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"Good Bones" book cover

Published October 2, 2017

Gold Medal Winner, Poetry ,  2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards Named one of the Five Best Poetry Collections of 2017 by The Washington Post One of Entropy ‘s Best of 2017

Good Bones  is a collection of modern poetry that speaks to the world we live in. Maggie Smith contemplates the past and our future, life and death, childhood and motherhood. She writes out of the experience of motherhood, inspired by watching her own children read the world like a book they’ve just opened, knowing nothing of the characters or plot. Smith takes in the dark world around her with a critical eye, always searching for the hidden goodness: compassion, empathy, honesty. “There is a light,” she tells us, “and the light is good.”

Smith skillfully reveals the layers of the world around us through lyric language and vivid imagery: “For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. / For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, / sunk in a lake.” These poems stare down darkness while cultivating and sustaining possibility and addressing a larger world. We come away from this collection hopeful about making the world a better place, a place to share with future generations. As Smith tells us in Good Bones , “This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.”

Much more than its title poem, this intimate poetry collection is meant for all of us, a way to explore the best and worst parts of our world.

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“How does one poem speak to so many people at once? I wonder. I’m tempted to call Maggie Smith a soothsayer, someone who heard the future’s sad, exasperated call a few months early so she wrote: ‘For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. / For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, / sunk in a lake.’ We think we know that stone better now, from our new vantage outside the orchard. We think we know that lake better, too, but the truth is, they’ve always been here, these stones and lakes. If anything, perhaps we see them clearer now. Perhaps we’re more aware than ever before of their multivalence, the many ways that elemental things like stones and lakes can mean.” — Julie Marie Wade, The Rumpus

“While the now-famous poem lends its name to Smith’s third poetry collection, and remains one of the book’s highlights, readers will find a far greater bounty within. Informed by the sacrifice, trepidation, and awe of early motherhood—’a spell/that is only now beginning to break’— Good Bones presents a rollicking array of lyrics, myths, and meditations. Notable for their heart, understatement, and deceptive accessibility, Smith’s poems yearn to reconcile how a world of wonders can remain a world of thorns.” — Adam Tavel, Plume

“The title poem of Good Bones went viral this year because its central theme — wanting to believe in the goodness of the world for the sake of one’s children — connected with so many people. The other pieces in this collection, Smith’s third, provide a fuller understanding of the complexities faced by the speaker, who tries to teach everything a child needs for survival, while admitting, ‘What can I say but stay/ alive? You’re new, and there’s too much to learn.’ No matter the style or subject, the writing remains honest, compassionate and graceful, and the speaker maintains her determination to ‘love the world like a mother.’” — Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post , “ The Best Poetry of 2017 ”

“The truth of these poems flies out of the honesty and realness of Smith’s experiences, her language richly accurate, deep and yet readable as if it were our own thoughts written down, brimming with feeling, and attuned through imagination’s watery grasp.” — Z.G. Tomaszewski, Michigan Quarterly Review

“Smith’s poems by turns flirt with this magical thinking and explode it. In “Rough Air,” the mother confronts fear of death not by praying but by invoking her children, though she knows very well that “motherhood / never kept anyone safe.” Our children’s need for us may feel like it overpowers physics, but it is no insurance policy. It won’t keep a plane in the sky.” — The Missouri Review

“In this collection titled for a poem that became an unlikely viral sensation, Smith follows The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison by exploring the sensorium mothers and children share in a place where ‘deer still find their way to the backyard.’ Suburban as it may be, strangeness and terror manifest in this setting, while surreal sound and color imbue the ordinary with surprising affect, as in the ‘glitter-black overlap of shingles’ or ‘lit/ windows painting yellow Rothkos on the water.’ The collection features many meditations—on past and future, life and death—but the ones that stand out revolve around motherhood, particularly the magic and trauma of motherhood and motherlessness. Smith considers, from a personal perspective, the violence of Caesarean section (‘Twice/ they cut babies from my body’) and miscarriage (‘you who have me/ in common—not-mother, mother// you weren’t to have’). She elevates motherhood to something akin to an aesthetic or theology. ‘The mother is glass through which/ you see, in excruciating detail, yourself,’ she writes. For mothers and non-mothers alike, Smith shares one possible orientation to the world whose rottenness she catalogues along with all that makes it, in her view, still worth loving: ‘Let me love the world like a mother./ Let me be tender when it lets me down.’” — Publishers Weekly

