Maggie Smith on her memoir's unanswerable questions and feeling ambivalent about "Good Bones"

Maggie Smith's poem "Good Bones" became a viral sensation when it was published in 2016 the same week as the Pulse Nightclub mass shooting in Orlando. I really love how you use this piece of repetition — which is, of course, another poet's craft element: "A friend says every book begins with an unanswerable question." And she talks about in "Body Work" maturing into — I don't know if compassionate is the word, but a sort of more considered space, where it's not enough that it happened to you, that you actually need to think about the ethics of what you're saying and how you're saying it and how you're framing it. There's a moment right around the end of the book where you write that your previous book, "Keep Moving," kept you and your kids in the house that you love. "Thinking about my work in a really clear way helped me see that anyone who's in a relationship with you should want the best for you, period."