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Overview
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: 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.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9781668090053
- ISBN-10: 1668090058
- Publisher: Washington Square Press
- Publish Date: March 2026
- Dimensions: 7.09 x 5.51 x 0.71 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.48 pounds
- Page Count: 128
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Maggie Smith’s newest poetry collection (and her 11th book overall) is a contemplation of the big questions: What does it mean to be an eternal being in a body that can—and will—fail in the end? What really happens after we die, and if we got to choose our afterlives, what would they be? In the meantime, what does it mean to have accumulated a life of poems, bills and children when all of it is likely insignificant to a god who may or may not be watching us from above?
A Suit or a Suitcase might best be described as a midlife retrospective, where the poet has covered enough ground to know many of the rules—that the world is a hard place, that everything changes and yet our souls are our constant companions—but still wonders what is left to come. In a long poem titled “Self-Portrait as an Incomplete List of Mysteries,” which comprises the middle of the book, Smith marvels at how things that were once true to us do not stay true over time, just as gold-plated jewelry eventually wears down and reveals its base metals beneath. In another line, the speaker asks why our fragile human bodies have not developed “a more durable design.”
The lines, as well as the poems themselves, are sometimes lighthearted and at other times heavy with humanity, which, at every moment in history (and certainly now) weighs us down with our responsibilities as well as our vulnerabilities. And yet, true to Smith’s aesthetic, there is space for hope and joy. There are the many lives we live and the ways we get better at surviving them; there are children to love and for whom to hope for a slightly better future; and finally, there is the world, both beautiful and beastly, the source of our woes and the scene of every wonder we’ve ever witnessed. It is all difficult, and yet there is still reason enough to try to finish the story, as Smith declares in the final lines of A Suit or a Suitcase. We seek to figure out what it all means, even if the unspoken truth is that we will never fully know until our bodies have packed us up like luggage and taken us away.
Maggie Smith’s newest poetry collection (and her 11th book overall) is a contemplation of the big questions: What does it mean to be an eternal being in a body that can—and will—fail in the end? What really happens after we die, and if we got to choose our afterlives, what would they be? In the meantime, what does it mean to have accumulated a life of poems, bills and children when all of it is likely insignificant to a god who may or may not be watching us from above?
A Suit or a Suitcase might best be described as a midlife retrospective, where the poet has covered enough ground to know many of the rules—that the world is a hard place, that everything changes and yet our souls are our constant companions—but still wonders what is left to come. In a long poem titled “Self-Portrait as an Incomplete List of Mysteries,” which comprises the middle of the book, Smith marvels at how things that were once true to us do not stay true over time, just as gold-plated jewelry eventually wears down and reveals its base metals beneath. In another line, the speaker asks why our fragile human bodies have not developed “a more durable design.”
The lines, as well as the poems themselves, are sometimes lighthearted and at other times heavy with humanity, which, at every moment in history (and certainly now) weighs us down with our responsibilities as well as our vulnerabilities. And yet, true to Smith’s aesthetic, there is space for hope and joy. There are the many lives we live and the ways we get better at surviving them; there are children to love and for whom to hope for a slightly better future; and finally, there is the world, both beautiful and beastly, the source of our woes and the scene of every wonder we’ve ever witnessed. It is all difficult, and yet there is still reason enough to try to finish the story, as Smith declares in the final lines of A Suit or a Suitcase. We seek to figure out what it all means, even if the unspoken truth is that we will never fully know until our bodies have packed us up like luggage and taken us away.