A review by kitnotmarlowe
Good Bones: Poems by Maggie Smith

emotional hopeful reflective fast-paced

5.0

 Like many others, I imagine, my first encounter with Maggie Smith was through her titular poem, Good Bones. What Smith lacks in subject variety (a matter of personal preference), she makes up for by re-examining the same themes and questions through different lenses. Her language is so precise, and her emotions so raw throughout that repetition hardly matters.

When reading poetry, I like to return to Emily Dickinson's definition of the form: "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." Good Bones is the only poetry collection I've ever read that I had to put down because it was too good. No joke, I read Rough Air, moaned like I'd been stabbed in the belly, turned my Kindle off, rolled over, and cried myself to sleep.