Download or read book Good Bones written by Maggie Smith and published by Tupelo Press. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring “Good Bones”—called “Official Poem of 2016” by the BBC/Public Radio International. Maggie Smith writes out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by watching her own children read the world like a book they've just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot. These are poems that stare down darkness while cultivating and sustaining possibility, poems that have a sense of moral gravitas, personal urgency, and the ability to address a larger world. Maggie Smith's previous books are The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo, 2015), Lamp of the Body (Red Hen, 2005), and three prize-winning chapbooks: Disasterology (Dream Horse, 2016), The List of Dangers (Kent State, 2010), and Nesting Dolls (Pudding House, 2005). Her poem “Good Bones” has gone viral—tweeted and translated across the world, featured on the TV drama Madam Secretary, and called the “Official Poem of 2016” by the BBC/Public Radio International, earning news coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, the Guardian, and beyond. Maggie Smith was named the 2016 Ohio Poet of the Year. “Smith's voice is clear and unmistakable as she unravels the universe, pulls at a loose thread and lets the whole thing tumble around us, sometimes beautiful, sometimes achingly hard. Truthful, tender, and unafraid of the dark....”—Ada Limón “As if lost in the soft, bewitching world of fairy tale, Maggie Smith conceives and brings forth this metaphysical Baedeker, a guidebook for mother and child to lead each other into a hopeful present. Smith's poems affirm the virtues of humanity: compassion, empathy, and the ability to comfort one another when darkness falls. 'There is a light,' she tells us, 'and the light is good.'”—D. A. Powell “Good Bones is an extraordinary book. Maggie Smith demonstrates what happens when an abundance of heart and intelligence meets the hands of a master craftsperson, reminding us again that the world, for a true poet, is blessedly inexhaustible.”—Erin Belieu

Download or read book You Could Make This Place Beautiful written by Maggie Smith and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-04-11 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NPR Best Book of the Year • Time Best Book of the Year • Oprah Daily Best Memoir of the Year “A bittersweet study in both grief and joy.” ­—Time “A sparklingly beautiful memoir-in-vignettes” (Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author) that explores coming of age in your middle age—from the bestselling poet and author of Keep Moving. “Life, like a poem, is a series of choices.” In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself. The book begins with one woman’s personal heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she’s known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy. You Could Make This Place Beautiful, like the work of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, and Gina Frangello, is an unflinching look at what it means to live and write our own lives. 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 “extraordinary” (Ann Patchett) in the way that it reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new and beautiful.

Download or read book Keep Moving written by Maggie Smith and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The NATIONAL BESTSELLER from the author of YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL “A meditation on kindness and hope, and how to move forward through grief.” —NPR “A shining reminder to learn all we can from this moment, rebuilding ourselves in the darkness so that we may come out wiser, kinder, and stronger on the other side.” —The Boston Globe “Powerful essays on loss, endurance, and renewal.” —People For fans of Glennon Doyle, Cheryl Strayed, and Anne Lamott, a collection of quotes and essays on facing life’s challenges with creativity, courage, and resilience. When Maggie Smith, the award-winning author of the viral poem “Good Bones,” started writing inspirational daily Twitter posts in the wake of her divorce, they unexpectedly caught fire. In this deeply moving book of quotes and essays, Maggie writes about new beginnings as opportunities for transformation. Like kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold, Keep Moving celebrates the beauty and strength on the other side of loss. This is a book for anyone who has gone through a difficult time and is wondering: What comes next?

Download or read book Goldenrod written by Maggie Smith and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR ??“To read Maggie Smith is to embrace the achingly precious beauty of the present moment.” —Time “A captivating collection from a wise, accessible poet.” —People From the award-winning poet and bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Keep Moving, and Good Bones, a stunning poetry collection that celebrates the beauty and messiness of life. With her breakout bestseller Keep Moving, Maggie Smith captured the nation with her “meditations on kindness and hope” (NPR). Now, with Goldenrod, the award-winning poet returns with a powerful collection of poems that look at parenthood, solitude, love, and memory. Pulling objects from everyday life—a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son’s pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road—she reveals the magic of the present moment. Only Maggie Smith could turn an autocorrect mistake into a line of poetry, musing that her phone “doesn’t observe / the high holidays, autocorrecting / shana tova to shaman tobacco, / Rosh Hashanah to rose has hands.”​ Slate called Smith’s “superpower as a writer” her “ability to find the perfect concrete metaphor for inchoate human emotions and explore it with empathy and honesty.” The poems in Goldenrod celebrate the contours of daily life, explore and delight in the space between thought and experience, and remind us that we decide what is beautiful.

