"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, author of The House of Broken Angels

"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, author of Sueño

"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, author of Stairway to Heaven

"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, translator and author of Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico

"...so beautiful it verges on the ridiculous."—B.A. Van Sise, New York Journal of Books

"The poems of A Camera Obscura travel the sprawling asphalt roads of a country still slippery to those who do not fit perfectly within it yet nevertheless live beneath the vast sky map that embraces us all, regardless of our culture or home."  —Angela María Spring, Washington Independent Review of Books

"A Camera Obscura by Carl Marcum is a book that feels full, feels like it is inspired by life itself (minutely and grandly) and the pact of pondering through a poet’s daily travels. This collection is filled with lines that stop us dead in our tracks." —North of Oxford

"A Camera Obscura is a compelling journey that simultaneously drifts through the cosmos while being rooted to the ground beneath our feet." —New Books in Poetry Podcast

"A cosmic plaintiveness suffuses this volume." —Lee Rossi, Pedestal Magazine