Maggie Smith’s new poetry collection is a study of mind and body, and it gets its title from a poem originally published in The Nation in 2022:
“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?”
A Suit or a Suitcase is the poet’s 11th book and a midlife retrospective, coming on the heels of her memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful. That unflinching memoir explored the disintegration of Smith’s marriage, starting with the discovery of her husband’s infidelity and continuing, in lyrical vignettes, through her journey toward divorce and its aftermath.
In A Suit or a Suitcase, Smith returns to contemplating life’s big questions: What happens when our bodies fail and die? Where do we go? And how do we navigate all that life throws at us in the meantime — kids, bills, aches, pains, relationships and solitude? And through it all, at least for Smith, the continual drive to create.
“I’m beginning to suspect this life is a study for another one,” she writes. “Research for a larger project / still taking shape. … Each day is a note I jot down / under the day before.”
Smith is best known for her poem Good Bones, which went viral in 2020 and elevated her to what one critic described as “America’s poet of hope in hard times.” A Suit or a Suitcase is hopeful in part, but it is also an emotional, mind-opening study on the relentlessness of time.
One of the collection’s most moving poems takes its inspiration from a line in Elizabeth McCracken’s memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: “This is the happiest story / in the world with the saddest ending.”
“Everything you think you own / is only lent you, then repo’d,” Smith writes. “All at once or taken piece / by piece. What makes the ending / so sad is the happiness / that precedes it. The happiest / story with the saddest / ending is textbook tragedy, / and it’s your life, if you’re lucky.”
The collection’s longest poem — Self Portrait as an Incomplete List of Mysteries — comes in the middle of the book and serves as an excellent microcosm of the collection, and perhaps even Smith’s career to-date. In it, she marvels at the mysteries of life — how some mornings her children look older than they did the night before, where she might have landed if she had made different decisions, how some days the weight of living leaves you breathless. “How writing about an experience, inscribing it, reinscribes the memory,” she writes. “How language constantly revises the mind.”
Smith’s poetry revises and challenges how we view the world and our everyday experiences. A Suit or a Suitcase is another collection to read slowly and savor.