Download or read book Wherever You Are written by Nancy Tillman and published by Feiwel & Friends. This book was released on 2010-09-14 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: . . . I wanted you more than you'll ever know, so I sent love to follow wherever you go. . . . Love is the greatest gift we have to give our children. It's the one thing they can carry with them each and every day. If love could take shape it might look something like these heartfelt words and images from the inimitable Nancy Tillman. Wherever You Are is a book to share with your loved ones, no matter how near or far, young or old, they are.

Download or read book Keep Moving The Journal written by Maggie Smith and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on the national bestseller Keep Moving—called “a meditation on kindness and hope” (NPR)—a 52-exercise journal about hope and renewal from the award-winning poet. As Maggie Smith navigated loss and upheaval, she wrote to herself each day—forgiving herself for a past mistake, reflecting on moments of joy, or looking towards the future, ending each note-to-self with the phrase “keep moving.” In her own words, “I wasn’t offering wisdom from on high; I was talking to myself at the bottom of a dark well, trying to climb up into the light, little by little, day by day.” Smith was surprised not only by how uplifting this process was, but also by the outpouring of support and gratitude from thousands of people who found solace in her words. Through the healing power of writing, Keep Moving: The Journal invites us to find beauty in the present moment, embrace change, and create a life we love.

Download or read book Lamp of the Body written by Maggie Smith and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Here in Maggie Smith's first book we encounter a voice that is spare, confident, and precise. Her images click into place, and the movement of each poem is deft, muscular, taut. These are poems we trust, poems that ask hard questions while at the same time convincing us of the magic in the world. Smith's voice is reserved, yet she carries her world forward in her teeth, so to speak. There's wisdom and acceptance in many of the poems, coupled with a willingness to utter what she does not understand, a recognition 'that worse happens to better than I.' She embraces the mystery. There's a kinship with the Ohio landscape, but also the recognition that 'darkness ploughs its furrows here.' These are poems that do not flinch in the face of grief while at the same time they do not give into formulas that either comfort or accuse. I admire the courage and the control, the gorgeous turns, the leaps she takes in the poems while keeping the center of each poem intact. These are poems that do not wobble; the voice is confident and secure, the authority claimed, and the darkness met head on--'mealy, and bitter' but as she writes in 'The Poem Speaks to Danger': 'I am the mouth/that can hold more . . . the globe // of some new, ready fruit.' This is a book that delights, intrigues, and instructs. A wonderful debut." --Carol Potter

Download or read book Maggie Smith written by Michael Coveney and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-12-29 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This perfect gift book for fans of Downton Abbey will take them behind the scenes of the Grand Dame who brings the Dowager Countess to life. No one does glamour, severity, girlish charm or tight-lipped witticism better than Dame Maggie Smith. Michael Coveney's biography shines a light on the life and career of a truly remarkable performer, one whose stage and screen career spans six decades. From her days as a West End star of comedy and revue, Dame Maggie's path would cross with those of the greatest actors, playwrights and directors of the era. Whether stealing scenes from Richard Burton, answering back to Laurence Olivier, or playing opposite Judi Dench in Breath of Life, her career can be seen as a 'Who's Who' of British theatre. Her film and television career has been just as starry. From the title character in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and the meddling chaperone in A Room With a View to the Harry Potter films in which she played Minerva McGonagall (as she put it 'Miss Jean Brodie in a wizard's hat') and the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films in which she played the wise Muriel Donnelly, Smith has thrilled, engaged and made audiences laugh. As Violet Crawley, the formidable Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey she conquered millions more. Paradoxically she remains an enigmatic figure, rarely appearing in public. Michael Coveney's absorbing biography, written with the actress's blessing and drawing on personal archives, as well as interviews with immediate family and close friends, is a portrait of one of the greatest actors of our time.

