Maggie Smith’s Launches New Poetry Collection, A Suit or a Suitcase.

Join New York Times bestselling author and poet as she launches her new poetry collection, , to kick off National Poetry Month! Maggie will do readings from this exciting collection and will be in conversation with Marcus Jackson, award-winning poet and photographer, and the director of Ohio State’s MFA program in creative writing.

A general admission ticket is $10 that is waived if A Suit or a Suitcase is pre-purchased when registering. The book will also be available for purchase at the event.

DREXEL THEATRE, OHIO POETRY ASSOCIATION, OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY ENGLISH DEPARTMENT, and OSU CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM are Community Partners for this program.

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.

Maggie Smith is the award-winning New York Times bestselling author of nine books of poetry and prose, including A Suit or a Suitcase, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, Goldenrod, Keep Moving, and My Thoughts Have Wings. She has been widely published, appearing in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Best American Poetry, and more. She is the host of The Slowdown. You can find her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.

Marcus Jackson is an award-winning poet and photographer who studied in NYU’s graduate creative writing program and as a Cave Canem fellow. His poems and photographs have appeared in such publications as The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. His second book of poems, entitled Pardon My Heart (Northwestern University Press/TriQuarterly Books), was released in 2018. Jackson’s forthcoming monograph of street portraits and poems will be published in June 2026. Jackson lives with his wife and child in Columbus, Ohio, and he directs the creative writing MFA program at Ohio State.

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