“In her terrific new book Seeing Things, Marjorie Maddox affirms the charities of attention as key to understanding, if not ameliorating, problems of fracture, disintegration, depression, disease. To ‘see things’ is to hallucinate, but never that alone. In poems of keen observation and formal beauty, the thingness of the imaginal acquires the stubborn presence of the undeniable, tangible, real. It articulates the crisis of a divided sensibility with a cry, a call to see through ‘the bright glare of what we hide/ from each other,’ to affirm, with unsentimental precision of heart and mind, the prospect of a more inclusive gaze. What could be more timely in an age dominated by image, appearance, lies? ‘Where shall we hide from the pain that bore us,’ the author asks, ‘from the damaged selves that keep us dying?’ Nowhere and everywhere, the poems suggest. In line after line, imagination binds us, makes a sacrament of heartbreak, lifts the veil on a spiritual infusion, the ghost that inhabits the body of world. Marjorie Maddox offers, in valorization of the shared, something of the truly exceptional: a visionary book.”
—Bruce Bond, author of Vault
“Seeing Things tells one story of a family under stress and navigating with grace to heal. It is a page-turner that all of us can read with fascination because in many ways, it is our story too. It’s surely one of the best books I have read this year.”
—Jeanne Murray Walker, author of Leaping from the Burning Train
“Marjorie Maddox’s aptly titled Seeing Things pulls us in precise lines to witness the daily struggles of the world we often turn away from—disease, mental illness, the devastating slow disappearance of a mother and her memory. Utilizing a variety of forms, Maddox traverses rooms of sorrow, and rooms of singing, and in the end offers us, in the face of grief, a profound love of life ‘claiming praise as respite, holding close each breaking day.’”
—Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Death Prefers the Minor Keys
“In Seeing Things, Maddox reminds us that the mind and body often choose our meditations and fates independent of our wills. In middle age, her speaker watches her daughter, the woman she has nurtured to adulthood, and her mother, the woman that nurtured her, reel with disillusion and disability, unstable like our wounded planet subjected to random violence and ecological catastrophe. Hers is the voice of maturity caring for her own old wounds in the midst of many uncertainties, her poems admitting that she is sometimes not seeing well or still learning how to see, and admonishing us to question our perceptions also. Seeing Things is sagacious and relatable. We need more wisdom in this world. We need poets like Maddox to help us to see.”
—Kimberly Ann Priest, author of Slaughter the One Bird
“’Just like that,’ the poet writes, ‘the invisible shifts to visible.’ However, in this remarkable book, Marjorie Maddox shows us that, yes, we are ‘seeing things’ physically, psychologically, artistically, imaginatively, and spiritually—and that yes, we are perceiving clearly, but only when we see through the lens of love and hope. Though we are often ‘wounded and weeping,’ the poet writes, we must ‘Open the window and sing!’ Ultimately, she says, ‘Step out/with arms open, and eyes gathering/vim and vision: grandeur…’”
—Lois Roma-Deeley, Poet Laureate of Scottsdale, AZ, and author of Like Water in the Palm of My Hand
“’We claim one life rewrites the rest,’ but how should we begin? Marjorie Maddox shows us how in this beautifully wrought collection. Among these poems are explorations of aging, mothers and daughters, caring for family members with dementia, trauma, and ‘days holy and unholy.’ You’ll also find gurgling hope, a small gray rabbit, the apple scent of hair in October, and a working radio still playing the oldies. There is a carefully constructed intimacy in these poems shaped by a firm resolve in the ‘layered song of sentences’ inviting you to embark on a worthy voyage and better understand that ‘perhaps it’s snow that filters out the light, perhaps it’s dusk.’
—Connie Post, author of Between Twilight and Broken Metronome
“Marjorie is one of our brightest, most intelligent and diligent poets. Anything she publishes will delight her audience
and gain her new admirers.”
—Luci Shaw, author of An Incremental Life (forthcoming, 2025)
