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FIRST PLACE in Fine Arts/Photography 2023 Royal Dragonfly Book Award
HONORABLE MENTION in Poetry 2023 Royal Dragonfly Book Award
ZOOM BOOK LAUNCH FOR IN THE MUSEUM OF MY DAUGHTER’S MIND FOR REDHEADED STEPCHILD! See the paintings. Hear the poems—or at least a sampling.
Shanti Arts Zoom Book Talk/Inspiration: Closer than You Think for In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind. Begin at the 47.40 minutes marker
Mother/Daughter reading for the North Carolina Poetry Society!
*Nine Cool Things on a Tuesday: “What a perfect way to celebrate Mother’s Day! Like those of you who love both words and pictures, I’ve always been fascinated by ekphrastic poetry. It feels like a double gift!…” -Jama Rattigan. Read more here!
WVIA NPR Art Scene with Erika Funke and radio interview with Mindy Conk on In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind, 4 May 2023.
“One of the great benefits of this collaboration was working with my daughter—artist to artist. This led not only to important discussions about the creative process, but also allowed us to address and process painful experiences. Art can do that—become the bridge that connects…” Read more at Speaking of Marvels, 15 May 2023
“Opening with the choices and vast possibilities of a library, In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind, a witty and eloquent poetry collection, invites the reader to the museum to linger with the mind and spirit of the artist and the writer. Marjorie Maddox’s fourteenth book of poetry, In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind, intertwines the mystery and magic of painting and photography with the cadence and tantalizing rhythm of poetry….Over and over, Maddox points the reader to roads, streets, transportation, and travel. Movement is a constant in life, taking us from one point to another. These poems show the way journeys can mean reuniting or goodbyes, loss or hope….Linking together paintings and poems while lingering in moments of life and death and questioning what is real, In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind is a stimulating, ekphrastic poetry collection.” -Rebecca Beardsall in Psaltery & Lyre
•In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind is a beautiful and thought-provoking collaboration. The juxtaposition of art and poetry elicits moments of contemplation and appreciation. I enjoyed delving into this collection and found myself returning to different pages as though walking through an art gallery deep in thought. I particularly enjoyed “Sun on South Street,” a symphony of light and shadow, hope and sunshine amid dark isolation. -Debra Ayis, Editor, Valiant Scribe
“. . . 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. It would seem that Maddox values the journey that her daughter has taken in her life. Afterall, one of her final lines found in “Wild Rest,” the last poem in the collection, gives the reader this advice: “Embrace the wild/in calm, the journey in rest.” -Karen Weyant in Parhelion, “Art, Form, and the Ekphrastic Poem: A Review of In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind”
Royal Dragonfly Book Award
First Place: Fine Art/Photography
Honorable Mention: Poetry
Featured on New Pages!
In New and Noted at Mom Egg Review. Marjorie Maddox and Anna Lee Hafer, In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind. Shanti Arts 2023. On a rainy-day excursion, poet Marjorie Maddox and her daughter and artist Anna Lee Hafer visit the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore 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. Maddox also includes poems based on work by Karen Elias, Antar Mikosz, Greg Mort, Margaret Munz-Losch, Ingo Swann, and Christian Twamley.
“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.
The interchanging use of forms as a way to express different modes of art speaks clearly from the page. With villanelles, pantoums, and free verse, the reader is able to explore within the boundaries of the words’ canvas yet gain a very rewarding trip through settings we feel as if we’ve been to before, but forgot to open our eyes the first time we visited. This allows the world Maddox created—in part with the mixed media of the collection itself—to invite us to travel from settings that place us in realistic spaces like libraries to the daring act of our inner mind and struggles with mental health.
Maddox’s own gift with words allows the media to take on a new story, but so does the small things that could be overlooked on a first read….The collection demands and earns respect for both art and language, paint and pen. It’s innovative, honest, and diverse in its ability to show and not tell. It offers open interpretation—as does the art included—and allows the reader to morph these stories and characters into something familiar, as terrifying as that can be. Yet, that’s what makes this collection stand out: being able to have words that speak such truth within them, but also divulge itself into what isn’t real, what doesn’t feel tangible, what doesn’t feel interpretable. This lends itself well to journeys with mental illness, and especially with the poem “Swirl.”
“Swirl” offers an inner look into how the relationships mentioned earlier melt and mold themselves into a deep dive of creativity and psychology…. “Swirl” sets itself apart with the anxiety of loss; of the self and of a loved one.
Like other pieces in this collection, it puts reality into perspective, a perspective that is constantly being questioned in the art as its counterpart. In particular, “Swirl” offers a haunting and chilling sensation and the fine line between the artist coming out in the art and exposing the vulnerability in honesty.
This honesty is what really sets Maddox’s collection apart. In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind offers a look into credibility, the calmness of repetition (but also the anxiety and loss that can come from this), and morphing reality to truth and vice versa. It uses art to tell a story and poetry to tell the art, an overarching theme that makes each turn of the page poignant in its individuality. “Ante Meridiem/Post Meridiem” ends in a beautiful way that I think speaks well for the hard work Maddox has done in creating this collection and turning it into a vast story: “Stay / a while / and / admire.” -Amber Alexander for Sundress
Published Mother’s Day (May 14) of 2023!
Early Praise for In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind
•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.” -Claire Bateman, artist and poet, author of Wonders of the Invisible World
•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. -Myrna Stone, author of The Resurrectionist's Diary
•“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. -Gary Fincke, author of Bringing Back the Bones: New and Selected Poems
“Swirl” in The Inflectionist Review