"’If all the weavers of the world are sad does it go into the fabric’ asks Madden. The intense and incantatory voice of Ritual Loss gives us the music of the loom in poems at once feral and magical. These could be the songs of Penelope, of Angela of Foligno, of selkies, of Macbeth’s witches who stir the cauldron, of survivors of trauma. ‘My father was / a soldier so what that means is we all went to war.’ War, divorce, death, all disorder of loss echoes through this collection. But if ‘grief is a shark’ that swims through Ritual Magic, a generational wisdom stitched with hope casts its oracular shadow over the poems. . . . Madden’s verse rings with a mystic’s passion and creates its own lexicon of spell casting. . . . . There’s a poem in the collection called ‘Contagious Magic’ and that’s what these poems are—to be read without stirring, mesmerized."

Desirée Alvarez, judge of the 2024 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Contest

“Madden gives voice to startling lines of flight that intersect alchemical knowledge with the science of stars; that choreograph the abrupt or belated extinguishing of persons as mirrored by the constellations above. Subjecting song structure to ancestral invocations, furious spells, and subversive affirmations, this is poetry that culminates in the dangers and bliss particular to folklore—scenes given now to the cadences of nursery rhymes, to the hesitant breath of ecstatic experience, and to the tremors of ascension and drowning. In storylines of displacement, accounts of labor, and syllables from diasporic life-ways, at once revealed in the hypnotic qualities of fascination and bewitching, Ritual Loss is a vivid, expansive work of lyric complexity commensurate with a broken world and the expanding universe.”

Roberto Tejada, author of "Carbonate of Copper"