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Critical Praise for Their Backs to the Sea: Poems and Photographs

• Margaret Randall's Their Backs to the Sea is a major accomplishment from one of America's most radical poet-citizens. Randall travels here "beyond cobalt" and "beyond turquoise" to Rapa Nui to consider the implications of legend, lore, geography, geology, migration, conquest, slave economies, and the powerful, insistent and mysterious presence of the magnificent stone moai, whose backs are indeed to the sea. . . .

  — Anne Waldman, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Naropa University

• Their Backs to the Sea shows me again why I have looked to Margaret Randall for a poetry & a life driven by many forces, multiple times & places, changing with a will to change that places her among the real & really forceful poets of our time.

  — Jerome Rothenberg, author of Traditions of the Sacred

• The ease with which one moves through this clean, clear music masks the depth at which it works to change us as we read, enlarging an inner life to make room for so much experience— an exploration of the rim of Rapa Nui, an aging mother's death, the uprising in Mexico during the '68 Olympics. Margaret Randall writes poems of sympathy, intelligence, and witness.

  — Samuel R. Delany, author of Dark Reflections

• Where do history and poetry meet to produce a third space of interrogation, wonder, and resonance? They do here. Their Backs to The Sea is a cartography of ruin, of contested days, of reclamation and occupation, of origin myths, of homage to the mysteries of an Easter Island both real and imagined, of lives lived in the center of time, of bodies who speak because language is life.

  — Akilah Oliver, author of The She Said Dialogues

Reviews

• Poet's Travel Book of Rapa Nui

  A Traveler's LibraryMarch 2010

  http://atravelerslibrary.com/2010/03/16/poets-travel-book-of-rapa-nui/

  In the first half of her book, the poetry and photography beautifully portray the mysterious stone heads on the island, and she asks the questions that I have asked when seeing pictures of the carvings, weaving the physical descriptions through the facts and speculations of history and anthropology.

  Even here, she sees the dangers of colonialism, and her contemplation of the ancients moves through time to Baghdad, and on to a loop between past and present and futureboth personal and global. Thus the second half of the book moves from Easter Island to the contemplation of universal life questions, and asks more of the reader than simple tourism.

  --Vera Marie Badertscher