“Come for Smith’s viral title poem, but stay for her range as she builds a notable collection, one suffused with grace, and—dare I say it—hope. ” — Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions , “ Must Read Poetry: October 2017 “

“As if lost in the soft, bewitching world of fairy tale, Maggie Smith conceives and brings forth this metaphysical Baedeker, a guidebook for mother and child to lead each other into a hopeful present. Smith’s poems affirm the virtues of humanity: compassion, empathy, and the ability to comfort one another when darkness falls. ‘There is a light,’ she tells us, ‘and the light is good.’” — D. A. Powell 

“Smith’s voice is clear and unmistakable as she unravels the universe, pulls at a loose thread and lets the whole thing tumble around us, sometimes beautiful, sometimes achingly hard. Truthful, tender, and unafraid of the dark, the poems in Good Bones are lyrically charged love letters to a world in desperate need of her generous eye.” — Ada Limón

“In her wondrous new poetry collection, Maggie Smith has much to tell us. And she does so with such a clean, aching clarity of lyricism that I freshly discover with real surprise now frequently exhausted human touchstones. It’s Smith’s dynamically precise and vivid images, and her uncanny ability to find just the right word or action to crack open our known experience, that make  Good Bones  an extraordinary book. Maggie Smith demonstrates what happens when an abundance of heart and intelligence meets the hands of a master craftsperson.” — Erin Belieu

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You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Maggie smith’s “good bones” earned her fame as a viral poet. can her new book turn her into a guru of literary self-help.

The night before I was to meet the poet Maggie Smith, I woke myself up from a dream by clawing at my own head with my fingernails. In the dream I was defending my family from a zombie attack, and we were holed up in an abandoned church, as you do, and I’d managed to hide my kids up in the choir loft before the howling undead battered down the doors, and as I was grappling with one red-spattered monster my youngest daughter appeared at the bottom of the stairs, and when she said “Daddy?” that’s when I scratched myself awake.

My phone told me it was 3:22 a.m. That evening I’d flown to Columbus, Ohio, where Smith lives, on a packed plane in which everyone sitting around me was coughing behind their ill-fitting masks, except for the guy in the TRUMP 2020 mask who muttered darkly. In my pitch-black hotel room I relived the final moments of the dream, then yanked my mind away as you yank your hand away from a hot pan. I thought, instead, of the hopeless real world. Ruth Bader Ginsburg had just died. Louisville, Kentucky was not going to file any real charges against the officers who killed Breonna Taylor. The West was burning, and the plague was spreading.

In the summer of 2016, in the wake of another horrifying real-world event, the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, a poem began spreading all over social media, shared by your mother-in-law, your most artsy college classmate, Megan Mullally, and maybe you, too. The poem was called “Good Bones,” and it elegantly, wittily distilled a very particular feeling of being afraid about the world and daunted by the challenge of raising kids in it. “Life is short,” the poem begins, “though I keep this from my children.”

As bad thing after bad thing kept happening that bad year, the poem became a kind of litany on my social media feed, a mantra of hope in hard times. Smith, previously a little-known (even for poets) poet who lived in Ohio and had published her collections with tiny independent presses, was featured in the Washington Post , on Slate , on PRI , which called “Good Bones” “the official poem of 2016.”

