Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s preview coverage of Miami Book Fair (MBF) 2021! The poets whose work you’ll be reading every weekday from October 25 through November 12 are just a few of the many authors from around the world participating in this year’s MBF, the nation’s largest gathering of writers and readers of all ages. They all look forward to sharing their work, thoughts, and ideas both in person and online. Between November 14 and November 21, new poet conversations and readings will be launched and available for free on miamibookfaironline.com (in addition to other content). For more information, visit the website and follow MBF on Instagram and Twitter at @miamibookfair and use the hashtag #miamibookfair2021.
It sounds like someone wound up the wrens and let them go, let them chatter across your lawn like cheap toys, and from here an airplane seems to fly only from one tree to another, barely chalking a line between them. We say the naked eye as if the eye could be clothed, as if it isn’t the world that refuses to undress unless we turn our backs. It shows us what it chooses, nothing more, and it’s not waxing pastoral. There is too much now at stake. The skeletal rattle you hear at the window could be only the hellion roses in the wind, their thorns etching the glass, but it could be bones. The country we call ours isn’t, and it’s full of them. Every year you dig that goddamn rose bush from the bed, spoon it from soil like a tumor, and every year it grows back thick and wild. We say in the grand scheme of things as if there were one. We say that’s not how the world works as if the world works.
Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of 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, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and more. You can follow her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.
Credit: First published in The Baffler; appears in Goldenrod: Poems (Atria/One Signal Publishers (July 27, 2021). Permission granted by the poet.
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Love this one. Thank you