A Future Unmappable by 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 Unmappable 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