Marjorie Maddox*

Marjorie Maddox is Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University, in Pennsylvania. To enumerate just some of her achievements, count the 17 collections of poetry she has published — awards received including the Yellowglen Prize, an Illumination Book Awards Medal, the Foley Poetry Prize, and several chapbook awards — as well as the more than 700 poems, stories, and essays she’s published in journals and anthologies.

Her new book Seeing Things (2025, Wildhouse Publishing) will appear on February 28th. Amid the advance praise for this poetry collection, Jeanne Murray Walker has said, “It’s surely one of the best books I have read this year.” It is a very personal book where Marjorie Maddox finds herself between her mother’s advancing dementia and her daughter’s depression, with troubling memories of her own.

The following poem is a tribute from one friend to another, both of whom are fine poets, one of whom died far too young of inflammatory breast cancer. I have had the privilege of editing poetry collections for both Marjorie Maddox (True, False, None of the Above) and Anya Krugovoy Silver (Second Bloom) as part of the Poiema Poetry Series. This poem first appeared in Presence, and is from Marjorie’s new book Seeing Things.

Photo with Bald Heads

— for Anya Krugovoy Silver and Noah Silver

Or nearly; the baby fuzz is hers,
compliments of the cancer we seldom speak,
though she does—loudly and often—but not now.
Instead, on this matte finish, she calmly cradles
the red-faced infant, his small mouth open,
life from the still-living pulsing.
His soft spot already
sprouts strands she’ll touch
and touch again. See
how she stares out at us
or at God, just this side of the pictureperfect
smile she owns
in the bright flash
of her dark room. See how
she embraces, with her
sleep-deprived, wideawake
eyes, much more
than the omniscient
one-eyed camera
could ever claim. Only she
can reveal her See
this is me there, here, now,
grabbing my own ever after,
the camera clicks and subtle shifts
that follow: her liturgy not of beginnings
or ends, but persistence, holy continuation
into our space of now, brimming
just so with this immortal moment of joy.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Marjorie Maddox: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Laura Reece Hogan*

Laura Reece Hogan is the author of two full-length poetry collections. Her new book, Butterfly Nebula, is the 2022 winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry and is published by the University of Nebraska Press. In this collection, Hogan focuses both on the micro and the macro, the deep and the distant, as she ponders the galaxies, life on the ocean floor, flowers, and insects ― from immense nebulae, right down to disembodied human tear glands growing in a petri dish.

Marjorie Maddox has said of Butterfly Nebula, “Astronomical, biological, ecological, theological, metaphorical…How dazzling the shine of these poems, how far-reaching their light."

Besides writing poetry, Hogan is the author of the theology book I Live, No Longer I (2017, Wipf & Stock) which was a winner at the American Bookfest Awards, The Illumination Book Awards, and the Catholic Press Association Book Awards.

The following poem, from the new collection, first appeared in The Inflectionist Review.

Prayer For Traversing the Eye

If I molt
peel and cast
the assemblage,
push aside / bend
behind can I sliver
shiver atoms spectral
can you splinter me
cut down the camel
of me shatter me
until I shed me
can you shove
me through
this frail
slit?

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Laura Reece Hogan: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Sarah Law

Sarah Law is a London poet who grew up in Norwich and once worked in the Julian Centre, next door to St Julian's Church. Her natural interest in the medieval anchoress Julian of Norwich was a starting point for further investigations into Christian mystics.

She is the author of several poetry collections, including her sixth: Thérèse (2020, Paraclete) in which she shares her poetic reflections on the life and writings of the Carmelite nun Thérèse of Lisieux (1873―1897). Marjorie Maddox calls the book “A biography-in-verse that brims with beauty, pain, insight, and humility…”

Sarah Law teaches at the Open University, and is editor for the online journal Amethyst Review, which focuses on new writing engaging with the sacred. Her new novel Sketches from a Sunlit Heaven is soon to appear from Wipf & Stock Publishers.

Grace Drifts Down Like Dust

Grace drifts down like dust
over the soul’s rough rocks,

settles in its crevices, scintilla
where even the light is blocked –

grace like fine flour sifting through
a grille to the lumpen heart.

I sit in the back pew (sunshine shears
into the evening church) and see

that motes are always falling –
each particle is gentler than confetti,

hallowing the human, the unready;
its glinting traces bless us unawares.

Grace is manna for an outpost life,
is unconditional and borderless –

there is only the reception of its calling,
all I can do is raise my empty hands.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Brad Davis*

Brad Davis is the author of three poetry collections: Opening King David (2011), Still Working It Out (2014), and his new book Trespassing On the Mount of Olives (Poiema/Cascade, 2021). Similar to how his first book consisted of poems in conversation with the Psalms, his new book’s poems are in conversation with the gospels. He has taught creative writing at the College of the Holy Cross, Eastern Connecticut State University, The Stony Brook School, and Pomfret School, where he served as school chaplain.

Marjorie Maddox has said of this new collection, “…Through persona poems and first-person narratives, the contemporary and biblical intersect with insight and humor. . . . What follows are spiritual and social examinations: ‘How to clear out a self from a self,’ how to protect the environment, how to face doubt and mortality, and, ultimately, how to ‘do whatever he tells you,’ even if that means, according to Davis, writing poems. Thank God for the latter.”

