Keep Moving - by Maggie Smith (Hardcover)

About the Book

"By Pushcart award-winning poet Maggie Smith, a collection of quotes and essays on facing life's challenges with creativity, courage, and resilience"--

Book Synopsis

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"A meditation on kindness and hope, and how to move forward through grief." --NPR

"A shining reminder to learn all we can from this moment, rebuilding ourselves in the darkness so that we may come out wiser, kinder, and stronger on the other side." --The Boston Globe

"Powerful essays on loss, endurance, and renewal." --People

Cosmopolitan's "Best Nonfiction Books of 2020"
Marie Claire's "2020 Books You Should Pre-Order Now"
Parade's "25 Self-Help Books To Get Your 2020 Off On The Right Foot"
The Washington Post's "What to Read in 2020 Based on the Books You Loved in 2019"

For fans of Cheryl Strayed and Anne Lamott, a collection of quotes and essays on facing life's challenges with creativity, courage, and resilience.

When Maggie Smith, the award-winning author of the viral poem "Good Bones," started writing inspirational daily Twitter posts in the wake of her divorce, they unexpectedly caught fire. In this deeply moving book of quotes and essays, Maggie writes about new beginnings as opportunities for transformation. Like kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold, Keep Moving celebrates the beauty and strength on the other side of loss. This is a book for anyone who has gone through a difficult time and is wondering: What comes next?

Review Quotes

"Keep Moving...is a meditation on kindness and hope, and how to move forward through grief."
--NPR

"Keep Moving is a shining reminder to learn all we can from this moment, rebuilding ourselves in the darkness so that we may come out wiser, kinder, and stronger on the other side."
--Boston Globe

"An excellent COVID-19-era pick me up."
--Huffington Post

"In the end, it is much larger than any individual, much taller than a personal stack of obstacles. Keep Moving has the ability to look inside of us and see our struggles, too."
--Ploughshares

"It's in these essays that Smith exerts her superpower as a writer: her ability to find the perfect concrete metaphor for inchoate human emotions and explore it with empathy and honesty."
--Slate

"Powerful essays on loss, endurance, and renewal."
--People

"Smith's gem is packed with luminous quotes and essays about resilience, transformation and moving forward no matter the circumstances."
--Newsweek

"Keep Moving is perfect for right now"
--Al Roker, The Today Show

"Keep Moving speaks to you like an encouraging friend reminding you that you can feel and survive deep loss, sink into life's deep beauty, and constantly, constantly make yourself new."
--Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times Bestselling author of Love Warrior and Untamed

"In a season of unprecedented uncertainty, KEEP MOVING has arrived just in time."
--Bookpage (starred review)

"Keep Moving offers a bouquet of generosities in one hand, and a bouquet of soft but firm honesty in the other.... A promise that what doesn't get better sometimes gets easier. And that, too, is worthy of celebration."
--Hanif Abdurraqib, author of Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest

"Candid, lyrical, and full of empathy, this is a book that feels vital and welcome in these times . . . . A stunning and wise piece of work."
--Sinéad Gleeson, author of Constellations

"Every once in a long, long while a book comes along that challenges and changes everything. Keep Moving is exactly that book: an ingenious synthesis of poetry, proverbs, journaling, lyrical prose, belles-lettres, psalms, meditations, and aphorisms. It defies any tidy definition, and thus, practically defines a new genre that gives everyone--no matter what walk of life--the gift of pausing to reflect on what we didn't know we already knew about ourselves because we never had words for it, until Maggie Smith. These pages give us a unique and poetic opportunity to recognize the joys within our failures, the peace within our terrors, the simplicity within our complex lives--and then some! It is sure to become a classic that will be read for decades to come."
--Richard Blanco, Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of How to Love a Country

"I lived this book in real time. I was going through something hard and heartbreaking, and every day I'd log onto social media....to read what you now hold in your hands: truth and pain and empathy and the wisdom that comes with living. We keep moving. I kept moving. So can you. I will carry copies of this beautiful gift of a book in my pockets and give them to everyone I know."
--Megan Stielstra, author of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

"I read this book in one sitting during one of the most difficult weeks of my life....This isn't lofty self-help stuff; she doesn't speak from above. Instead, she speaks next to you, whispering right in your ear that we are all in the trenches together. Every single page of this book made me breathe a little deeper and feel a little less alone."
--Amanda Palmer, singer, songwriter, musician, author of The Art of Asking

"I wish I'd had a copy of Keep Moving when my first marriage ended. It would have consoled my fears about being alone. Maggie Smith writes so honestly without being brutal, and she shows readers hope while avoiding the saccharine... To experience relief from a book is a rare and wonderful thing. Keep Moving gave me that relief."
--Bella Mackie, author of Jog On

"In Keep Moving, poet Maggie Smith takes what William James called 'torn-to-pieces-hood' and knits it into something new and surprising and fortifying. I'm so grateful for the clarity, compassion, and wit in these pages. This is a book that will change you, a book you will want to give to someone you love. I've never read anything quite like it."
--Lucy Kalanithi, Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine, Stanford University, and widow of Paul Kalanithi, author of When Breath Becomes Air

"Maggie Smith's mantras are a faithful and forgiving companion, coaxing us through the darkness and toward our own resilience."
--Rebecca Soffer, coauthor Modern Loss: Candid Conversation About Grief. Beginners Welcome.

"Maggie Smith's voice is the one I hear in my head, the one that keeps me going when I don't feel I can. And now, with this book, she has gifted the entire world with that particular brand of magic."
--Jennifer Pastiloff, author of On Being Human

About The Author

Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of several books of poetry including Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, The List of Dangers, and Nesting Dolls. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, and more.