Carl Marcum is a Chicano poet from Tucson, Arizona. He is the author of the collections, Cue Lazarus and A Camera Obscura, and his poems have appeared in the anthologies, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, and Latinix Rising: An Anthology of Latinx Science Fiction & Fantasy. He received his MFA from The University of Arizona and was Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Marcum has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Taos Writers Conference. He served as a Canto Mundo Fellow from 2011-2015. Marcum taught for many years at DePaul University in Chicago, and now lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he is the Managing Director of small Engineering & Environmental Consulting Firm.

Other poems by Carl Marcum in Verse Daily:

Books by Carl Marcum:

Other poems on the web by Carl Marcum:
Three poems

Carl Marcum on Twitter.

About A Camera Obscura:

"Carl Marcum takes inspiration here ranging from the gravity of living on Earth to the extremity of contemplating the stars. He writes his way into stunning imaginative identification with ‘Xipe Totec, the Flayed One' and into science-smart reflection on images gleaned by the Hubble Space Telescope. The reach of the book is gorgeous, all attended to with an appetite for language that seems itself a kind of soul hunger. The ‘smolder and spark' of Chicago's cityscape, the word ‘cute,' the Drake equation ending in Fermi's paradox, the star called ‘Ojo de Dios'—all seek to ‘unite the mind with the unknown' in these fine and engaging poems."
—Alison Hawthorne Deming

"Heady and full like a hearty glass of Petite Sirah, this intelligent collection of poems displays the best of ‘American' fusion. Both aged and fresh, these poems blanket the tongue with their flush of lush language. High and low culture blend with the Native Spanish of the Southwest in this poetry of sanguine saguaros set in the windows of Chicago high-rises and the spoils from academic ivory towers, those ‘robots' less than human, ‘more than semiotic ghost'—all woven together into A Camera Obscura, which holds ‘every heavenly hypothesis.'"
—Lorna Dee Cervantes

"I have been a fan of Carl Marcum's work for years. His first book, Cue Lazarus, rented a room in my head for a while. It's great to have him back in there, kicking the furniture around. Orale, poeta!"
—Luis Alberto Urrea

"Carl Marcum is that rare poet who dares to peer into the darkness and give name to the unknowable ('the land you could never pronounce,' 'the horizon between us'). Like an old Stoic in the age of dark matter, Marcum understands that we are, at our best, 'a quintessence of dust.' His is an investigative poetics of the untranslatably profane and sublime: the etymology of cuteness and passion, the spatial logic of Walmart, the mysteries of a José Clemente Orozco mural, indigenous histories and cosmologies, the light of a Chicago autumn and its stone. The poet's imagination is as 'synthetic and pervasive / as microchips' but attuned to the 'meander of Andromeda' and the 'movement of thought against light.' Marcum claims the physics of poetry and the poetry of physics in a liminal poetics of 'anisotropic apostrophe' that values 'the interval. / What's between, / what's missing.' The in-between here is also Chicago, 'the prophetic city' and its speculative fictions: 'City of the aborted future, shroud of parallax.' Like a Midwestern, half-Mexicano Whitman, the poet becomes part and particle of the city in a (meta)physics of dérive: 'Soy tanta cuidad.' In the spirit of modern poiesis, A Camera Obscura maps how 'Chaos works through its agenda of dust,' but it never gives up on a visionary poetics of 'incantation and renewal,' where 'sound is stretched / to color, color stitched to light, light solidifying / to absence.' You won't read a smarter book of poetry this light-year! Come for the trippy 'SciFi-ku' ('We should be a space- / faring people, if only / to leave and come back.'). Come for a stunning sonnet and its high-voltage volta ('of dividing lines and the sun's far off fusion.'"). Come for the geek-chic hijinks and virtuoso/rasquache world-making (an 'interruption' of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a riff on the Drake equation). Then stay for the lovely cosmic blues ('How does this field escape its naming?'), for a poetry that maps our other-worlds and other-words in the here and now: 'O, this present tense, this wretched skin. / We are something always to be sketched in.'"
—Urayoán Noel