Seeing Things

by Marjorie Maddox

94 pages, Paperback

Published February 28, 2025

Reviews

[Maria Terrone · Rating 5 out of 5]

From "Guardian," her first poem in Seeing Things, Marjorie Maddox moved me profoundly with a strange, disquieting beauty that carries throughout this courageous book. She writes with hard-won certainty that "we wear the unseen's shadow," and her poetry moves deep into these shadows: a daughter's delusions, physical illness, her mother's dementia, without a hint of self-pity. Her many formal poems contain and shape these difficult subjects, raising them to the level of true art. Seeing Things demonstrates how a woman of faith deals with life's sorrows and pain. Ultimately, Maddox does not lose hope but ends with "Ode to Everything": "holding close each breaking day, dangerous/yet divine in all/its gorgeous glory." The intermingling of danger and divinity is remarkably realized in this powerful new work.

[Amy Small-McKinney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seeing Things by Marjorie Maddox is a triumph of craft, language, form, and content. Using unsentimental and surprising language, Maddox peels away layers and decades of the unsaid and the purported invisible, “the boulder-sized heft of the hidden.” As a mother, as a daughter, and as a woman deeply looking and listening and speaking, she interweaves her story with the stories of other women and children, finally allowing this reader to say, yes, yes, and thank you. Throughout the book, the villanelle, odes, and triolets help to contain the uncontainable. Finding the words for her role as caregiver for a mother who no longer knows her, her role as mother of a daughter struggling with challenges, and as a woman who is finally facing her own abuse, Maddox unearths “new syllables / solid on our tongues, ready to speak, / speaking.” What makes this book extraordinary is the clear-eyed, and yet somehow gentle, confrontation that, if we are lucky, offers this possibility: “weight-lifted together, / becomes stone bridge, becomes / path home.” This book asks us to read and read it again.

[Catherine Hodges · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Just like that, the invisible shifts to visible.” Thus begins the title poem of Marjorie Maddox’s new collection, SEEING THINGS. And this is what the poems do: make visible the invisible as they explore difficult subject matter, including sexual abuse and its legacy, a daughter’s mental health struggles, and a mother’s steeply declining grasp on the present. Threaded through these formally dexterous and profoundly personal poems are considerations of such events as a mass shootings and the 2018 Thailand cave rescue; together, the poems speak to the suffering of not just one family but of the world. Perhaps because Maddox brings an unsparing, intelligent gaze to her work, her pivot toward hope—“Open the windows and sing! / The world is awash with / world”—feels fully earned in this book of accomplished and moving poems.

[Erin Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are poems about mothers and daughters, mental illness, abuse, aging, memory loss, and caregiving. But it’s not the “what” of these poems that interests me most—it’s the “how,” how within a single poem Maddox tells and retells a narrative until it becomes about the telling itself. “Story Retold as Half Troilet” begins with “On Mother’s Day, she jumps out of the car./ The traffic swerves and brakes.” The brakes become a broken family, a car becomes a scar, the she becomes they as the poem hurtles toward the final line, a question: “Will they survive?” The answer is yes, thanks to faith and art—and faith *in* art. “Ode to Daughter as Artist” ends with “in an ordinary room,/ on an ordinary day: art &/ its dizzying versions of birth.” Each poem in “Seeing Things” is a brilliant, dizzying version of birth (and rebirth) that dares to offer: “Take, read; this is my story.”