Random Music in a Small Galaxy

Margot Wizansky's latest poetry collection, Random Music in a Small Galaxy, is a retelling of landscapes, mythologies, prayers, histories, evolutions. Every poem carries a sustained understanding of our mortality, "and so delivered us our cursed narrative - " which the poet witnesses, translates, transforms, and defines into poetry. She fully inhabits each life she creates, bringing attention to war, migration, environmental crises, and religion with intimate details and deepened revelations. In her title poem, "Random Music," the poet imparts a truth: "Don't let nostalgia take the place of beauty, / or sentiment will smother all your lines. / Poetry is a risky inclination." Compassionately, Wizansky gives us ways to find the courage to confront whatever this world hurls at us.

-Alexis Ivy, author, Taking the Homeless Census

In Random Music in a Small Galaxy, Margot Wizansky blends observations of the natural world with existential inquiries on mortality and the human condition. Imbued with a deep reverence, her transcendent work "gives praise to ... angles of thrust," celebrating the subtle forces that shape both spirit and landscape. Wizansky's lyrical poetry is the locus where what's ordinary is elevated to the sublime, offering a collection that lingers in the mind, revealing the thought-provoking themes woven within the everyday.

-Eric Hyett, poet and translator

In Random Music in a Small Galaxy, we are immersed in a mythic world where women contain the glen of longing and start the history of love. We are then swept into the awe of the land - in Newfoundland, the Grand Canyon, Iceland - its vastness, its realness (mule dung and all). Several psalms find a home in this book, each one reignited by Margot Wizansky's creative re-imagining. A luxury of details abounds: a "lacery of veins," "night hisses its fast downpour," and "sifting-steel skeletons." In subsequent sections, the mythic becomes real - the Holocaust, refugees, and immigrants. This is a writer with a strong voice: "dead, you aren't pretty" and "take a piece of iceberg / to chill your cocktail." We get the treat of the title poem at the end of the collection. This is a poet who finds random music everywhere, and you definitely want to hear what she discovers.

-Sarah Dickenson Snyder, author, Now These Three Remain