Good Bones

by Maggie Smith

Overview

Good Bones, the collection that took the internet by storm in 2017, is a collection of modern poetry that speaks to the world we live in. Maggie Smith contemplates the past and our future, life and death, childhood and motherhood. She 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. Smith takes in the dark world around her with a critical eye, always searching for the hidden goodness: compassion, empathy, honesty. “There is a light,” she tells us, “and the light is good.” Smith skillfully reveals the layers of the world around us through lyric language and vivid imagery: “For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. / For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, / sunk in a lake.” These poems stare down darkness while cultivating and sustaining possibility and addressing a larger world. We come away from this collection hopeful about making the world a better place, a place to share with future generations. As Smith tells us in Good Bones, “This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946482013
Publisher:	Tupelo Press
Publication date:	10/01/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	114
Sales rank:	69,528
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Maggie Smith is the author of three books of poetry: GOOD BONES (Tupelo Press, September 2017); THE WELL SPEAKS OF ITS OWN POISON (Tupelo Press, 2015); and Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press, 2005). Smith is also the author of three prizewinning chapbooks. Her poems appear in Best American Poetry, the New York Times, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Guernica, Plume, AGNI, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Smith has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, among others. She is a freelance writer and editor.

Table of Contents

Weep Up 3

First Fall 4

Marked 5

Sky 7

This Town 8

Twentieth Century 10

The Hawk 12

London Plane 14

Accidental Pastoral 16

Museum 18

The Story of the Mountain 20

Orientation 22

You could never take a car to Greenland 23

At your age I wore a darkness 27

Past 29

Heart 30

Stitches 31

The Crows 32

Let's Not Begin 33

Home-Free 36

Deer Field 38

Nest 39

Size Equals Distance 40

Harrowing 41

Lullaby 42

Where Honey Comes From 44

Rough Air 49

Leaves 51

The Hunters 52

Parachute 54

If anyone can survive 57

Storybook 58

Stonefish 60

Illustration 61

Invincible 63

Your Tongue 64

Splinter 66

The Mother 68

What I Carried 69

Good Bones 75

Transparent 76

Clock 78

Future 80

Cloud Study 81

The Hawk-Kite 83

Reading the Train Book, I Think of Lisa 84

Panel Van 85

Poem with a Line from Bluets 87

Dear 88

Mountain Child 90

Love Poem 92

Rain, New Year's Eve 94

Acknowledgments 97

Editorial Reviews

10/02/2017
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.” (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

“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

“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

“It’s Smith’s dynamically precise and vivid images, and her uncanny ability to find just the right word or action to crack open our known experience, that make Good Bones an extraordinary book. (She) 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

From the Publisher