We don't define home the same way anymore. School shootings and natural disasters populate the headlines. Tragedy and disease infiltrate our neighborhoods. We not only must survive in an unsafe world, but also persevere in it. By confronting fear and embracing family, Local News from Someplace Else rediscovers both grace and joy.

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"Marjorie Maddox's newest book offers visions of disaster, tempered by a mother's hope. In taut language, these poems move into the center of familiar tragedies, often lifted from the news. Local News from Someplace Else is a reminder that what separates us from destruction are sheer luck (or grace) and the insistence of life itself."
--Shara McCallum, author of This Strange Land and The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems

"Marjorie Maddox brings us Local News from Someplace Else, a 'brief alphabet of grief,' 'where loss . . . flies fastest / in the smallest of words': hurricanes, fires, school shootings, mine cave-ins. But she is also a reporter of joy: births, barbecues, retirement parties, hotel rooms with 'the hundred-plus / channels of cable / deliciously at our command.' 'We are in love / with room service at midnight,' Maddox writes, and you will be too."
--Barbara Crooker, author of Gold
 
"Marjorie Maddox's poems move with faith and grace through the violent landscapes of contemporary America, through the humdrum chores of parenting and work, through the thin spaces that divide the living from the dead. Hers is a poetry haunted by the presence of survivors, and, as she confesses, 'What we hold / is ourselves holding on.' In the gift of her deeply reflective poems, we glimpse 'the sad joy that lets her see / all that the world is.'"
--Todd Davis, author of In the Kingdom of the Ditch and The Least of These

Laurie Klein reads “Extra Towels” from Local News from Someplace Else on Spokane Public Radio

"...Filled with death, fear, sadness and ultimately joy, Local News from Someplace Else is a fitting and respectable addition to any bookshelf. Its wide emotional range and various poetic forms lends itself to all readers, no matter their mood..." -Laura DiNovis Berry

"...Perhaps the best way to describe the feeling that settled in me, at last, after reading Local News from Someplace Else was that of a holy, uncanny calm. I had travelled to a host of places, but I had not lost home. The journey had taken me to the “someplace else” of grief and loss, of bizarre tragedy and daily salvation. Through her entire book, Maddox kept telling me: if it is human, it is yours; embrace it. For it is only through our embrace of humanity that we can finally save what is profoundly ours, what gives meaning to both individual and communal truth: “all of our lives / … planted deep” (“Settled”)."-Sofia Starnes in American Literary Review

"...When Maddox emerges from the darkness of terrible tragedy, she sees and urges us to see simple joys in an original light."-Christopher Scalia in Anglican Theological Review

"...In Local News from Someplace Else, Marjorie Maddox gives us a world outside full of danger and disaster, but her poems offer visions of hope, and “the sad joy that lets her see / all that the world is.” We are reassured that what helps us face the dangers, and survive, are the connections we form with those we love. In the end, “what we hold / is ourselves holding on.”-Carolyn Perry in Gently Read Literature 

Poet Laurie Klein hilariously reads “Extra Towels” from Local News from Someplace Else on Spokane Public Radio. Take a listen!

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