Her newest book, Useful Junk, was published by BOA Editions in April of 2022."Sometimes the best thing I can do to improve a poem is to loosen my grip on it. You can follow her on social media Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry series winner Copia (2014) and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), which won the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry, and was a finalist for the Library of Virginia Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. She has been widely published, appearing in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and more.
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. Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017), The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (2015), Lamp of the Body (2005), and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Chang e. With a poet’s attention to language and an innovative approach to the genre, Smith reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new. Above all, this memoir is an argument for possibility. It is a story about a mother’s fierce and constant love for her children, and a woman’s love and regard for herself. You Could Make This Place Beautiful, like the work of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, and Gina Frangello, is an unflinching look at what it means to live and write our own lives. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she’s known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself.
The book begins with one woman’s personal, particular heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels.
This event will be held in person at Boswell Book Company Reading celebrating Maggie Smith ’s new memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful (Atria/One Signal, 2023), in conversation with Erika Meitner.
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