Shortly after this flurry of attention, Smith’s marriage fell apart. Near the end of 2018, that bad year, she started posting daily encouragements and affirmations on Twitter. “Today’s goal: Stop rewinding and replaying the past,” she wrote in one representative tweet. “Live here, now. Give the present the gift of your full attention.” She ended that tweet with the same two words that ended all the tweets, clearly a message for herself as well as for her then-16,000 followers: “Keep moving.” Now, in 2020, the worst year yet, comes Smith’s commercial debut: not a collection of poems but a quirky quasi-memoir called Keep Moving , which intersperses those affirming tweets with personal reflections on the hardest days of Smith’s life and features blurbs from the inspirational blogger Glennon Doyle and the singer Amanda Palmer. Four years after “Good Bones” went viral, in the midst of an even grimmer moment in American history, this new book feels like a clear bid to transform Maggie Smith from a famous (for a poet) poet into a guru of literary self-help.

The morning after my dream, I drove to Westerville, Ohio, the Columbus suburb where Smith grew up, and met Smith at the front gate of a public garden. It was a perfect September day and I wore a baseball cap to protect my scalp from the sun, and also to cover the scratches on my head.

“I used to bring my kids here all the time when they were little,” Smith said. We walked by a fountain where, Smith recalled, she’d attended a Girl Scout event with her daughter during which another girl had leaned too far over and fallen face-first into the water. “Just splashed down in there,” she said.

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Smith is small, with a pixie haircut grown shaggy in quarantine—“mutton chops,” she said despondently. She carried a tote bag covered in drawings of upraised middle fingers. In person, Smith has the air of a friend who’s confiding secrets. When I asked if all the nature imagery in her poetry meant she was an outdoorsy type, she pointed to her shoes, simple ballet flats with a camouflage pattern. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said, “but I’m a walker, not a hiker. I won’t go anywhere I can’t walk in these shoes.”

In Keep Moving , Smith writes about being a fearful child, wary of surprises: “I thought of change as some interruption in my life, a veering off course.” Sitting on a bench by that same fountain, Smith elaborated on this fearfulness. “Needing to know what was gonna happen next was a big thing for me,” she said. She was a list-maker—her grandmother’s family nickname was Checky Listy, and young Maggie became known as Little Checky Listy—and she recalled writing a detailed order of operations for Christmas morning:

1. Get dressed 2. Drive to Grandma’s 3. Have a Shirley Temple 4. Open our presents 5. Play with our presents

“Who has to make a list that has ‘play’ on it?” she said ruefully.

Other than a year spent teaching in Pennsylvania, Smith has never lived away from the Columbus area: college at Ohio Wesleyan where she met her future husband, a post-collegiate year working at the car dealership where her mother ran the finances, an MFA at Ohio State, marriage and two children just a few suburbs away. In her first year in graduate school, Smith was thrown to learn she would have to take a bus to campus—in fact, would have to transfer buses. Before classes started she made the boyfriend she was soon to marry take her on a practice run. He showed her where to feed her dollar into the fare machine, and how to take the paper transfer ticket out, and when to pull the cord for your stop. “Like you do with a kindergartner,” she said. “I was 22 years old.”

But over time, Smith and her husband, an attorney, built a life that resembled her childhood, steady and secure. “To me that’s the ideal,” she said. “When your kids know what’s coming.” And then, over the past four years, it all changed. “Everything got thrown up in the air and then sifted back down into different piles,” she said. “I had to let go of my lists.”

Smith wrote “Good Bones” in a Starbucks around the corner from her house on a weeknight after her husband got home from work. Unusually for her, she composed the poem in one go rather than labor over it for days or even months. It appeared in the literary journal Waxwing in June 2016, the same week as the Pulse shooting, alongside two of her other poems.

Rereading “Good Bones,” it’s surprising how ambivalent the poem seems to be about the hope it’s offering the reader. (Smith says she sees a lot of debate online about whether the poem is a downer or not.) There’s mischief in the poem—the “thousand deliciously ill-advised ways” Smith has shortened her life, which “I’ll keep from my children.” But it’s also glum, in its litany of horrors: strangers who will break you, birds struck by stones. “The poem makes plausible the idea that we’re not fucked,” says the critic Stephanie Burt, “while acknowledging that sometimes it’s hard to believe. In that sense it is what Auden said all the best poetry was: a clear expression of mixed feelings.”

