The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison by Maggie Smith

Ī 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in poetry, Maggie has also received four Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is also the author of Lamp of the Body ( Red Hen Press, 2005), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, and three prizewinning chapbooks, the latest of which is Disasterology ( Dream Horse Press, forthcoming 2015). Something beautiful.Maggie Smith’s second book of poems, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison ( Tupelo Press, April 2015), was selected by Kimiko Hahn as the winner of the Dorset Prize. 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. “Life, like a poem, is a series of choices.” The bestselling poet and author of the “powerful” (People) and “luminous” ( Newsweek) Keep Moving offers a lush and heartrending memoir exploring coming of age in your middle age. Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by Good Housekeeping, Goodreads, Zibby Mag, Newsweek, BookPage, and LitHub “This book is extraordinary.” -Ann Patchett

The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison by Maggie Smith