Download or read book The Best We Could Do written by Thi Bui and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National bestseller 2017 National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Finalist ABA Indies Introduce Winter / Spring 2017 Selection Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Spring 2017 Selection ALA 2018 Notable Books Selection An intimate and poignant graphic novel portraying one family’s journey from war-torn Vietnam, from debut author Thi Bui. This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family’s daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves. At the heart of Bui’s story is a universal struggle: While adjusting to life as a first-time mother, she ultimately discovers what it means to be a parent—the endless sacrifices, the unnoticed gestures, and the depths of unspoken love. Despite how impossible it seems to take on the simultaneous roles of both parent and child, Bui pushes through. With haunting, poetic writing and breathtaking art, she examines the strength of family, the importance of identity, and the meaning of home. In what Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “a book to break your heart and heal it,” The Best We Could Do brings to life Thi Bui’s journey of understanding, and provides inspiration to all of those who search for a better future while longing for a simpler past.

Download or read book We Could Be Beautiful written by Swan Huntley and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2017-06-13 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Catherine West has spent her entire life surrounded by beautiful things. And yet, despite all this, she still feels empty. After two broken engagements and boyfriends who wanted only her money, she is worried that she'll never have a family of her own. Then at an art opening Catherine meets William Stockton, a handsome banker who shares her impeccable taste and whose parents once moved in the same circles as Catherine's. But as William and Catherine grow closer, she begins to encounter strange signs. Her mother, now suffering lapses in memory, seems to hate William on sight. Is William lying about his past? And if so, is Catherine willing to sacrifice their beautiful life in order to find the truth?

Download or read book Too Close to the Falls written by Catherine Gildiner and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author shares her memories that are by turns hilarious and deeply moving about growing up in the 1950s in Lewiston, New York, a small town near Niagara Falls. As a four-year old, she could read road maps, and made deliveries for her father's pharmacy, including sleeping pills to Marilyn Monroe while she was in town filming "Niagara." Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Download or read book This Place Is Still Beautiful written by XiXi Tian and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With five starred reviews, this is an acclaimed novel about sisterhood, family, and the pernicious legacy of racism. Perfect for fans of Tahereh Mafi, Jandy Nelson, and Emily X.R. Pan, with crossover appeal for readers of Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half. The Flanagan sisters are as different as they come. Seventeen-year-old Annalie is bubbly, sweet, and self-conscious, whereas nineteen-year-old Margaret is sharp and assertive. Margaret looks just like their mother, while Annalie passes for white and looks like the father who abandoned them years ago, leaving their Chinese immigrant mama to raise the girls alone in their small, predominantly white Midwestern town. When their house is vandalized with a shocking racial slur, Margaret rushes home from her summer internship in New York City. She expects outrage. Instead, her sister and mother would rather move on. Especially once Margaret’s own investigation begins to make members of their community uncomfortable. For Annalie, this was meant to be a summer of new possibilities, and she resents her sister’s sudden presence and insistence on drawing negative attention to their family. Meanwhile Margaret is infuriated with Annalie’s passive acceptance of what happened. For Margaret, the summer couldn’t possibly get worse, until she crosses paths with someone she swore she’d never see again: her first love, Rajiv Agarwal. As the sisters navigate this unexpected summer, an explosive secret threatens to break apart their relationship, once and for all. This Place Is Still Beautiful is a luminous, captivating story about identity, sisterhood, and how our hometowns are inextricably a part of who we are, even when we outgrow them.