Speaking as someone who spends a lot of time trying to make things become popular on the internet, I can say that ambiguity is not usually a recipe for viral success. In my experience, viral success is typically closely connected to a simple, direct point of view, expressed loudly. But the success of “Good Bones”—as well as the previous poem to go viral in this way, Patricia Lockwood’s “Rape Joke” —suggests people share poetry for different reasons than they share other kinds of content online.

“Whenever I see people share poems,” says the poet and nonfiction writer Hanif Abdurraqib, who lives in Columbus, “I wonder if they have found the language they were reaching for but couldn’t access.” I think that’s right about “Good Bones.” It was the poem’s overwhelmed recognition of the way things are , not its inspirational qualities, that so struck me and led me to share it back in that summer of 2016. Feeling so seen by a work of art is a potent experience, and I transformed that feeling into a kind of unalloyed hopefulness the poem doesn’t actually contain: My brain replaced the actual meaning of the poem with the buoyant feeling being seen gave me, which feels a lot like hope.

You write a poem thinking about what you’re trying to convey to some imaginary reader , not about everyone in the world including Meryl Streep somehow reading it, and for Smith it was entirely overwhelming watching her mentions fill up as actors, artists, and musicians posted the poem after the Pulse shooting and then again after the election in November. “Oh, I just read your poem on Charlotte Church’s Twitter,” a neighbor told her when they ran into each other on the street.

“The strangest thing about having a viral poem,” says Patricia Lockwood, “is that you are framed in reference to it afterwards to a degree that feels ensmallifying. It feels a little like you’re placed into a box.” Smith still grapples with the legacy of her viral poem. “ Great ,” she says resignedly. “What I’ll always be known for is writing this poem about how bad things are, and maybe they could be better, but they’re bad.” Her social media feed became a kind of “weird disaster barometer”: “Every time my mentions tick up, I know to check the news because something bad has happened.” Some readers ask her for a new poem of solace whenever there’s a fresh tragedy—“as if I’m some kind of literary first responder,” she says.

But what she appreciates, she says, is why people share the poem. “It makes them feel better somehow,” she says. “I think what they’re communicating is hope. Or at least a shared sense of collective mourning.”

After “Good Bones,” Smith’s profile rose fast. Suddenly offers were coming in: to read at festivals, to teach workshops, to get paid to be a public poet. She could make as much spending two days at a festival as she did editing five freelance projects. “You know,” she recalls, “I can change the way I make a living and have more time with my kids. But I realized, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to have to be braver than I am right now.” She hired a speaker’s agent, did interviews with newspapers and magazines, and started traveling more.

It didn’t go unnoticed in the insular poetry world. “Poets can be competitive,” says the poet Victoria Chang, a close friend of Smith’s. “There was a lot of pushback for her poem going viral. Even I was sort of catty about it at first.” The poet Devon Walker-Figueroa observed that the popularity of “Instapoets” like Rupi Kaur make it easy for writers to dismiss the work of someone whose poem gets screenshotted, turned into a JPEG, and shared on Twitter. “She’s been writing for years,” says Walker-Figueroa, “but she gets lumped in unfairly with people writing Hallmark dross, because of the way the poem gets distributed.”

And of course there’s good old-fashioned jealousy. “Frankly,” says the poet and critic Jordan Davis, “there are hundreds of people with teaching jobs who are publishing regularly and have multiple books—but they didn’t go viral, and she did.” He’s delighted about the success of “Good Bones,” he says. “Often, when a poet’s work spreads widely it’s a poem that doesn’t reflect what contemporary poetry can do. But ‘Good Bones’ really does. It’s a good poem.”

Smith’s new book, Keep Moving , emerged from a dark stretch in Smith’s personal life. It began with the realization that her marriage was unsalvageable. “Even when things were terrible, I always thought we could fix it,” she told me as we walked single file past a couple holding hands. “And had to, because we had a 9-year-old and a 5-year-old. Well, that didn’t happen.”

