In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind
by Marjorie Maddox
Shanti Arts, 2023
Review by Erica Goss
In this innovative, thought-provoking collection, Marjorie Maddox responds in poetry to the paintings of her daughter, Anna Lee Hafer, as well as the work of several other contemporary artists. In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind portrays poetry and visual art as complementary genres, echoing themes such as family relationships, mortality, and mental health. By allowing the art to speak through her, Maddox creates conversations that invite possibilities for deeper understanding. As a bonus, the book includes reproductions of each work of art, turning it into a tour of a vividly curated collection.
As Maddox writes in the introduction, “Ekphrasis [the description of a work of art through poetry] is a way for art and poem, artist and poet, and writer and reader to communicate. The relationship of words and images in each poem respond to the interweaving of images and words in each painting.” This unassuming description only hints at the craft and complexity of these poems; in coaxing meaning from the visual, the poet offers new, often radical ways of experiencing both the painting and the poem.
“Swirl,” a pantoum based on Anna Lee Hafer’s 2018 painting of the same name, illustrates this approach. From Hafer’s description: “Swirl exhibits strong visual elements of harmony and balance, but with a closer look, a contradictory message occurs.” In the painting, a curved shape, suggestive of a small water vessel, dominates the foreground. Straight geometric lines converge from its tip, pointing to the contradictory messages Hafer refers to. Painted in murky gray tones, the background suggests clouds, or the color of the ocean at sunrise.
The poem, a pantoum, begins:
Look closer. This is not a textbook, but a person.
This is not a painting but the poem of someone’s mind,
her mind: new or worse depression.
Beneath the surface of harmonious balance,
this is not a painting but the poem of someone’s mind.
Thoughts of suicide or dying
beneath the surface of harmonious balance.
New or worse irritability, new or worse anxiety.
The precise positioning of the second line, “This is not a painting...”, emphasizes Hafer’s depiction of “a contradictory message.” A hard-earned understanding between mother and daughter lurks in the background, a shared experience whose repercussions weave throughout the poem: “This is a daughter, / who slipped beneath the surface, but rose up // from weeping. You almost drowned in it. Did.” The point of view shifts, briefly, to the second person—the “you” could be the reader, the daughter, or the speaker. In any case, we are all implicated in this story’s struggle, heartbreak, and eventual recovery. The poem ends on a hopeful note:
This is a life of treating depression, both
a painting and a poem—complicated beauty of mind
beneath the surface of harmonious balance.
Look closer. This is not a textbook, but a person.
In “Swirl,” Maddox directs us to “look closer,” a guiding principle at the heart of ekphrastic writing. Any work of ekphrasis invites us, the reader-turned-viewer, to observe a work of art in a way that is new to us, evoking both emotional and intellectual responses that might seem strange or uncomfortable at first. When we read an ekphrastic poem, we can’t ignore the art in question. And, though we see it through the eyes of the poet, it is not a secondhand experience. Instead, the poem transforms the art for us and through us, leading to expanded insights.
“Forever’s possibilities transporting / the artist’s view to ours,” from “At the American Visionary Art Museum: The Watcher,” illustrates the type of expansion ekphrasis conjures. The painting, by Greg Mort, shows a middle-aged man in jeans and a white shirt standing, as Maddox writes, “at the threshold / not of fear of the outside but this unexpected hinged / opening to awe.” The man’s arms spread as if to embrace the star-filled sky he sees from the doorway. From the title of the poem, we know that his role is not to impose himself on what he sees but to observe it, “there at the precarious brink / of stepping into the unknown.” As the watcher, his task is vast, eternal, and vital—all artists are watchers who present their visions to the public, creating an infinite number of observers.
A work of art invites our attention; our responsibility lies in sharing that attention wisely. On occasion, a line-by-line description is enough to evoke a visceral response. Margaret Munz-Losch’s painting White Rabbit, from “At the American Visionary Art Museum: White Rabbit,” one of a series called Beauty and the Beast, seems straightforward at first: a girl, naked from the waist up, holds a white rabbit against her chest. As the poem reveals, however, all is not well with this child:
The naked girl buzzes
with bees, is bees: nipple,
elbows, neck, chest, swarming
forehead; insect fingers grasping
the starkly white, pink-eyed,
magician’s rabbit of miracles.
