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EARLY PRAISE:

The title poem of Marjorie Maddox’s Hover Here entreats readers to pause to appreciate their “own / sweet precipitation of hope: / no weather of worry, / no stormy deadline of hurry.” There is sweetness in her poems of nature and of the ordinary, “For the pebble, the worm, the clothesline,” all described with exquisite precision and insight, “all the way to the I of the eye that keeps yearning / for attachment.” But hurry is here also, deadlines for dealing with contemporary perils, variously societal and environmental: “Don’t hide behind poems. Wildfires are raging.” She writes in many forms, and her mastery of all expresses and celebrates the potential for order, in poetry at least, and perhaps in life. Her closing ekphrastic poem after the cover artwork of Karen Elias contemplates a milkweed pod, “this empty / and brittle surprise / of beauty” – just so this collection opens and empties to surprise with beauty, and hope."

-Editor Larry W. Moore

Marjorie Maddox’s Hover Here makes lingering look appealing—in the title poem, in her description of a girl hovering on the stories and dreams of her ancestors, in the wisps of dandelions that hover above a lake in anticipation of spring. Her descriptions of the natural world are vivid—30,000 spines on the porcupine! And there is much to like also in the poet’s other considerations (the account of being a motel maid in the 1970s is one of my favorites), where Maddox turns her attention to coming of age, socio-political justice, and the arts, including a poem inspired by a Judy Collins song.

—Susana H. Case, author of If This Isn’t Love

"By turns wise, witty, and profound, these captivating poems teach us “to re-see our lives” in the “silent swooping / of story” as divulged by gull and kite, creek and toad, banjo and drum, loon and “brushstroke of buttercup.” Marjorie Maddox is a master of detail and dissonance, of tenderness and gut-punch, and Hover Here has an almost magical perspective-shifting potency. Here are prayers wordless yet tangible: lament spoken in “billowed sheets,” praise whispered through “small petals,” grace found in “water, fish, wind, wave” and the breeze-carried sparrow—together gorgeously tracing “how prayer, silent, weaves through air.”

-Laura Reece Hogan, author of Butterfly Nebula

There is a playfulness in Marjorie Maddox’s poems that takes us back to the wonders of childhood, finding a sense of the spiritual in the everyday, recognizing the connectedness in all things. Maddox is accomplished in many forms: villanelle, sestina, pantoum, as well as free verse. Many poems acknowledge lateness, autumn, and the passing of friends. Others are meditations on the threats to our environment. Lyrics that celebrate the natural world exhibit both fragility and strength, always with surprise, discovery.

-Robert Morgan, author of Dark Energy

A poet of terrific energy and wise hope, Marjorie Maddox, in Hover Here, attends to our complicated world with complicated love. In an array of enchanting forms, these poems weave artfully through spirited meditations, arriving often at moments of grace and affirmation: “…The cause of things—/ flight, companionship, love—our steady now and then.” A realist, awake to all that threatens our lives, Maddox reminds us that we’re equipped for the struggle. “Beyond flooded neighborhoods,” she writes, “…you get to choose /when to tango in the rain, /when to outstare the storm…” Hover Here is a book one needs.

-David Swerdlow, author of Nightstand