NATIONAL BESTSELLER *
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR
“To read Maggie Smith is to embrace the achi
ngly precious beauty of the present moment.” —
Time
“A captivating collection from a wise, accessible poet.” —
People
From the award-winning poet and bestselling author of
You Could Make This Place Beautiful
,
Keep Moving,
and
Good Bones
a stunning poetry collection that celebrates the beauty and messiness of life.
With her breakout bestseller
Keep Moving
, Maggie Smith captured the nation with her “meditations on kindness and hope” (NPR). Now, with
Goldenrod
, the award-winning poet returns with a powerful collection of poems that look 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. Only Maggie Smith could 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
.”​
Slate
called Smith’s “superpower as a writer” her “ability to find the perfect concrete metaphor for inchoate human emotions and explore it with empathy and honesty.” The poems in
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.