Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation by Marjorie Maddox
Winner of the Yellowglen Prize
Wipf & Stock, 2018
A blizzard, a car crash, the donated heart—poet Marjorie Maddox frontloads her vivid collection with personal story.
“In the transplant waiting room, / a child asks her mother, / ‘Will Daddy love the same people?’”
Cracking open this book feels akin to witnessing the split sternum. Wondrous workings. Visceral shocks. Dark, intricate passages. Maddox speaks to us “out of the nicked vision that splinters.” We learn from the outset her father’s transplant fails. Thereafter, “in the half-light of intensive care,” Maddox plunges readers into the intricate anatomy of bereavement: the outcry, necessary substitutions, the halting forms of communion as she writes: “This is the hole / in the stranger, in my / father, in my own / cracked chest….”
Dissected into five sections, Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation vibrates with muscle and music, wordplay and riddle, occasional ode—even moments of farce. The reader acutely senses “the jolt that joins us at the organs.” Several startling and ingenious shape poems emerge.
Part II illumines family life in the aftermath: “what others’ hearts were, are, continue to become / inside our opened hollows.” In the lead poem, “The Sacrament of Marriage” (“this Pentecost of pleasure”), the voice ranges from ecstatic to grave to pleading. Couched within the joys and rigors of the other Christian sacraments, we find “What is undone in the unforgiving / are the alms of the everyday, / the laying on of hearts.”
The book’s long-poem centerfold, Part III, riffs on body parts. From bemused to sexy, cerebral to wry, descriptions dazzle: the eyeball “hammocked in fat”; “the undertow of tongue”; the ribs “a thin sagging bridge / with boards missing, / blackness beneath.” In describing this poem on her website, Maddox expresses awe “at the miracle and terror of our bodies and how, both inside and out, we are always part of the other, straining to connect, to correct, to purify, to expel.”
Part IV offers a thoughtful, embodied return to the sacraments with the speaker navigating roles: celebrant, witness, partaker. Part V goes global, with poems set in five countries. Geographical movements shift to musical movements that include “boogie-woogie and bebop, but mostly the cool blue / of Sinatra and Gershwin,” the tape of her dead father’s dance band, and, in the final poem, his voice on an old answering machine. Maddox leaves a message.
A poet of fierce curiosity, Maddox incrementally parses daily life and loss through art and science underscored by faith. Courageous beholding evokes the becoming. I’m still savoring her sleight of hand—and heart. The sinewy energy and the hush.
Laurie Klein is the author of Where the Sky Opens (Poeima Poetry Series) and a chapbook, Bodies of Water, Bodies of Flesh (Owl Creek). Her work has appeared in Ascent, Barrow Street, New Letters, Relief, Saint Katherine Review, The Southern Review, Windhover, and elsewhere.