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“This new full-length collection of poetry by Marjorie Maddox is extraordinary. Maddox makes poems that pull the world inside out: the hidden becomes apparent, the spiritual palpable, the heart, that sock stuffed in the chest, gives rise to ‘the architecture of mercy.’ Examining, in a variety of moods, both the dazzling intricacy and the frightening fragility of the human body, Maddox never forgets the heart at the heart of the matter.”—Kelly Cherry
“In poems that survey the ‘body’s landscape,’ then raise their ‘hallelujah torrent’ to celebrate ‘the human beneath,’ Marjorie Maddox allows faith—in language that aspires toward prayer—to balance the sorrow and ‘stubbed joy’ that inform ‘the world we live in/and the world beyond.’ These poems acknowledge the body and its betrayals with clarity, humor, and Whitmanian fervor. This is a book of fierce and eloquent consolations.”—Michael Waters
“Passionate, heartfelt documentaries of a life that is full, and filling, and reaching for true purpose.”—Scott Cairns
Reviewed at The Literary Journal by Heather Lang “…Throughout the collection, Maddox embraces our human emotions and astutely translates them into palpable moments. Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation is performed with absolute eloquence.”
“Grim Gratitude: Marjorie Maddox’s Poetry of Loss & Living”—a review of Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation by Amy George for The Curator: “Marjorie Maddox’s latest, exquisite poetry collection, Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation, filters the hope, heartbreak, joys, and frustrations of life through the lens of a shattering event in the poet’s life: Her father’s failed heart transplant. Maddox walks her readers through a litany of complex emotions where faith wrestles for reconciliation with circumstance. In these poems, the heart itself becomes cracked open for exploration into what it means to love and lose, to be an individual soul, and to be cared for…”
Reviewed in Anglican Theological Journal "... Perhaps, its Maddox’s own familial losses (her father undergoing a heart transplant) that have primed her for the part of raconteur and medical expositor. In the multi-part poem “Body Parts,” Maddox demonstrates a keen eye for descriptive writing, a poem which ought to find its way into every medical school textbook in the country. Her pinpoint execution, the dance between the purely informational and emotional, sheds new light on old bones. And these are the kind of bones she picks, the kind she buries, the kind she raises from the dead just to bury again, the kind that give us an apercu into the social wares that make up our day-to-day existence..." -Trey Palmisano
Alive and Writing: What Recent Memoirs Reveal about Illness and the State of Health Care by Anna Leahy in Entropy "...Or Marjorie Maddox’s father, who, as she recounts in the reissued poetry collection Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation, receives a heart transplant from a dead stranger: “'His heart is buried / in my father, / who is buried'....These books—Everything Happens for a Reason; Sick; The Family Gene; I Am, I Am, I Am; and Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation—are each worth reading on their own, for the distinctive story of illness, for the sharp perspective, and for the original voice. If you’ve seen one, you’ve not seen them all. Each is a really good book in its own right. Together, they are an imperative, a call for compassion for each other. Moreover, they are a call for wide access to personalized health care and individualized decision-making between healthcare providers and patients...."
Reviewed at Tweetspeak Poetry by Glynn Young "...Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation is about change both sudden and gradual. It is about what binds us in relationships, and what happens when those binds come undone or are severed. And it’s about reliance, what we have and what we find to help us go on."
Interviewed about Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation by Will Woolfitt at Speaking of Marvels "Writing is a process of discovering the world inside and around us..."
Reviewed by Lynn Levin in Poetry Niederngasse alongside Deborah Fries' Various Modes of Departure "... Marjorie Maddox’s rapturous collection Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation is the winner of the Yellowglen Prize....A close and expert observer of nature, Marjorie Maddox is—as her book titles often denote—both a poet of the earthly and the transcendent. Her descriptions of medical and biological phenomena—surgery, the organs of the human body, a courier on an airplane carrying organs for transplantation—are often lenses through which she glimpses the eternal...."
December 2, 2018 article in the Williamsport Sun Gazette, “Local Poet, Author, Marjorie Maddox: “Much of my writing focuses on the intersection of body and spirit; on place; and on personal, historical or current events. In short, I write because writing leads to discovery by bringing us face-to-face with ourselves, but also with others and with the world. It is a way to enjoy, endure, and sometimes better understand where we have been, where we are going, and whom we are meeting on the way,” Maddox said.
Review at But Does It Rhyme? “… Marjorie Maddox’s extraordinary new book Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation… her stunning descriptions of her father’s failed heart transplant,…simply reading these pages is a tutorial in metaphor, line, sound, and the guts of poetics. The five-part book concerns marriage, love, and spiritual matters as well as the transplant of the title. But to me, the heart of the book is its central section, “Body Parts,” a tour-de-force likening 39 organs and appendages to everything from a stingray (the lung) to a dog’s tongue (the pancreas)….Winner of the Yellowglen Prize, Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation bristles with memorable lines. Describing the hospital waiting room, for example, Maddox writes “… its stucco walls vacant / of the pain we hang upon the gray / and graying we soon become.” In “Ash Wednesday,” she speaks of the ash-cross on the forehead: “…to wear bindhi this medal of our not winning / each day we wake to the worlds / we are and are not.” ….”
Reviewed at Berry Her With Poems by Laura DiNovis Berry “Maddox is a poet worth reading. She does not hem herself in with one particular poetry format….Her work is at once light on its feet while carrying weighty materials as if it were a “…robin leaving / with wings full of weather.” This ability is most likely why Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation won the 2004 Yellowglen Prize.”
Interviewed at Corrigan Literary Review: “I really love that moment when I discover something about myself or the world through the process of writing….I don’t always enjoy writing; it can be downright painful, but I can’t imagine myself or my life without it. It’s part of who I am.”
