Begin with a Question: Poems - Paperback

by Marjorie Maddox (Author)

Winner of the 2023 Illumination Book Awards
Winner of the 2022 International Book Awards
Third Place 2023 Catholic Media Association's Book Awards

Begin with a Question explores how the life of faith is a continuous voyage, launched anew each bright day of the spirit or dark night of the soul. This is a book of contemplation and motion, a journey--often in stops and starts--toward the Divine, a pilgrimage paved with prayer, praise, pause, penitence, and (of course) questions. Urgent and universal, joyful or joyless, tinged with doubt or rinsed with hope, here are honest queries that probe, lift, and lead to discovery.

Begin with a Question keeps us moving, seeking, reaching, lifting us out of ourselves to something beyond. Using a variety of fixed forms and free verse, the poet examines our relationship to the one who asks, "Who do you say that I am?" A book for seekers, doubters, and believers alike, these poems bring us face to face with anguish, anger, awe, and adoration. They give us permission not to demand answers, but to follow the questions that lead to the Alpha and Omega, to the I AM that keeps us spiraling along this twisting path toward God.

Begin with a Question is published under Paraclete Press's "Iron Pen" imprint. In the book of Job, a suffering man pours out his anguish to his Maker. From the depths of his pain, he reveals a trust in God's goodness that is stronger than his despair, giving humanity some of the most beautiful and poetic verses of all time. Paraclete's Iron Pen imprint is inspired by this spirit of unvarnished honesty and tenacious hope.

Author Biography

Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 16 collections of poetry, a short story collection, four children's and YA books, and 650+ stories, essays, and poems in such journals and anthologies as Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, and Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion. Assistant editor of Presence, she hosts WPSU's "Poetry Moment" & has co-edited Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and the forthcoming Keystone.

Her numerous honors include Cornell University's Chasen Award, the 2000 Paumanok Poetry Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Seattle Review's Bentley Prize for Poetry, a Bread Loaf Scholarship, Pushcart Prize nominations in both poetry and fiction, and Lock Haven University's 2012 Honors Professor of the Year. She is the great great-niece of baseball legend Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers who helped break the color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson.