Happy Birthday, Book!
After years of labor, it's here. Pine Soot Tendon Bone, my new poetry collection, is officially in the world.
If you've been following this space for a while, then it won’t be news to you that I have a book coming out.
Today, I'm elated to announce that the book is now out in the world, in fully actualized, physical form! And, yes, you can easily get a copy (see links below).
Friends, as you know, this took years. From reinventing my approach to poem-making to write about new subject matters, to drafting and iterating individual poems, to building and rebuilding and submitting the manuscript, to working with the press ...
It all had to synchronize with my Life. Capital L. With coordinating driver's license tests and submitting college applications (and the FAFSA!) for my kids. With seeing an ailing relative through his last months. With keeping up with client work that pays bills (employment that makes a life, small L, in poetry possible), all while living through a pandemic, wildfires, a mass shooting, and sudden losses of dear friends. Through surviving a bike accident that broke two vertebrae in my neck and rebuilding my body and life afterward. Though many happy times, as well.
I think it's fair to say the publisher's effort has been no less immense. From coordinating submissions, to choosing this manuscript, to editing, more editing, formatting, even more editing, facilitating cover design, etc—connecting the many dots that it takes to connect the book with a readership—the lists of tasks is endless and largely invisible to us as readers.
It's a miracle books are born. Truly. Every book is a birth. I cried when I realized my labor was over. So I hope you'll join me in celebrating this book, my baby.
About Pine Soot Tendon Bone
"Pine Soot Tendon Bone (the traditional ingredients of Japanese Sumi-e inkstone) is a work of absorbing, unerring description that celebrates the natural world’s wonders and consolations, while nimbly acknowledging, in almost the same breath, the persistence of annihilating, at-large gunmen and unjust exile (“the t / at the end of internment”). In this prize-winning book, with champion empathy and visual prowess (“make the page a horizon”), Radha Marcum invites us to feel and sense more deeply our dynamic, contradictory world, insisting time and again on attentive poetry’s gorgeous music and crisp, accurate magic." —Cyrus Cassells, author of Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch? and 2021 Texas Poet Laureate
"In her remarkable second collection of poems, Pine Soot Tendon Bone, Radha Marcum writes unflinchingly and with a rare synthesis of lyric and scientific intelligence. A close-range witness to the ravages of Boulder’s wildfires and the tragedy of mass random shootings in her community, Marcum is sensitive in equal measure to the beauties, griefs, and depredations of our era. Like the chickadees in “Cadenzas,” her poems “sing harmonies / to complicate your discontent” as they investigate just what it is to exist with consciousness now. Charged, luminous, and hard-won, these poems are indispensable." —Carol Moldaw, author of Beauty Refracted
"Say we put together an American time capsule and put it in the blessed ground. Say we included Radha Marcum’s new poems. Say someone—born to a time beyond our current and colossal problems—unearths the capsule and reads the collection. That person would feel climate chaos, mass shootings, and a pandemic that’s gone on too long—not as abstractions, but like their own slick viscera. They’d understand, then, why future generations live at all: because these poems did the necessary and astonishing work of turning us away from divisions, distractions, denial, and doing for doing’s sake. Of reattaching our flailing umbilici to the natural world. Marcum reminds us, in details that will live in our skin and dreams forever, that attention and embodiment are central to our survival. That when we say yes to the grief of now, we say yes to every soaring hawk, every fire-scarred ponderosa, and to each other." —Amy Irvine, author of Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness
Thank you for supporting me, The Word Works, and this book.
As I say in the acknowledgements page: Thanks ... to my students and the Poet to Poet community for daring to keep poetry at the center.
Upcoming Events & Classes
If you're at LitFest in Denver this week, I'll be at the Faculty Showcase Reading: June 14, 4:30-5:30pm MT. Register.
More readings and book-related events TBA soon.
And it’s not too late to join me for …
How to Publish Poetry — Lunch & Learn (Virtual)
Are you working on a full-length poetry manuscript or chapbook, or building a portfolio of journal publications? Learn how to work smarter and overcome common obstacles to getting published during these monthly sessions in 2024. Jump in any time. Our next session is July 10th. Get a free guest pass.
It does not matter how many times one has done it, a book coming out is always a cause for celebration when one sees how many good poets had real trouble trying to see their books in print not to mention those who never published a collection. Good luck to you with any sales that may be.
Just the best news! Congratulations 🎊