Good Bones
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4.4 • 8 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Featuring “Good Bones”—called “Official Poem of 2016” by the BBC/Public Radio International. Maggie Smith writes out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by watching her own children read the world like a book they've just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot. These are poems that stare down darkness while cultivating and sustaining possibility, poems that have a sense of moral gravitas, personal urgency, and the ability to address a larger world.
Maggie Smith's previous books are The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo, 2015), Lamp of the Body (Red Hen, 2005), and three prize-winning chapbooks: Disasterology (Dream Horse, 2016), The List of Dangers (Kent State, 2010), and Nesting Dolls (Pudding House, 2005). Her poem “Good Bones” has gone viral—tweeted and translated across the world, featured on the TV drama Madam Secretary, and called the “Official Poem of 2016” by the BBC/Public Radio International, earning news coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, the Guardian, and beyond. Maggie Smith was named the 2016 Ohio Poet of the Year.
“Smith's voice is clear and unmistakable as she unravels the universe, pulls at a loose thread and lets the whole thing tumble around us, sometimes beautiful, sometimes achingly hard. Truthful, tender, and unafraid of the dark....”—Ada Limón
“As if lost in the soft, bewitching world of fairy tale, Maggie Smith conceives and brings forth this metaphysical Baedeker, a guidebook for mother and child to lead each other into a hopeful present. Smith's poems affirm the virtues of humanity: compassion, empathy, and the ability to comfort one another when darkness falls. 'There is a light,' she tells us, 'and the light is good.'”—D. A. Powell
“Good Bones is an extraordinary book. Maggie Smith demonstrates what happens when an abundance of heart and intelligence meets the hands of a master craftsperson, reminding us again that the world, for a true poet, is blessedly inexhaustible.”—Erin Belieu
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this collection titled for a poem that became an unlikely viral sensation, Smith follows The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison by exploring the sensorium mothers and children share in a place where "deer still find their way to the backyard." Suburban as it may be, strangeness and terror manifest in this setting, while surreal sound and color imbue the ordinary with surprising affect, as in the "glitter-black overlap of shingles" or "lit/ windows painting yellow Rothkos on the water." The collection features many meditations on past and future, life and death but the ones that stand out revolve around motherhood, particularly the magic and trauma of motherhood and motherlessness. Smith considers, from a personal perspective, the violence of Caesarean section ("Twice/ they cut babies from my body") and miscarriage ("you who have me/ in common not-mother, mother// you weren't to have"). She elevates motherhood to something akin to an aesthetic or theology. "The mother is glass through which/ you see, in excruciating detail, yourself," she writes. For mothers and non-mothers alike, Smith shares one possible orientation to the world whose rottenness she catalogues along with all that makes it, in her view, still worth loving: "Let me love the world like a mother./ Let me be tender when it lets me down."