I am honoured to be the editor of the Poiema Poetry Series, and to have worked with Brad Davis on both Still Working It Out, and Trespassing On the Mount of Olives.

The following poem first appeared in Ekstasis, and is from his new poetry book.

The Generative Influence of Q on John’s Gospel

Luke 5:1–11

The fragment is on the mark.
Whoever wrote it down got it right,
and I should know.
From a boat offshore,
my younger self watched it happen:
the crowd pressing upon the Teacher
as he taught on the beach;
he commandeering Peter’s boat
and telling him to put out into deep water;
we rolling our eyes
when he instructed Peter to let down his net,
yet then having to help him land
that crazy haul of fish;
and finally back on the beach, the Teacher
announcing, From now on, you will catch men.
Ever since it was entrusted to me,
I have treasured this fragment,
holding it as first among the other fragments
I keep rolled in a scrap of leather.
And there’s a new reason I hold it dear.
Early last Sabbath, the rains dampening
my eagerness for eldership here in Ephesus,
I unrolled the fragment
to refresh my sense of commissioning—
you will catch men—
when suddenly the words
turned themselves inside out
and I became dizzy, like that day
in the upper room with the Spirit-fire.
Suddenly the crowd on the beach
listening to Jesus teach the word of God
became a crowd on a beach
listening to God.
I felt myself melt, as if into a glorious light.
Then later in the day words occurred to me—
In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was—
along with a compulsion
to write them down
and follow them with other words.
And it was as though I were once again
following Jesus up some rocky path
between small towns on the way to Jerusalem.
I’m telling this to all of you
because the idea these words convey
will be called blasphemous.
I may suffer for having written them.
But I know and trust their source,
and when I’m done they must
be sent around to all the Teacher’s friends.
Which makes me nervous
how even they will receive them,
for none of the others have spoken as plainly
of the Teacher in this way—
as the great I AM. So I have awakened you,
the moon still bright above the city,
because I want you to sit with me and pray
as I write what I will write.
You know how tired I become by early afternoon,
and how I have needed your help
shepherding our little flock here in Ephesus.
Well, now I will need you even more
to help complete the new work. Please,
someone bring me my pen, ink, and parchment.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Brad Davis: first post, second post, fourth post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock.

Anya Krugovoy Silver*

Anya Krugovoy Silver (1968—2018) is a prolific poet, perhaps best known for writing boldly and honestly about her battle with inflammatory breast cancer. She was recently named a Guggenheim fellow for poetry for 2018. I was informed of her death last week, within the first 24 hours. I still feel shock, as she had just been sharing with me about various projects she was working on — including a review of my anthology, Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse, and a new poetry collection.

She participated in the Poiema Poetry reading at the Festival of Faith & Writing in Grand Rapids in April, as pictured below, and will be very missed by the circle of fine poets — including Julie Moore, Barbara Crooker, Tania Runyan, and Marjorie Maddox — who count her as a friend.

The following poem is from her fourth and most-recent book, Second Bloom, which I am honoured to have edited for the Poiema Poetry Series (Cascade Books).

Fourth Advent

On Sunday, I lie beside a friend in bed,
weeping, because she doesn’t want a better place.
How bleak the next life to her grieving sons,
who need their mother here, on earth—
her silly wigs, her marathons, her fingers
deftly pinching dumplings for the feast.
For our sins, it’s said that Christ was born.
The manger’s set up in the church,
my friend sleeps through her steroid pills.
The nights grow still. We wait, Emmanuel.
Merciful one, begotten of woman, understand
how difficult it is to trust that you are kind.

Here is Anya's obituary from Friday's New York Times.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Anya Krugovoy Silver: first post, second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

Marjorie Maddox

Marjorie Maddox is Sage Graduate Fellow at Cornell University (MFA) and a professor of English at Lock Haven University, in Pennsylvania, where she is also director of their Creative Writing program. She has published five full-length poetry collections, five chapbooks, two children's books, and has co-edited (with Jerry Wemple) the anthology Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania. Her short story collection What She Was Saying is forthcoming from Fomite Press.

Her most recent poetry books are Local News from Someplace Else (2013, Wipf & Stock), and True, False, None of the Above (2016, Cascade Books). I am pleased to say that I assisted with her new collection as editor, and have included it in the Poiema Poetry Series.

The following poem is from True, False, None of the Above.

Distinctions

-----------“There is one notable dead tree . . .
-----------the inscape markedly holding its
-----------most simple and beautiful oneness . . . .”
------------------------------------—Hopkins’ journals

Inscape

Curled into this moment,
swirled into this tree,
epiphany with a capitol E,
an ordained extraordinary gene
translated to mean uniquely
breathed into being and why
the world sings its key
of awe.

Instress

Such power to hold the whole
symphonic cosmos, spring pushing up
into twig and Trinity, each leaf
cradled by Creator, the Spirit
breathing its force field
of sentience, circling the sense
of our being that now—
this moment or the next—
breaks open its seed
of seeing.

Posted with permission of the poet.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Marjorie Maddox: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.