Pine Soot Tendon Bone is Radha Marcum's second book of poems and the winner of the Washington Prize. This book is an elegy for our times, an attempt to find sanity in a world that seems to have lost its senses, lamenting our unfolding crises-wildfires, climate change, mass shootings, a pandemic-alongside personal loss and uprootedness. The title refers to traditional ingredients of Japanese Sumi-e ink stone and, like that art, each poem is born of the elements of nature and the hand of an artist who is exacting yet compassionate. Aware of the perils we face in a fractured world while still able to see the beauty in it, these poems locate hope in the simple but precise act of observing nature.
Amy Irvine says, "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. "
Cyrus Cassells adds, "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."
Carol Moldaw concludes, "In her remarkable second collection of poems, 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. Charged, luminous, and hard-won, these poems are indispensable."