Goldenrod
Poems
1st Edition
Published on 27. July 2021
128 pages
978-1-9821-8507-7 (ISBN)
Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR
"To read Maggie Smith is to embrace the achingly 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 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.
"To read Maggie Smith is to embrace the achingly 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 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.
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Maggie Smith is the award-winning New York Times bestselling author of nine books of poetry and prose, including A Suit or a Suitcase, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, Goldenrod, Keep Moving, and My Thoughts Have Wings. She has been widely published, appearing in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Best American Poetry, and more. She is the host of The Slowdown. You can find her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.
Content
- Intro
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Part 1
- 1. This Sort of Thing Happens All the Time
- 2. Goldenrod
- 3. Animals
- 4. The Hum
- 5. In the Grand Scheme of Things
- 6. Ohio Cento
- 7. Lacrimae
- 8. Poem Beginning with a Retweet
- 9. Walking the Dog
- 10. Starlings
- 11. Written Deer
- 12. Rose Has Hands
- 13. At the End of Our Marriage, in the Backyard
- 14. If I Could Set This to Music
- 15. Talk of Horses
- 16. Inventive Spelling
- 17. Stone
- 18. Threshold
- Part 2
- 19. Slipper
- 20. For My Next Trick
- 21. December 18, 2008
- 22. Small Blue Town
- 23. Ohio Cento
- 24. Airplanes
- 25. Tender Age
- 26. Prove
- 27. Poor Sheep
- 28. Half Staff
- 29. Perennials
- 30. Interrogators of Orchids
- 31. At the End of My Marriage, I Think of Something My Daughter Said About Trees
- 32. Not Everything Is a Poem
- 33. Confession
- 34. Small Shoes
- 35. Planetarium in January
- 36. After the Divorce, I Think of Something My Daughter Said About Mars
- 37. Poem Beginning with a Line from Basho
- Part 3
- 38. Invisible Architecture
- 39. Wild
- 40. Junk trees,
- 41. First Thaw
- 42. A Room Like This
- 43. Ohio Cento
- 44. Woman, 41, with a History of Alzheimer's on Both Sides of Her Family
- 45. What Else
- 46. Porthole
- 47. Joke
- 48. Homesick on a Farm in Franklin, Tennessee
- 49. During Lockdown, I Let the Dog Sleep in My Bed Again
- 50. Wife for Scale
- 51. Bride
- 52. Talisman
- 53. How Dark the Beginning
- 54. Verse Chorus Verse Chorus Bridge
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Credits
- Copyright
