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In the Museum of My Daughter's Mind poetry by Marjorie Maddox
On a rainy-day excursion, poet Marjorie Maddox and her daughter and artist Anna Lee Hafer visit the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, where, as never before, they realize how their passions for art and poetry intersect. With this exhibit and Hafer’s own surreal paintings as inspiring backdrop, they exchange their responses to joy and trauma more deeply—artist to artist, mother to daughter. These connections between poet and visual artist constitute the core of this ekphrastic collection. In addition, Maddox includes nine poems based on work she saw that day by Antar Mikosz, Greg Mort, Margaret Munz-Losch, Ingo Swann, and Christian Twamley, as well as several later collaborations with Karen Elias. ART / General ISBN: 978-1-956056-74-7 (print; softcover; perfect bound)
LCCN: 2023930454 Copyright 2023; released May 14, 2023 96 pages; 33 full-color images |
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Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania, Marjorie Maddox has published fourteen collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize), True, False, None of the Above (2017 Illumination Book Award Medalist), Local News from Someplace Else, Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award), Begin with a Question (Winner Poetry/Religious Category 2022 International Book Awards), and Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (Shanti Arts), an ekphrastic collaboration with photographer Karen Elias. In addition, she has published the short story collection What She Was Saying and four children’s and YA books—including Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems with Insider Exercises (Finalist Children’s Educational Category 2020 International Book Awards), A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry, and I’m Feeling Blue, Too! (a 2021 NCTE Notable Poetry Book)—as well as the anthologies Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and the forthcoming Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (co-editor with Jerry Wemple, PSU Press). The assistant editor of Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, she is the recipient of numerous awards and gives workshops and readings around the world. For more information, please visit www.marjoriemaddox.com. Anna Lee Hafer is a studio artist in the Philadelphia area who graduated from Roberts Wesleyan College, Rochester, New York, in 2019. Her art includes studio exhibitions at Davison Art Gallery and Rochester Contemporary Art Center in Rochester, New York, as well as published images or broadsides in Still Point Arts Quarterly, The Westchester Review, The Penn Review, The Pine Cone Review, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, The Ekphrastic Review, and elsewhere. Her work is heavily influenced by such surrealist painters as René Magritte, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso, all of whom strove to build their own realities through small glimpses into a particularly confusing, but utterly unique, worldview that dictates its own specific set of instructions. In her work, Hafer pours and layers paint to create dimension and texture, mixing different styles and colors onto each other until they produce a 3D effect. Through marker and pencil that create shadow, she further enhances these forms and separates them from the background. Heavier layers and thicker brushes in the foreground of her work push the painting toward the viewer, whereas the thinner layers and small brushes in the background elongate the space and push away from the viewer. By juxtaposing interior and exterior elements, Hafer makes the audience question whether they are looking at something inside or outside. For additional information, please visit www.hafer.work. |
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“This collaborative project of remarkable formal and tonal range invites us to ‘click open possibility,’ to stand on the threshold of ‘the mind’s inner workings’ where we glimpse vast territories strangely weathered and richly populated. Is it safe to venture in? As these paintings and poems instruct us, that question doesn’t represent the appropriate mindset—instead, we must abandon caution to ‘wander and wonder’ through ‘the labyrinth of spirit,’ these ‘rooms of elsewhere/and beyond,’ ‘this universe that hurts and heals.’’’ “Here, the beating heart of Marjorie Maddox’s fourteenth book of poetry lies in her emotional and psychic response to her daughter’s eighteen paintings. If art truly imitates life, Maddox blows both wide open, revealing in her brilliant reactions to her daughter’s, and to other artists’ work, her own calls and answers about what binds and distorts living and dying, health and illness, seeing and believing. Throughout, Maddox’s sonically charged language and clever use of repetition produces an electric and unforgettable effect before finally offering us, in the end, the cushion of an easy chair and a wild rest.” “‘Late-night, mid-morning, or dawn, choose/ imagination . . . ’ Marjorie Maddox writes, welcoming readers to her fascinating poetry/art collection In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind. ‘This is not a textbook, but a person,’ she tells us later, and in poem after poem, as well as painting after painting, we are immersed in ways that compel us to turn another page as if entering another museum room to be astonished by poems, paintings, and photography until, at last, arriving at ‘your own wild, wild rest’ in words and color that brilliantly illuminate the complexities of a young artist’s vision.” | |||||||||||||
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Review, Ruth Hoberman, Mom Egg Review (April 8, 2024) “Working carefully with words and purposeful end rhymes (eclipse/synapse, obsessions/questions, transgression/lesson), Marjorie Maddox’s In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind (Shanti Arts, 2023) does a beautiful job of translating brushstrokes to print and taking innovative storytelling elements to bring the characters on canvas into a new dimension.” “What purpose does the ekphrastic poem serve in today’s poetry community? The use of visual art gives writers a chance to explore different ideas outside their usual artistic inspirations. However, ekphrastic poetry also celebrates both written art and visual art, finding an intersection that reveals meaning in both. In Maddox’s latest book, she uses this intersection to help find common ground with her daughter and her daughter’s work.” Review, NEWPAGES (June 11, 2023) Review, Mom Egg Review (June 10, 2023) Rebecca Beardsall, Review, Psaltery & Lyre (May 19, 2023) Interview, Speaking of Marvels (May 15, 2023) ArtScene with Erika Funke, Podcast, WVIA Public Media (May 4, 2023) Jama's Alphabet Soup, Review (May 2, 2023 |
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