Seeing Things, the new collection by award-winning poet Marjorie Maddox, is both a searing look at the traumas endured by three generations of women in one family, and a profoundly moving testament to resilience, faith, and love. The title can be read in two ways. It can mean seeing things that aren’t there, as in the hallucinations suffered by the narrator’s daughter. But it also refers to seeing things as they really are and doing what needs to be done in the face of those realities. In the title poem, Maddox observes:

Angels and saints somehow still name
the invisible within the visible,
Still break the shadows with light.
And can this make us whole?

The sixty poems in this collection continually break the shadows with light. The quest for wholeness and the tension between the visible and the invisible resonates throughout the collection, which finds the narrator coping with her daughter’s struggles with depression, her mother’s advancing dementia, and her own memories of abuse. But while there are excruciating accounts of pain and struggle, there is also an abundance of healing, consolation, and dare I say it, joy. In the final analysis, the collection is a treatise on caregiving: for the daughter, the mother, the world in its suffering, and ultimately, the wounded self. The poem “In the Company of Women” reminds us that suffering is a communal experience. When shared, others see that “they, too, will survive” and the massive load “weight-lifted together, / becomes stone bridge, becomes / path home.” Indeed, Maddox becomes that bridge. The care revealed throughout this collection extends to not only her own mother and daughter; it offers a path home for everyone who has served as caregiver to a beloved one who is suffering.

Maddox takes no shortcuts on that path. She never shies away from the things she is seeing. “Recoil and run / is the way to go when fear’s tattooed / the inside of the brain,” she says in “Trust.” But Maddox does not run. She faces the suffering of her mother and daughter while also confronting the terror of her own memories. In “Details,” a poem written in the third person, she renders painful facts as if filing an imaginary police report:

It was dark and it hurt. This is
how your parents make babies. This is
how the nightlight left on when everyone else
is gone reminds her to spot-clean the sheet,
tuck the moist fabric around her innocence.

The agony of the child is rendered in succinct clinical language which makes the reality of what she later refers to as “the incident” that much more horrifying. And the horror comes full circle in a later poem, “#MeToo” in which she says:

It’s hard to mourn a past
you’ve thrown away without an elegy
to mark its pain. And yet all grief outlasts

the syllables we grab to make a poem
that looks like us.

In these poems, Maddox finally allows herself to mourn and retrieve what had been thrown away. She universalizes her experience with the use of the word “us.” She is not only mourning for herself; she is mourning for every woman who has experienced that violation.

Whether describing her daughter, her mother, or herself, Maddox faces the fears over and over again, perhaps nowhere more urgently than in the poem “Found and Not Found,” in which she briefly loses sight of her daughter, a young child, at the beach. “You raised your small hand and waved, / unaware of the terror in a parent’s empty arms.” The narrator does not yet know that she will reexperience that terror again and again in years to come as she reaches for the daughter who will cross other thresholds where she cannot be reached. She also doesn’t yet know that this daughter will triumph as she discovers a path to healing described in “Ode to Daughter as Artist” which celebrates “the unannounced swirl and burst of emergence” and “creativity tottering on eternity.”