The List of Dangers

by Maggie Smith

"Tight and purposeful as a fable, The List of Dangers gives us sorrows and warnings from a world imbalanced by beasts and little beauties. The images are precise as a child's playroom-keyholes, miniature candelabra, the 'trebly notes' of wrens and gypsies- but perilous in their tender transformations. Maggie Smith's rich lyric gifts produce here a poetry of balancing composure in the face of peril and pretty chance."-David Baker, author of Midwest Eclogue "In Maggie Smith's The List of Dangers, as in the Brothers Grimm, we learn early how hazardous life is and how eagerly our fate awaits us. In these inventive new poems, Smith borrows elements from folktales, fairy tales, and fables to remind us once again that 'Nothing stays good for long' and 'No one [is] preserved.' And just as before, we're thrilled by each tale and tickled to death at our own imperilment."-Kathy Fagan, author of Lip

Genres: Poetry

36 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 15, 2010

About the author

Maggie Smith is the author of the national bestseller Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change (One Signal/Simon & Schuster 2020); Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017); The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo Press 2015), winner of the Dorset Prize, selected by Kimiko Hahn; and Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press 2005), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award; and three prizewinning chapbooks.

Smith's poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, Image, The Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, AGNI, Guernica, Brevity, the Washington Post, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and many other journals and anthologies. In 2016 her poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. In April 2017 the poem was featured on the CBS primetime drama Madam Secretary.

A 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Maggie Smith works as freelance writer and editor. She is an Editor at Large at the Kenyon Review and is also on the faculty of Spalding University's low-residency MFA program.

Reviews

[ocelia]

faves were "the shepherd's horn" and "i think of you, eréndira"

[JV Austen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, the time has come to give up on reading poetry.
I mostly "get" Billy Collins & Brian Andreas, but there the list ends.
Maybe it is being so much closer to death that makes me realize I have no one to impress.
I can read whatever & watch whatever & there is no grade, no outside judge.
Who analyzes my Netflix list & decides what my worth is to the world? Nobody.
Today, I'm giving up poetry & giving myself permission to be okay with that.
(And I'm never going to read any Charles Dickens...)

[Katie Brown]

Lot (always) going on in the world. Thinking about innocence, if it’s temporary or just false. These poems are fable-like, speak to lurking danger, like a kid alone in a dark forest.

[Ruby Scupp]

Nothing stays good for long—

not the new neighborhood with its wrist full of charms,
not the last tier of wedding cake in the icebox, white
and glittering like a glacier. No one was preserved,

an heirloom apple. Not even the three daughters
would taste exactly as girls did hundreds of years ago.

[Cooch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three and a half stars

An uneven pamphlet of poems. There are some good images and uses of language. Quite interesting but not for me.