Radha Marcum is a Boulder-based poet who grew up in New Mexico. She studied at Bennington College for her undergraduate degree and earned her MFA from University of Washington, Seattle. Marcum’s first collection of poetry, Bloodline (2017), published by 3: A Taos Press, received the 2018 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award in Poetry. It maps her own history as well as the nuclear age in Los Alamos where Marcum’s grandfather was a Manhattan Project scientist. Her poetry considers how that era’s legacy affects the women in her family and our shared sacred lands

Radha Marcum

During the COVID years of 2019-2021, Marcum was inspired to cast her latest collection, pine soot tendon bone (2024). The collection won the 2023 Washington Prize and many of the poems have been published in journals such as Humana Obscura, Plant-Human Quarterly and Poetry Northwest.

pine soot tendon bone visits moments of tragedy and lays a map for navigating those times, rooted in place. The title is mined from the poem “Hidden Narrative” which is Ekphrastic in nature, considering works of art by Japanese-American painter Kakunen Tsuruoka, held in internment at the Colorado River Relocation Center in Arizona during WWII. Tsuruoka painted in a traditional Japanese method of blending pine soot and water for his brush strokes. Marcum mimics his ink with her own words, “swirled from ink stone / (pine, soot, tendon, bone).” Imagining Tsuroka’s freedom beyond barbed wire, Marcum envisions “borderless clouds” where only Tsuruoka’s brush strokes can set “the skeletal mesquite twisting”.

Hidden narratives are revealed in other poems as well, such as an underlying event of destruction that seeks recovery in nature. In “Fire Season in the West” Marcum contemplates life after the 2021 Marshall Fire. Her west is burning. Ashes are mistaken for fireflies. Dry conditions are sparked by lightning. Marcum wonders, “how many acres this season?” What will survive? What will resurrect? Can she learn to “forgive the grasses    that replace the trees?”

In “Swarm, Marcum inserts an epigraph by Muriel Rukeyser: “Whatever can come to a city can come to this city.” This is a requiem for the March 22, 2021 mass shooting at the Table Mesa King Sooper’s in Boulder that took ten lives. Everyday life is transformed in mourning as “[a] cold door opens in memory onto frozen peas … repeating … waiting to be torn open.” Marcum wrestles with this “new era, a new colony, the mate-swarm like too / much punctuation.” Even in ordinary places, doors open, terror enters and memories linger.

Marcum examines her anxieties, and how she tries to soothe them. The poem “Four a.m.” remarks on her fragility: “I am crows in a broken cottonwood.” She tries to be strong for her children, her partner, her community. Sometimes all she can do is “claw the sheets” and “pray for snow glitz to shiver it all.”

Other times she draws on her creativity. In “Poets,” she records her observations of piñón jays, the image of birds carrying piñón seeds in their mouths and burying the seeds which, when forgotten, will eventually grow into new evergreens. This forgotten hibernation is a reminder that things may get buried or go unsaid, but there will be an emergence. Even in the dark, a slow-growing Spring will unfold.

“Poem” is Marcum’s Ars Poetica, a poem about the nature of poetry. Her writing style draws from nature, its beauty and life cycles that lead to death, decomposition and renewal. When the poet runs dry, she seeks “the well’s plummet.” Cholla cactus prick with their thorns, but they also bloom. Rows and rows of sharp pines guide lines of poetry in one of her constructions. Radha Marcum’s desired path is one she hopes to map by noticing the wild and transplanting those observations into poems. Instead of the tumultuous, she settles on beauty because, ultimately, she knows all of it is “going after all, in the end.” With a decision to move her work away from “The Velocity of Sorrow”—the title of a poem about school shootings that was considered for the book’s title—Marcum chooses to lean toward embodiment and nature. This is her suggestion to us, her readers, as we move through these bewildering times.