Pine Soot Tendon Bone

Winner of the 50th Anniversary Washington Prize

Radha Marcum’s second book of poems is an elegy for our times, lamenting unfolding crises—wildfires, climate change, gun violence—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.

Forthcoming in 2024 from The Word Works

"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, 2021 Texas Poet Laureate and author of Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch?

Review Copies & Author Requests

Get in touch.