In October 2018, the decision had been made, but there was still a month before he was going to move out. “That was the worst time,” she said, “when you know it’s over but you’re having to cohabitate with someone you don’t like or trust or respect.” She stopped sleeping. She lost weight. “I was divorcing a litigator whose job it is to fight and win, who had resources that I didn’t have,” she said. “I was just honestly panicked.” Smith’s friend, the poet Ann Townsend, met her at a coffee shop to talk her through the practicalities of divorce. It was just dawning on Smith that she didn’t even know what all the bills the family paid were, so Townsend went through them: There’s the mortgage, there’s the water bill, there’s the gas bill … “OK,” Townsend said to her panicked friend. “We’re gonna make a list. We’re gonna figure it out.”

Aside from family and a few close friends, Smith didn’t yet feel comfortable sharing the specifics of her divorce with many people. Online, she revealed nothing, at first, to acknowledge “this huge tectonic shift that was going on in my life.” But she felt a gulf between her usual online persona—focused on poetry and supporting her writer friends—and the devastation she felt. “I wanted to be able to admit it,” she said. “You know, ‘I’m struggling, but I’m trying.’ ” She woke up one morning, made coffee, and tweeted her frustration and fear—with a hopeful spin:

“I was talking myself into it,” she said. “I needed to feel better so much.”

Within a few days, she was tweeting a “keep moving” message every morning, often from bed. She enjoyed the ritual. It gave her something to focus on besides her own anxiety. And the responses flooded in, just like with “Good Bones,” even though this time the only disaster was her own life. “People would say, like, ‘I’m exactly where you are now.’ ‘This is what’s going to get me through the next three hours.’ And just feeling like all of this terrible stuff that I was trying to process on my own was maybe useful to somebody else—that helped.”

She continued tweeting through the winter, her follower count growing—she now has over 60,000 Twitter followers—and while at a writers’ residency in Arizona, she wrote an essay about her divorce for the New York Times’ Modern Love column. Compared with the crystalline smallness of her poetry, an essay felt expansive, exciting—whole paragraphs waiting to be filled with her own story. A friend connected her to an agent, and she wrote a proposal for a book that would combine essays with the tweets, in a kind of hybrid of memoir and self-help.

“That isn’t what I do,” she said, laughing. “A self-help book? Come on. But people on Twitter and on Facebook and on Instagram were asking. ‘I would like to have these on a bedside table, you should make these a book.’ And I was about to be a single mom, who’s a poet, without a real job. I needed to pull myself out of this in some way.”

The agent sent the proposal out the day the Modern Love piece was published. Her Twitter feed became a warm bath, as her readers learned why it was that Smith was trying so hard to keep moving. Julia Cheiffetz, an editor at the Simon & Schuster imprint One Signal, said the book felt like an acknowledgment of the kind of hard times she’d been through too. “I’ve had cancer, I had an epically bad divorce,” Cheiffetz said. “I wished I had had this book when I needed it.” When the proposal sold, “it helped me sleep, honestly,” Smith says. “I didn’t even know how I was going to afford to pay my lawyer. And then I had this book.”

Though Smith is delighted that others find her tweets therapeutic, she describes them not as wisdom she’s imparting to others but as notes to self. “The you in all of them is me,” she says. With that in mind, you can read the dedication of Keep Moving as a sly wink or as a wholehearted embrace, for now, of her newfound ability to inspire readers. The dedication says, “For you.”

The book is a curious mix. Smith’s essays can be brutal in their honesty and sadness about her divorce, her miscarriages, and her postpartum depression. It’s in these essays that Smith exerts her superpower as a writer: her ability to find the perfect concrete metaphor for inchoate human emotions and explore it with empathy and honesty. She writes about the cones of the lodgepole pine, which only release their seeds when fire sweeps through the forest. She writes about kintsugi , the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with gold-streaked lacquer, tying the craft cleverly to the work of recovering from sadness—honoring, not hiding, the things that happened to you. She tosses off perfect lines like they’re nothing, like this one about her daughter’s anxious questions: “I could almost hear her mind whirring, whirring, unable to shut itself down. I had an old MacBook that did that until it burned my lap.”

