Good Bones - by Maggie Smith (Paperback)

About the Book

Featuring "Good Bones," called "Official Poem of 2016" by Public Radio International

Book Synopsis

A powerful collection that includes the viral hit poem "Good Bones" -- Public Radio International's Official Poem of 2016!

Good Bones 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."

Review Quotes

"I think if the book called Good Bones has a moral, it's about learning to grow where planted. It's also about learning how to look danger in the eye, how to acknowledge the thing that wants to stop us--uproot us, undo us--and then refusing to let it." -- "Julie Marie Wade, The Rumpus"

"In her wondrous new poetry collection, Good Bones, Maggie Smith has much to tell us. And she does so with such a clean, aching clarity of lyricism that I discover now frequently exhausted human touchstones freshly, with real surprise. 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. 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"

"Smith encourages goose-prickles; her words settle in your stomach and create a disturbance so potent that you will sit and ponder for hours what mark you are making on the world while wondering if it really matters after all." -- "Hannah Warren, Pleiades: Literature in Context"

"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, the poems in Good Bones are lyrically charged love letters to a world in desperate need of her generous eye." -- "Ada Limón"