The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison

Winner of the Dorset Prize for Poetry

“Maggie Smith’s collection is magical and troubling.… Time alternates between the forest where there are refrigerator magnets and safety belts, and The Forest where you, a now-human you, once preened ‘your blue-black wings.’… Time stops for violence and passion. Be intrigued. Find yourself welcome.”
—Kimiko Hahn

About the Author

Maggie Smith holds a BA from Ohio Wesleyan University and an MFA from The Ohio State University. Her previous books are Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press, 2005) and three prizewinning chapbooks, Disasterology (Dream Horse Press, forthcoming), The List of Dangers (Kent State/Wick Poetry Series, 2010), and Nesting Dolls (Pudding House, 2005). She lives with her husband and two children in Bexley, Ohio, where she works as a freelance writer and editor.

Advanced Praise

“Some kind of primary mythic world lies behind and throughout these adult tales of ultimate matters.… as much about the terrible and beautiful dreams of children as it is about waking up as a parent. This is a rare book of poems.” —Stanley Plumly

“Enchantment: that rarest of all poetic gifts. As when the neurons, in the kaleidoscopic movie they call a ‘functional MRI,’ speak to us in colors on a screen from the deepest recesses of what we already know. Maggie Smith’s are poems of transformation: haunting, gorgeous, intimately unsettling. I cannot remember when I last read a book to match her powers of delight.” —Linda Gregerson

“These poems acknowledge that the well may be poisoned, but it is a deep well, and it has given itself the power of speech. It can warn us. In that warning, given freely to ‘Babes in the Wood,’—all of us children who will be lost to darkness and death, Smith unearths the deepest moral from these tales: that we can face the truth (‘The trees turned dark and took me with them’), speak it to one another, and through some mystical, magical, enchanted gift, still survive.” —Kenyon Review

“Folk tales and their eerie, animistic wisdom are a wellspring for these powerful lyrics. The poems are ethereal and dark, brimming with dread, beauty, and rapture. The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter’s arresting prose engagement with fairy tales, comes to mind. Smith updates motifs of the pacts children make with nature, the power of luck and curses, loss of innocence, the vulnerable and the sinister, primal fears of being eaten, and much more. The images are so fresh and inventive they shimmer. Original, cautionary, rich, delicious, The Well Speaks… is a spellbinding collection.” —Amy Gerstler

“Maggie Smith’s Dorset Prize-winning collection, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, skillfully maneuvers between parent and predator, child and prey. She finds the fantastical within suburbia and threads the domestic into fairy tales. Imaginative and playful, Smith’s book nevertheless offers page after page of danger, wonder, and transformation.” —Heavy Feather Review

Format: paperback
ISBN: 978-1-936797-56-1