Meanwhile, the tweets, which appear in runs of five or six in between essay fragments, are doggedly positive, even as they acknowledge trauma. That’s a lot to pack into 280 characters, and Smith’s hairpin turns toward the light can sometimes make me grip the armrests:

Maybe you have a little voice inside that says you aren’t strong enough to handle what life’s left at your feet. That voice lies. Prove it wrong today—then repeat, repeat, repeat. KEEP MOVING.
Even though so much seems to be in pieces, trust your wholeness. Accept that you cannot be sure of everything, but be sure of yourself. KEEP MOVING.
Let go of the idea that things could have happened differently, as if this life is a Choose Your Own Adventure book and you simply turned to the wrong page. You did the best you could with what you knew—and felt—at the time. Now do better, knowing more. KEEP MOVING.

The tweets are elegantly laid out, one per page, crisp black text in white text boxes, or white text on a soft gray background. Each “KEEP MOVING” is printed in a bolded sans-serif font at the bottom of the page. The book is designed by Oliver Munday, a witty and adventurous graphic artist whose work here is a little bit basic: Visually, the tweets resemble nothing so much as the inspo quotes that get shared widely on social media, the ones that say, like, “Be the energy you want to attract.” This impression of the tweets as visual wallpaper led me, while reading Keep Moving , to keep moving past the KEEP MOVINGs.

Smith stresses that the tweets are not poems, but other poets see connections between her online writing and her verse. “I think the tweets braid together very smoothly with what Maggie’s work does,” says Abdurraqib. “The tools she’s working with are really similar across genre. She has a command of language and an ability to get to the heart of direct address.”

“It gets very strange with the tweeting world, because we can’t decide what kind of writing it is,” Lockwood says. “There are things that you tweet that are worthwhile but they don’t feel like they have the heft of the work . It’s hard to figure out how to walk that line.” I know my knee-jerk distaste for the tweets and their role in the book is snobbish, a dismissal of self-help as different from, as Lockwood says, work —not a worthy accompaniment to the poems Maggie Smith has been writing for decades.

When I ask Davis, the critic, if there’s precedent for a poet sliding into self-help as a genre, he says, “The kind answer is, it really hasn’t been done well.” He chuckles, but then makes an argument on Smith’s behalf. “I think Maggie Smith’s book is explicitly an attempt to discuss this with herself. That she’s apprehensive about it speaks well to her chances at succeeding.”

I remind myself that writing these tweets, writing this book, is what Maggie Smith wants to do—what her readers have asked for. “She’s been called to action by her audience to offer advice and wisdom and perspective in these self-help tidbits,” says Walker-Figueroa. “And she’s answered that call.” And this is all aside from the fact, as Smith makes clear, that the book was necessary —necessary for her financial security, necessary for her emotional health.

“Your work can flow into the shape that people make for you,” Lockwood says. “Or you can try to break that shape.” I’ve come to think that with Keep Moving , Smith’s trying to do a little of both. What if the tweets aren’t simply filler? What if, instead, they’re more akin to the gold-flecked lacquer in kintsugi —holding a broken object together, gleaming in the light?

After our walk in the woods, Smith met me at her house, which was as she described it in Modern Love: periwinkle siding, just the one car in the driveway now that her husband’s is gone. The day had turned warm, and with her jacket off her short sleeves revealed the tattooed wild violets and lemon branches twisting around her upper arms.

Seeing the house, thinking of that Modern Love essay, which is as straightforwardly sad a piece of writing as Smith has ever produced—“like ‘Good Bones’ without the last three sentences,” she said—I wondered why her dominant emotional mode as a writer was sadness, not anger. Doesn’t she have plenty to be angry about? Don’t we all? “I’m as least as angry as I am sad,” she said. “But I’m much more comfortable being sad in public than I am being angry in public. I won’t say I can’t , I will say I can’t yet square that in my work.” She pointed out that what her children, any children, need in a difficult time is not a parent who’s consumed by anger. “So every time I want to kick a wall, instead I do something that’s out of care for them.”

