(The following is a verbatim press release provided by Bucks County Community College)
Madeline Marriott, a freelance journalist and independent bookseller, has unique body art: the closing line from a meaningful poem inked on her arm.
“I take my poetry very seriously,” the Holland resident said with a light laugh. “I’ve got it tattooed on me.”
That devotion to the written word has led Marriott to being named the 2025 Bucks County Poet Laureate by officials at Bucks County Community College. Marriott, at age 23 the second-youngest laureate in the 49-year history of the contest, rose to the top of 65 entries, according to Professor Ethel Rackin, Ph.D., the program director.
Marriott will be celebrated with a reading and reception at 1 p.m. Saturday, November 15, in Tyler Hall on the College’s Newtown Campus, joined by 2024 Bucks County Poet Laureate Lake Angela, and preliminary contest judge Nicole Greaves.
The judges also selected three unranked runners-up who have also been invited to read November 15. They are Tricia Coscia, of Morrisville, Annika Crawford, of Washington Crossing, and Lynn Fanok, of Perkasie.
Marriott, who placed as a runner-up last year when she first entered the contest, says the monthly poetry groups that meet at the Newtown Bookshop where she works have been an incredible inspiration. In fact, the poet who runs the workshops – Lynn Fanok– is a runner-up this year.
“I feel so honored, since I’m around poets from the area all the time at the bookshop, and they’ve been so helpful to me,” said Marriott. “I’m relatively new to this area’s poetry group, and to writing poetry and putting my work out there, so having their wisdom is just awesome.”
But Marriott, who holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Lafayette College in Easton and is pursuing a master’s degree in writing at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, is not new to writing. She recalls writing stories on her desktop computer as a kid, and her dad, who was also an English major, instilling an early appreciation of the written word by reading Robert Frost’s poems to her.
The poems Marriott submitted to the contest contain themes of love, heartbreak, change, and relationships.
“I write a lot about my own experience, such as the young-adult transition into being an adult,” said Marriott. “I also write about being a witness to the difficult things my friends are going through as well.”
Her poetry’s reflection of both herself and others stood out to the final judge, poet Jennifer Tseng, who noted that Marriott’s poems bring to mind the ambigram – a word that can be oriented two ways for a different meaning – of “me/we.”
“Here the ‘me’ is always connected to another; the ‘me’ is always part of a ‘we,’” said Tseng. ”Sonically subtle and satisfying, these are the poems of someone who has the power to see the ‘we’ everywhere, in everything.”
Marriott, who co-founded the English Club and the yearly Poetry Slam at Lafayette College, has had her poems appear in the Turning Leaf Journal, Engine Idling, and more. Her first children’s book will be published in May. When she’s not reading or writing, she stays busy coaching kindergarten and first-grade soccer, watching Philadelphia sports teams, and hunting for the best latte in town.
The Bucks County Poet Laureate reading and reception takes place at 1 p.m. Saturday, November 15, in historic Tyler Hall, located on the campus at 275 Swamp Rd., Newtown, Pa., 18940. Admission and parking are free. For a campus map and directions, visit bucks.edu/newtown.
Established in 1977, the Bucks County Poet Laureate Program is the longest continuously running poet laureate program in Pennsylvania. It’s coordinated by the College’s School of Language and Literature under the direction of Professor Ethel Rackin. Past laureates continue to give back through Poet Laureate Community Projects and the Volta Center for Writing Arts, housed at the College’s Newtown Campus Library. Learn more at voltawritingcenter.org.
Sample poems by Madeline Marriott:
St. Paul’s Cathedral
The wrong line on the tube, of course. Morning rush
for the working people of London. Everyone swaying
with a paperback, everyone with a dog-ear
near the end, my knuckles gripped to white
as I rattle to the new rhythm.
Back home,
my best friend’s father was dying. I was the worst
person in the world that day, seeing something new.
Everywhere we went, I thought of him: in every
maple-soaked basement of a pub with a clever name,
in the late-evening light along the river. Beautiful places.
Places too far from home to be beautiful.
Moving Home
I’m last awake in a house full of hallways.
My shadows, old and new, converge
in the corner when I walk, warp my shape
until I disappear. The sky is spitting
rain after a forty day drought and my first
thought is biblical even now. On the news,
they say the ground gets so parched
that it can’t absorb the water when it
finally comes. If I learn anything else
I’ll have to change my life, so I walk back
down the hall, shadow splitting in my wake.
The Story
When I write about you, people always think
I’m in love. I might be, but that misses the point.
It’s more that the month we met, I could only
think of the labyrinth of nerves just under my skin.
You were not far behind, I would learn, choking
on the kind of sadness you only see in movies.
A ghastly sight we were, I’m sure, but what sick fun
we had. We sat at dinner and barely ate,
then sat on my carpet and laughed about it.
It was grim. I loved you in less than a week
when you cried and it split me in two. The story
has to be that we both got better.
