A Suit or a Suitcase by Maggie Smith is a collection of poems that I’ve eagerly awaited after following Maggie’s Substack. The existential question posed by the collection is “Do I wear it or does it carry me? Is the body a suit or a suitcase?” It’s from her title poem “A Suit or a Suitcase” (pg. 5). The poem is not the opening poem of the collection. “Detail” opens the collection and establishes what kind of person the narrators is: “You’re the kind who looks at a painting/and wonders what’s happening beyond” (pg. 3)
It’s a collection that reflects on time and the changes we endure, embrace, and more. It’s also a study in what it means to be human. Is it the soul? Is it our minds? Or is it something more?
The poet is examining what it means to be alive, what lessons are learned, and why we need these lessons. Is this life “practice” for another, as she asks in “Study”? Or is she the “prototype” in “Time-Stamped” or the later versions of herself and were all the previous moments of herself just revisions? The poet narrator reminds us “Everything you think you own/is only lent you.”
I love the back and forth the narrator has in these poems as she tries to puzzle out a satisfactory answer or non-answer. In the end, there’s this realization that she needs to just enjoy each moment and version of herself that comes to be.
From “Self-Portrait as an Incomplete List of Mysteries” (pg. 49)
How I’ve lived so many lives inside this one body—reincarnation light—and how many I have left here.
Like the rolling waves of the sea, we are remade and remade. We are submerged and resurface, glistening in renewed brine and glimmer. Maggie Smith’s A Suit or a Suitcase provides us with the lessons. We need no answers.
RATING: Cinquain
