Those of you who read The Small Bow newsletter regularly know that poetry has been an important part of my recovery. Every morning, I read a poem as part of my daily journal and reading routine. This began in 2017, when I was working my way through early sobriety. I discovered a poem that I loved — Stephen Dunn’s “The Inheritance.” From there, I began to seek out more contemporary stuff, poems that I read for pure enjoyment. Poems that offered me recognizable worlds and helped me access some of the disorienting feelings I was navigating in early sobriety.

To better promote poetry and the poets who write it on TSB, I’ve started a monthly series called “TSB’s Poet Laureate Club,” where I’ll feature one poet per month whose work I appreciate and have found an excellent complement to my recovery.

This month’s poet laureate is Maggie Smith. Her next collection, A Suit or a Suitcase: Poems will be published on March 24, 2026.

I think a lot about how we evolve as people, and about second (and third, and fourth, and fifth) chances, and “Time-Stamped” is a meditation on this. The idea that we are all drafts, all constantly being revised by the passage of time and by our experiences, is one of the main themes of my next book of poems, A Suit or a Suitcase. This poem asks: What if there are future revisions of us who can look back and see us now? What do they see that we can’t? Thinking of ourselves as drafts, as in-process, is liberating, because there’s room for growth and change. We might stumble or fall, but we’re not stuck. If this day (week, month, year) wasn’t my day (week, month, year), there are more coming. More revisions. When I revise a poem or an essay, I always rename or renumber the new draft and save it as its own version—I never “save over” or replace the previous version. It’s useful to be able to go back and retrace my steps, to see previous iterations of a piece, and, sometimes, to see where I lost my way so that I can get back on track. It’s useful to be able to see where I started and how far I’ve come. Funny how many parallels there are between writing and living. 

There is a revision of me that lives
in the future, watching me from the future, 

which makes me a prototype, 
an earlier version, the one she thinks of now.

She looks back at me and at the life 
I live in the house she must think of 

as the old house, and at my children—
her children—still lap-small 

and sticky-cheeked. She watches us 
the way I watch old, time-stamped versions 

of myself, the roughest drafts, feeling 
I’d slit a stranger’s throat for the clean slate 

that was mine—the slate I wanted 
only to write and write on. 

She watches from the future 
to remind me I am not finished, 

not as fleshed out as I feel. 
I must be full of blanks she’ll know 

how to fill, and she’ll fill them. 
She looks back at me, and someone 

looks back at her, and I am watching 
every version of myself behind me: 

never overridden or replaced 
but saved, each of us saved.

MAGGIE SMITH is the New York Times bestselling author of nine books of poetry and prose, including You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Keep Moving, Good Bones, and Dear Writer. A Suit or a Suitcase: Poems will be published on March 24, 2026. An NEA fellow and Pushcart Prize winner, Smith has been published in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, and The Best American Poetry. In 2025 she was named the host of The Slowdown, a podcast from American Public Media. You can find her on Substack and on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.