NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR
??âTo read Maggie Smith is to embrace the achingly precious beauty of the present moment.â âTime
âA captivating collection from a wise, accessible poet.â âPeople
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 âmeditations on kindness and hopeâ (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 lifeâa hallway mirror, a rock found in her sonâs pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the roadâshe reveals the magic of the present moment. Only Maggie Smith could turn an autocorrect mistake into a line of poetry, musing that her phone âdoesnât observe / the high holidays, autocorrecting / shana tova to shaman tobacco, / Rosh Hashanah to rose has hands.â
Slate called Smithâs âsuperpower as a writerâ her âability to find the perfect concrete metaphor for inchoate human emotions and explore it with empathy and honesty.â 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.