted in solidarity and in the texture of ordinary lives. This particular title has left only a faint bibliographic trace, but it sits within a large, committed body of work in which the idea of home — exile, return, belonging, and the price of one's convictions — is a defining preoccupation.
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The author
Margaret Randall (b. 1936, New York City) is a poet, essayist, oral historian, photographer, and activist whose life reads like a map of the twentieth-century American left. She lived for years in Mexico (where she co-edited the bilingual journal El Corno Emplumado), then in Cuba and Nicaragua, chronicling the women of those revolutions. When she returned to the United States in 1984, the government moved to deport her under the McCarran-Walter Act, objecting to the politics in her writing; she fought the case for years and won her citizenship in 1989 — a landmark First Amendment battle.
The book
The Coming Home Poems belongs to Randall's extensive poetry output, though this specific title has left a thin public record — publisher and date are not readily documented. Its concerns are legible from both her life and its title: home and homecoming, exile and return, and what belonging means for someone whose commitments carried her far from where she began.
How to read it
As part of a witnessing life's work — poetry as testimony, unembarrassed by politics and grounded in solidarity and the everyday.
For more context
Randall's oral history Sandino's Daughters (on the women of the Nicaraguan revolution) and her memoir I Never Left Home.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Margaret Randall
- ISBN
- None
- Format
- Chapbook
- Shelf
- Poetry
- Location
- Maine