"I think if the book called Good Bones has a moral, it’s about learning to grow where planted. It’s also about learning how to look danger in the eye, how to acknowledge the thing that wants to stop us—uproot us, undo us—and then refusing to let it." 

Julie Marie Wade, The Rumpus

"Smith encourages goose-prickles; her words settle in your stomach and create a disturbance so potent that you will sit and ponder for hours what mark you are making on the world while wondering if it really matters after all." 

Hannah Warren, Pleiades: Literature in Context

“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, the poems in Good Bones are lyrically charged love letters to a world in desperate need of her generous eye.” 

Ada Limón

“In her wondrous new poetry collection, Good Bones, Maggie Smith has much to tell us. And she does so with such a clean, aching clarity of lyricism that I discover now frequently exhausted human touchstones freshly, with real surprise. It’s Smith’s dynamically precise and vivid images, and her uncanny ability to find just the right word or action to crack open our known experience, that make Good Bones 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