You Could Make This Place Beautiful

(Hardback, Main)

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Description

'Life, like a poem, is a series of choices'

In her long-awaited debut memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, award-winning poet Maggie Smith explores in lyrical vignettes the end of her marriage and the beginning of a surprising new life. With the spirit of reflection and empathy she's known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness and narrative itself.

It is a story about a mother's fierce and constant love for her children, and a woman's love and regard for herself. Above all, this memoir is an argument for possibility. Smith reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new. Something beautiful.

Reviews

'This book is extraordinary' - ANN PATCHETT

'Rich in nuance and unrelenting in its honesty, Smith's memoir is a bittersweet study in both grief and joy' - TIME

'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

Author Bio

Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, 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