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Thanks for dropping by my author website. Here you’ll find my current work, opportunities to write with me, and more. Have a query? Please contact me directly. For my content strategy and communications consulting work, please visit Insights Collaborative.

“Line by line, Radha cuts her own way toward understanding the deep story she is in, a story we all share.” –William S. Barnes, The Ledgerbook

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Winner, New Mexico Book Award in Poetry

Bloodline

“Bloodline is a mesmerizing, intelligent book, full of beauty, science, and ancestry.” –Michael Henry 

Bloodline Cover new for posting

I started writing on my mom’s Hermes 3000 typewriter when I was seven.

Since then, I have made it my life’s work to tap language’s power to gather our collective attention on what matters, whether through writing poems or by being a voice for innovation in health, environment, and business.  In 2022, I launched Poet to Poet, a newsletter and private community for poets developing books.

My writing practice is rooted in ecological, social, and personal landscapes of the American West. I’m most interested in hidden narratives, exploring resonances between outer environment and what poet Muriel Rukeyser called our in-vironment (or what Gerard Manley Hopkins called the inscape of things) through language’s relational energy. I consider myself an eco-poet but not just that; I weave threads of physics, found texts, visual arts, and many other disciplines into poems. You also might say my approach leans into phenomenology, mirroring structures of consciousness in poetic expression.

Ecological time, like technological time, is speeding up. To highlight that, I use juxtaposition in my poems—combining human timelines and geologic phenomena, for example, or scientific theories and archetypal wisdom. The physicist Niels Bohr once said: “Physics isn’t the study of what is. It is the study of what we can say about what is.” Poetry is the same—not an encapsulation of a static thing but a series of textual/textural gestures that synchronize us with unseen facts, engaging us in the emotional truths we may require for our survival.

Why Poetry

“Poetry is not an encapsulation of a static thing but a series of textual/textural gestures that synchronize us with unseen facts, engaging us in the emotional truths we may require for our survival.”

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Praise for Bloodline

  • “Bloodline succeeds admirably in beginning to answer the question posed in ‘Project Y’: ‘What can I say to my children / when they find hollow, underground test chambers / in the dry, open spaces of their personal history?’”–New Mexico Magazine 

    Peter BG Shoemaker
    New Mexico Magazine
  • “The legacy of Los Alamos is a rich and challenging subject; by setting it opposite a meditation on desert landscapes, on people in those spaces, Marcum has opened a new window into intractable questions about who we are and what we have done.” –Terrain.org 

    Amy Knight
    Terrain.org
  • “Fusion, fission, breakability, unbreakability, incorruptibility are all themes that the poet works into her lines. This beautiful poetry bears witness without being didactic or overtly political—and its message is clear.” –Poet Lore 

    Anne Harding Woodworth
    Poet Lore

Write With Me

Join me for craft seminars and workshops at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, coaching sessions, and drop-in virtual writing classes.

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Student Feedback

  • “I can’t thank you enough for another great class series.  Everything about the class was great and your class is the hour I look forward to most each week!” 

    Celeste
    Drop-in Class Regular
  • “This was one of the best and most helpful classes I have taken. It was well organized, with helpful details and great examples. Filled me with ideas and spurred me on. Thank you, Radha.”

    Sue
    Lighthouse Student
  • “Excellent class! It covered very important material—and Radha is an intelligent, intuitive instructor. I wish we could have more course offerings from her!”

    Paige
    Lighthouse Student

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