“To read Maggie Smith is to embrace the achingly precious beauty of the present moment.” —Time

From the award-winning poet and bestselling author of Keep Moving and Good Bones, a stunning poetry collection that celebrates the beauty and messiness of life.

With her breakout bestseller Keep Moving, Maggie Smith captured the nation with her “meditations on kindness and hope” (NPR). Now, with Goldenrod, the award-winning poet returns with a powerful collection of poems that look at parenthood, solitude, love, and memory. Pulling objects from everyday life—a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son’s pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road—she reveals the magic of the present moment. Only Maggie Smith could turn an autocorrect mistake into a line of poetry, musing that her phone “doesn’t observe / the high holidays, autocorrecting / shana tova to shaman tobacco, / Rosh Hashanah to rose has hands.”​

Slate called Smith’s “superpower as a writer” her “ability to find the perfect concrete metaphor for inchoate human emotions and explore it with empathy and honesty.” The poems in Goldenrod celebrate the contours of daily life, explore and delight in the space between thought and experience, and remind us that we decide what is beautiful.

From the award-winning poet and bestselling author, a stunning poetry collection that celebrates the beauty and messiness of life.

“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