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.”

Selected by Kimiko Hahn as a winner of the 2012 Dorset Prize, Maggie Smith’s poems question whether the realms of imagination and story can possibly be safe.This house at the end of the street isn’t all that it appears to be, as Smith’s verses design a dark mythical landscape hidden between the picket fences. In “The List of Dangers”, she writes, “The sun was a saw blade,/a yellow circle with teeth. Terrible birds with plumage/of fire scorched whatever they touched: The black/mailbox opened its mouth to the black street”. This is a world unwelcome to the children that play in it, whether they know it or not. The vivid imagery and colors of any old neighborhood fill the pages with life, giving Smith’s work an ominous relatability. Her stories leave us grasping at who said what and, more importantly, where the line between fairy tale and horror story really lies.