Cover Reveal

You know I have a thing for clouds

Hi, Friend.

We have a cover! My next poetry collection, A Suit or a Suitcase, will be out in March of next year. Here she is.

The gorgeous art is by Aykut Aydogdu, and the design is by the brilliant Jimmy Iacobelli, who also designed the covers for Keep Moving, Goldenrod, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, and Dear Writer. He’s the best!

A Suit or a Suitcase is my fifth full-length book of poetry; the last was Goldenrod, published in 2021. It’s always challenging to try to encapsulate something as wide-ranging as a book of poems, because collections come together one poem at a time over several years. I’ll share the publisher’s copy below to give you a sense of the book.

Instant New York Times bestselling author and poet Maggie Smith returns with a new collection of poems on the sometimes-blurry distinction between mind and body, and how the self shifts and moves through time and space.

The title of Maggie Smith’s new collection comes from the eponymous poem, which begins:

You ask what I’ll miss about this life.
Everything but cruelty, I think.

But you want one specific thing,
so here—I’ll miss my body. I’ll miss

its companionship, how it’s traveled
with me, never leaving me—& by me,

I mean my mind. My soul? My self?
I don’t know what to call it, and besides,

my body hasn’t traveled with me.
I’ve traveled inside it. Do I wear it

or does it carry me? Is the body a suit
or a suitcase?

Within, poems turn over the strange relationships between the body and the mind, the self and the world. With her signature tenderness and clarity of observation, and with stunning swoops of imagination, Smith considers—and reconsiders—what it is to be human: Does one life matter in the grand scheme of space and time? How can it be that we are the same people we were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, but also different people? And could there be more to life, just beyond the borders of we can experience?

Each poem is an ode to the power of our minds, and proof that both a life and a self, whether within a suit or a suitcase, is infinitely expandable.

If they’re lucky, before poems have a home together in a book, they’re offered shelter in magazines and anthologies. Poems from this collection have been published in The Nation, Poetry, The Southern Review, APR, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Enormous thanks to those editors.

I’ve been preaching the gospel of preorders for years, so you’ve likely heard me talk about their importance before. I’ll just say this: Preordering a book is one of the best ways to support an author and a forthcoming book. You can preorder from your local indie bookstore or from your favorite online retailer. (Yes, you absolutely get literary karma bucks when you buy indie!)

My neighborhood indie bookstore, Gramercy Books, offers signed and personalized copies of my books, including preorders of A Suit or a Suitcase. You can place an order online, tell them in the notes if you want the book simply signed or inscribed to someone special, and then they’ll ship it right to your door anywhere in the continental US. Easy!

I’m so excited to share this book with you. Next spring will be here before we know it!

Now, back to writing…

Love,
Maggie

PS: If you’re curious about the title poem, you can find a behind-the-scenes look at it, with a handwritten annotation and author’s note, here.