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Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, My Thoughts Have Wings, Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. 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. She has been widely published, appearing in the New York Times, New Yorker, Paris Review, Best American Poetry and more.@MaggieSmithPoet | maggiesmithpoet.com
This book is extraordinary -- ANN PATCHETT I am in awe of Maggie Smith's memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, for what she is willing to show us. Yes, the writing is keen and gorgeous, and yes, she tells us a hundred truths in every chapter, but most of all she allows us to witness a self crumbling, scattering and renewing . . . [A] generous, beautiful book -- KATHERINE MAY This is a memoir of a woman who recommits to herself after heartbreak, but it's also a meditation on patriarchal power dynamics, a mother's love for her children and what that means in today's world and how to bet on yourself, even and especially when we're told not to. A balm for the soul and a rallying cry for the heart * * Good Housekeeping * * A composite of creativity, motherhood and determination * * New York Times * * Rich in nuance and unrelenting in its honesty, Smith's memoir is a bittersweet study in both grief and joy * * TIME * * [A] meditation on what it means to be a modern woman, this is as beautiful and lyrical as they come * * Red * * Reminds you that you can [ . . . ] survive deep loss, sink into life's deep beauty, and constantly, constantly make yourself new -- GLENNON DOYLE A poet's memoir . . . [Smith] has an uncanny ability to boil down giant ideas into tiny, dense sentences that are both playful and heartbreaking * * SHONDALAND * * Smith turns to prose to chronicle the end of her marriage and the hard, beautiful work of loving and valuing herself * * PEOPLE * * Smith confronts our collective desire for a clean narrative. You Could Make This Place Beautiful shows a writer wondering why we use the narrative vocabulary we have to make sense of life's ups and downs. Smith breaks the fourth wall constantly in her memoir, calling out the real-life moments that feel too on the nose, evaluating the fallout of her husband's infidelity * * Vanity Fair * *