Download or read book The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible written by Charles Eisenstein and published by North Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As seen on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday A beacon of hope in the face of our current world crises, this uplifting book demonstrates how embracing our interconnectedness is key to world transformation In a time of social and ecological crisis, what can we as individuals do to make the world a better place? This inspirational and thought-provoking book serves as an empowering antidote to the cynicism, frustration, paralysis, and overwhelm so many of us are feeling, replacing it with a grounding reminder of what’s true: we are all connected, and our small, personal choices bear unsuspected transformational power. By fully embracing and practicing this principle of interconnectedness—called interbeing—we become more effective agents of change and have a stronger positive influence on the world. Throughout the book, Eisenstein relates real-life stories showing how small, individual acts of courage, kindness, and self-trust can change our culture’s guiding narrative of separation, which, he shows, has generated the present planetary crisis. He brings to conscious awareness a deep wisdom we all innately know: until we get ourselves in order, any action we take—no matter how good our intentions—will ultimately be wrong-headed and wrong-hearted. Above all, Eisenstein invites us to embrace a radically different understanding of cause and effect, sounding a clarion call to surrender our old worldview of separation, so that we can finally create the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. With chapters covering separation, interbeing, despair, hope, pain, pleasure, consciousness, and many more, the book invites us to let the old Story of Separation fall away so that we can stand firmly in a Story of Interbeing.

Download or read book The Probability of Miracles written by Wendy Wunder and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having spent several years in and out of hospitals for a life-threatening illness, pragmatic sixteen-year-old Cam is relocated by her miracle-seeking mother to a town in Maine known for its mystical healing qualities.

Download or read book Coming Clean written by Kimberly Rae Miller and published by . This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The writer and actress explore her childhood and youth, which was largely defined by her father's struggle with hoarding.

Download or read book The Beautiful Ones written by Prince and published by One World. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The brilliant coming-of-age-and-into-superstardom story of one of the greatest artists of all time, in his own words—featuring never-before-seen photos, original scrapbooks and lyric sheets, and the exquisite memoir he began writing before his tragic death NAMED ONE OF THE BEST MUSIC BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND THE GUARDIAN • NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD Prince was a musical genius, one of the most beloved, accomplished, and acclaimed musicians of our time. He was a startlingly original visionary with an imagination deep enough to whip up whole worlds, from the sexy, gritty funk paradise of “Uptown” to the mythical landscape of Purple Rain to the psychedelia of “Paisley Park.” But his most ambitious creative act was turning Prince Rogers Nelson, born in Minnesota, into Prince, one of the greatest pop stars of any era. The Beautiful Ones is the story of how Prince became Prince—a first-person account of a kid absorbing the world around him and then creating a persona, an artistic vision, and a life, before the hits and fame that would come to define him. The book is told in four parts. The first is the memoir Prince was writing before his tragic death, pages that bring us into his childhood world through his own lyrical prose. The second part takes us through Prince’s early years as a musician, before his first album was released, via an evocative scrapbook of writing and photos. The third section shows us Prince’s evolution through candid images that go up to the cusp of his greatest achievement, which we see in the book’s fourth section: his original handwritten treatment for Purple Rain—the final stage in Prince’s self-creation, where he retells the autobiography of the first three parts as a heroic journey. The book is framed by editor Dan Piepenbring’s riveting and moving introduction about his profound collaboration with Prince in his final months—a time when Prince was thinking deeply about how to reveal more of himself and his ideas to the world, while retaining the mystery and mystique he’d so carefully cultivated—and annotations that provide context to the book’s images. This work is not just a tribute to an icon, but an original and energizing literary work in its own right, full of Prince’s ideas and vision, his voice and image—his undying gift to the world.

Download or read book This Story Will Change written by Elizabeth Crane and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rachel Cusk meets Nora Ephron in this intimate and evolving portrait about the end of a marriage and how life can fall apart and be rebuilt in wonderful and surprising ways "Thrilling." —The New York Times Book Review One minute Elizabeth Crane and her husband of fifteen years are fixing up their old house in Upstate New York, finally setting down roots after stints in Chicago, Texas, and Brooklyn, when his unexpected admission—I’m not happy—changes everything. Suddenly she finds herself separated and in couples therapy, living in an apartment in the city with an old friend and his kid. It’s understood that the apartment and bonus family are temporary, but the situation brings unexpected comfort and much-needed healing for wounds even older than her marriage. Crafting the story as the very events chronicled are unfolding, Crane writes from a place of guarded possibility, capturing through vignettes and collected moments a semblance of the real-time practice of healing. At turns funny and dark, with moments of poignancy, This Story Will Change is an unexpected and moving portrait of a woman in transformation, a chronicle of how even the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are bound to change.