Michele Parker Randall

A Future Unmappable Michele Parker Randall

There's a rope between two burning towers. One tower burns anxiously. The other tower (the left side of the brain) burns orderly. Randall is dancing on that rope. It is the motion-a footfall, a locomotive blowing hard, a wave-that keeps her from falling. An ecstasy is a song to motion, to ex stasis, and Randall belts it true enough to pop the deepest bass string on your Fender Squier guitar.

-Barrett Warner, Why Is It So Hard to Kill You?




These powerful poems erode our physical boundaries leaving us to explore mental illness as a patient and as a caregiver alternatively. With ferocity yet in a ceremony of revelation, Michele Parker Randall's A Future Unmapable artfully discloses the unfathomable struggle of helping a beloved come back from the brink. Honest and courageous, each poem is a study of the much-needed conversation of what it is like to live with and recover from such a destabilizing experience.

-Didi Jackson, Moon Jar




In A Future Unmappable, Michele Parker Randall explores the nakedness of mental uncertainty: What is real? what is not? when "unable to tell the dream-state from the wake-state / Try to free someone from inside a balloon." Muted tension screams in the torque of Randall's lines: "coiledspring / a snake" "between the wardscape / walls" "how many worlds we / fit in one day." These panoptic poems offer a view from the in-between lest any of us be too sure.

-Tanya Grae, Undoll