Goldenrod

Notes From Your Bookseller

For those who came to Maggie Smith via her 2020 personal growth book Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change, you’re in for a treat with Goldenrod. Smith is the perfect mash-up of Cheryl Strayed, Anne Lamott and Billy Collins. Do yourself a favor and read the poem “Good Bones” from 2016, then you'll know to add a dash of Philip Larkin as well (thinking of his poem “Days” where we always find much solace). Maggie Smith's work takes our everyday events and tells us that life is worth every precious moment.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR

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 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.