A Camera Obscura (Red Hen Press, 2021) by Carl Marcum is a lyrical exploration of external and internal worlds. The heavens described in these poems could be the stars glittering above our heads, the pathways of faith, or the connection between human beings. Playing with scientific understandings of the world, along with the linguistic conventions of the poetic form, A Camera Obscura is a compelling journey that simultaneously drifts through the cosmos while being rooted to the ground beneath our feet.

“When the sun rose it was smaller

than in my dream. I had been asleep

for what felt a long time, and woke

confused and claustrophobic.

The texture of the sky still magnetized me,

a desert bright day. But the light is streaked

like too much everything pulled to the edges

of a window in storm.”

— from “A Science Fiction”

Carl Marcum is a Chicano poet from Tucson, Arizona. He is the author of the collection Cue Lazarus, and his poems have appeared in the anthologies The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry and Latinx Rising: An Anthology of Latinx Science Fiction & Fantasy. Carl has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Taos Writers Conference. And he has also served as a Canto Mundo Fellow from 2011 to 2015.

Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction.

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