The Recognition of Movement, by Margaret Marcum

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

This poetry chapbook represents a project on healing the collective, particularly from humanity’s existential angst, through the individual. I entitle it The Recognition of Movement since movement is critical for humanity’s growth and development, and ultimately its evolution—both individually and collectively. The poems comprising it focus on utilizing movement conscientiously as a force for the spirited healing of our individual and collective angst—for to become immobile is to perish.

In addition, the chapbook’s title was inspired by the essay, “Reading as Prowling, Book as Cage.” Its author, Tate Shaw, explains how we engage with books where the only movement is through language. In one part, Shaw renders a tigress’ true essence as “No single, individual cell…[rather] the recognition of movement is her essence” (128). I resonate deeply with this idea because it captures the true essence of the message I hope to convey through these poems: the ultimate sign of life is the recognition of movement. For the ultimate goal of life is movement since we must evolve to heal and live life, to keep moving and to keep growing. Poetry’s true aim, then, is to accomplish such a recognition, whether through focusing on personal narrative to reach the collective or vice versa.

Margaret Marcum lives in Texas with her cats, Angel Clare, Alice, Adam, and Mazzy. She recently graduated from the MFA program in creative writing at Florida Atlantic University. Her poems have appeared in Amethyst Review, Barzakh Magazine, Coffin Bell Journal, NonBinary Review, Scapegoat Review, The Islandia Journal, October Hill Magazine, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, and Children, Churches, and Daddies, among others.