Smith, Maggie

Maggie Smith is the author of Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestseller Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. Her writing has been widely published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Poetry, among others. With her breakout bestseller Keep Moving, Smith captured the nation with what NPR called her “meditations on kindness and hope.” With Goldenrod: Poems (Atria/One Signal Publisher), she returns with a collection that looks at parenthood, solitude, love, and memory. Pulling objects from everyday life – a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son’s pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road – she reveals the magic of the present moment. Smith can turn an autocorrect mistake into a line of poetry, musing that her phone “doesn’t observe / the high holidays, autocorrecting / shana tova to shaman tobacco, / Rosh Hashanah to rose has hands.” The poems in Goldenrod celebrate the contours of daily life, explore and delight in the space between thought and experience, and remind us that we decide what is beautiful. Publishers Weekly praised it as an “empathetic, wise, and honest collection … brimming with poems full of heart and feeling.”