Seeing Things: Poems by Marjorie Maddox
Wildhouse Poetry, 2025
Seeing Things brilliantly uses the repetition inherent in poetry and poetic forms (such as sonnet, villanelle, and triolet) to think and feel with, to precisely render the effects of traumatic experiences: the poet’s abuse by others, a daughter’s struggle with depression, a mother’s dementia, or, indeed, to capture redemptive experiences that temper pain. “Still Life with Rabbits and Phone” is a wonderful example of the latter. A rabbit “hunkered down” in the poet’s backyard in Pennsylvania becomes a deliberate topic of daily conversation with her 91-year-old mother inside “the locked / Assistant Living apartment” in Arizona. “Each day . . . / my mother and I name and rename, the hare, / the bunny, the cottontail, the lapin” and the mother suggests “Peter” or “Hoppy” or “Hope,” as names. But the rabbit is found dead and eviscerated, and, for the poet, there’s “no way to shape / the absence: hare, bunny, cottontail, lapin…” The mother forgets “the hare, bunny, cottontail, lapin,” “the namings, the conversations,” isn’t sure she herself is “in Phoenix,” or “certain it was a rabbit.” But when another “small gray rabbit” appears in the poet’s yard,
I dial her number,
Exclaim, “What shall we call him? What?”
“Hare, bunny, cottontail, lapin,” she lists.
Then, just like that,
She lands again on “Hope.”
Poems, such as “St. Dymphna”—about the “[p]atron saint of . . . victims of incest”—unblinkingly deal with the indelibility of trauma. “Where shall we hide from the pain that bore us / from the damaged selves that keep us dying?” the poet asks. In her sonnet “#Me Too,” the poet asserts
. . . The past, both mine
and yours, will tell its days of deep duressand live to type another self: We claim
one life rewrites the rest. But they’re the same.
Maddox so skillfully evokes public events and makes them also speak for her trauma. For example, in her poem “Arise,” which alludes to the 2018 Thailand cave rescue and is “the prayer of all parents / in whispers, in screams,” she describes her own child as “miles below belief and barely breathing.” The imagery of stones or boulders appears in this poem, as elsewhere:
“Come forth!” the doctor-priest I don’t know
commands my child, who has barricaded
herself behind boulders of her own making—
In “Cortisol: This Is Only a Test,” trauma builds a brain,
worry by worry, crisis by crisis,
everything not tumbling down
but up into this lonesome, loathsome
wailing wall that only the brave can chip,
tip, knock, dismantle, bombard, blast, decimate…
Other poems emphasize that bravery, resilience, and endurance. “In the Company of Women” ends by praising
the discovery of lifting,
rock by rock, pebble by pebble,
what once was thrown as “Victim!”
but, now, weight-lifted together,
becomes stone bridge, becomes
path home.
Seeing Things is punctuated by odes of praise—of the silence of contemplation, of the poet’s husband’s fanatic grilling, of the very cautious return to “Normal,” to “an ordinary Saturday,” in which
We swallow our songs of praise,
sit on hands anxious to applaud,
refuse the almost unbearable urge
to breakdance on the kitchen table.
And in the final “Ode to Everything” this truthful, exact, complex, intelligent, gorgeously executed book, turns towards “holding close each breaking day”—where “breaking” holds on to its double meanings.
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Judy Kronenfeld’s nine collections of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems was published by Inlandia Books in 2025.