Goldenrod by Maggie Smith

Some poems ask you to reach for a dictionary. These ask you to look out the window.

A National Bestseller and one of NPR’s Best Books of the Year, this collection finds Maggie Smith doing what she does best: turning ordinary moments into something luminous. A hallway mirror. A rock tucked in a child’s pocket. A field of goldenrod nodding at the side of the road. In her hands, the everyday becomes a small revelation.

Following her breakout bestseller Keep Moving, Smith returns here to the tender, tangled territory of parenthood, solitude, love, and memory. She’s the rare poet who can spin an autocorrect mistake into something worth underlining, musing that her phone “doesn’t observe / the high holidays.”

Time put it perfectly: “To read Maggie Smith is to embrace the achingly precious beauty of the present moment.” People called it “a captivating collection from a wise, accessible poet.” And Slate praised her “superpower as a writer”—her “ability to find the perfect concrete metaphor for inchoate human emotions.”

This is poetry for people who think they don’t read poetry. Approachable, honest, and quietly stunning, it reminds us that we get to decide what’s beautiful.

We can’t think of a better companion for a rainy afternoon in the cove—salt air drifting in, the ocean just outside, a warm drink and these pages in hand. Come linger a while. This one’s a keeper.

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