Goldenrod

Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. 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, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and more. You can follow her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.


Review Quotes:
" Goldenrod brims with fervent love for this gorgeous, wounded world. These are poems you want to rush into, poems you will return to more slowly again and again. They are like the stones she describes: together/ they dazzle with fire."
--Ellen Bass, author of Indigo


Review Quotes:
"The poems in Goldenrod alternate between gratitude and anger, bafflement and forgiveness, but more than anything else, they radiate love. To read Maggie Smith's poetry is to realize we aren't alone."
--Rhett Miller, Singer/Songwriter, The Old 97's


Review Quotes:
" Goldenrod is lush and intimate, full of joy and sorrow, fire and field. With wonder and poignancy, Maggie Smith navigates a reconstitution of self as she grieves what is lost. Her way of seeing is positively alchemical."
--Marcus Wicker, author of Silencer


Review Quotes:
"In Goldenrod Maggie Smith aptly writes, 'America, we have taken children/ from their mothers. We have separated/ words from their meanings.' Though no injustice escapes her attention, nor any personal hurt, Smith's daring empathy and her knowing grasp of survival deliver us to a place where pain and beauty hold hands together in grace and transcendence."
--Barbara Ras, author of The Blues of Heaven