Good Bones

About the Book

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."

Table of Contents:
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

About the Author :
Maggie Smith's previous books are The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo, 2015), Lamp of the Body (Red Hen, 2005), and three prize-winning chapbooks: Disasterology (Dream Horse, 2016), The List of Dangers (Kent State, 2010), and Nesting Dolls (Pudding House, 2005). Her poem "Good Bones" has gone viral-tweeted and translated across the world, featured on the TV drama Madam Secretary, and called the "Official Poem of 2016" by the BBC/Public Radio International, earning news coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, the Guardian, and beyond. Maggie Smith was named the 2016 Ohio Poet of the Year.

Review :
"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."  "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."  “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.”  “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.”