The girl’s impassive gaze, coupled with the rabbit she holds, pierces us more than an openly suffering expression would. These lines at the end of the poem extract the essence alive in the child’s body,
the way my mother skin
tingles with hers, is hers/
yours, tiny stings that cling
to the most vulnerable
flesh left to love, hovering
sweetly, deceptively,
over the decaying, the dead.
It’s not obvious, from first viewing the image in the book, that that the child’s skin crawls with bees. That fact dawns on us gradually; even after reading “the naked girl buzzes / with bees,” it takes a moment before they become apparent, and with them, the painting’s strange horror.
Black Cat, the companion painting to White Rabbit, shows the same girl. Now she holds a black cat, its yellow eyes huge; instead of bees, her skin is covered in maggots. Again, Maddox’s poem guides us:
Startled, the bad-
omen black cat stares
at you, a voyeur suddenly here
in this stark room, uninvited,
it thinks, by the young,
pig-tailed girl whose skin
(ten shades duller than its bright
feline eyes) squirms with the intricate
pattern of maggots.
As in “Swirl,” Black Cat implicates an unnamed you: the viewer, the reader, or, perhaps, the artist who made the painting. All share a tacit guilt, the poem states, referring to the reflexive recoil that “intricate pattern of maggots” and “perched flies of eyebrows” produce. The image, and its accompanying poem, throw us off balance, providing an example of how our curiosity can lead us into uncomfortable realms—a perfect illustration of the warning, “Don’t look too closely.”
According to Maddox’s introduction, the model for White Rabbit and Black Cat is Munz-Losch’s daughter. Maddox’s poems in response, including “Swirl,” illustrate the mother-daughter themes fundamental to the book. These three poems describe emotionally charged exchanges between mothers and daughters, as well as between the poems and art. “Ark,” however, based on Hafer’s painting Ark, revels in a rollicking wordplay. With its rhythm and internal rhyme, “Ark” moves quickly down the page, reflecting the energy in the painting, which shows a ship caught in a storm’s crashing waves; waves swirl from right to left into a vortex of light. About the painting, Hafer writes, “Ark is an apocalypse...Ark is a safe haven.” Maddox plays with these contradictions:
Ladders to below/above to
turn off the faucet to
weeping to
turn on the spigot to
here/now to
unleash the liquid to
water to weary to whiplash to
swirl in the iris of horizon to
witness the wet of windswept to
hide in the eye of reject to
The poem ends with the resolution “to // dive and discover to / finally land.” Appearing near the end of the book, “Ark” steers the book from troubled seas to a calm conclusion.
Original, poignant, and disquieting, In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind unveils the hopes and concerns of a mother for her child. It’s a remarkable achievement, one that stands apart from other poetry projects. Instead of writing about her daughter, Marjorie Maddox writes through her daughter’s artistic visions with remarkable insight. She treats the work of the other artists included in this collection with the same sensitivity, delivering poems that bring new meaning to the juxtaposition of words and pictures.
Marjorie Maddox, Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University has received numerous awards, including the Yellowglen Prize, the Sandstone Book Award, the Amelia Chapbook Award, the Painted Bride Chapbook Award, and the 2019 Foley Poetry Prize from America Magazine for her poem “Arise.” Her collections include Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (finalist for the Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes; 2020 Philip H. McMath Post-Publication Book Award), True, False, None of the Above (Illumination Book Award Medalist), Wives’ Tales, Local News from Someplace Else, Perpendicular As I, and Weeknights at the Cathedral. Recent works showcase her collaborations across the arts: Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For with photographer Karen Elias; In the Museum of Her Daughter’s Mind, inspired by the paintings of her daughter Anna Lee Hafer and other artists; and Begin with a Question (Paraclete Press).
Erica Goss is the author of Night Court, winner of the 2017 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press, and Landscape With Womb and Paradox, forthcoming in 2026 from Broadstone Books. She has received numerous Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations, as well as a 2023 Best American Essay Notable. Recent and upcoming publications include The Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Oregon Humanities, Creative Nonfiction, North Dakota Quarterly, The Indianopolis Review, Gargoyle, Spillway, West Trestle, A-Minor, Redactions, Consequence, The Sunlight Press, The Pedestal, San Pedro River Review, and Critical Read. Erica served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California, from 2013-2016. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she teaches, writes and edits the newsletter Sticks & Stones.