I get that, I said, transmuting anger into care. But what about transmuting anger into action ? Good art doesn’t always need to meet the political moment, but what about this moment? What worried me about a writer like Smith retreating into self-help right now, I said, was that to focus on taking care of yourself and your family emotionally might be exactly what we don’t need art to be telling us as the world falls apart.

“In some ways,” Smith finally said, “I think care is action. It’s a kind of action. And I don’t mean that in like a Pollyanna way, like we can just love each other and heal everybody. But I do think a lot of problems we’re facing stem from the fact that we are not thinking about others as ourselves.”

I mentioned a phrase Smith uses several times in her tweets: “Do something today, however small … ” Often the prescribed action is directed not only inward, but outward: “Do something today, however small, to light up your own life. Or shine on someone else—the light will reach you, too.” In my copy of Keep Moving , next to that tweet, I’d written “oh brother,” but I was trying to shake away my cynicism and really think about what such a thing would look like. I asked her, “Is that care as action?”

Smith smiled. She mentioned, not for the first time, the friends who had helped her through her divorce, the casseroles left on her porch, the phone calls late into the night. “But it’s not only that,” she said. “Sometimes we talk about words and actions as being separate. But I don’t know … when I tweet a response to your tweet that says, hey , you know, you’re not in this by yourself —that’s an action.”

While I was on the flight home, Smith tweeted another aphorism, not from herself, but from the writer Grace Paley: “The only recognizable feature of hope is action.” Part of me was annoyed to have our impassioned discussion boiled down to an inspirational quote on Twitter. But I scrolled through the responses—“These are the words I didn’t know I needed to hear,” “Love this,” “Hope made me drive my absentee ballot 30 miles to deliver it in person”—and calmed down a little.

That evening I sat on the porch of my own house, thinking about the end of “Good Bones.” The smoke in the upper atmosphere made the sky a gorgeous, shocking orange—a “beauty emergency,” as Smith calls such moments where you just have to drop what you’re doing and look. Smith had mentioned that the reason she thought the poem wasn’t a downer, as some on the internet declared, was that its final lines were a call to action of sorts. “It’s not super direct,” she said, “but it’s there.”

I pulled the poem up on my laptop, that neat little JPEG shared hundreds of thousands of times. If the world is like a house with good bones, the question is, how are we to make things better? It’s not by concealing what’s bad about it, despite what the poem’s speaker hides from her children. It’s by treating the world like we’d treat that house: by tearing it down to the studs and building something new from that skeleton. We might not feel like there’s a lot to work with right now, in our burning world. But we could still make this place beautiful.

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Good Bones

Distributed for Tupelo Press

Maggie Smith

114 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2017

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Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

This poem originally appeared in Waxwing , Issue 10, in June 2016. Used with permission of the author.

More by this poet

Voting-machine.

In 1899, Lenna R. Winslow of Columbus, Ohio, applied for a patent for a “Voting-Machine.” He had created a mechanical system that adjusted the ballot the voter would see based on whether that voter was a man or a woman.   —David Kindy, Smithsonian.com     When you enter the booth through the door marked   ladies , listen for the click and turn—levers and gears   designed to conceal. Don’t trouble yourself,   they say, with the say you aren’t allowed to have,  

The starlings choose one piece of sky above the river

      and pour themselves in. Like a thousand arrows 

              pointing in unison one way, then another. That bit of blue

      doesn’t belong to them, and they don’t belong to the sky,

or to the earth. Isn’t that what you’ve been taught—nothing is ours?

Poem Beginning with a Line from It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

Just look—nothing but sincerity  as far as the eye can see— the way the changed leaves,

flapping their yellow underbellies in the wind, glitter. The tree looks sequined wherever

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'Good Bones' star Mina Starsiak Hawk reveals why HGTV series is ending

It's official: "Good Bones" is coming to an end.

On Aug. 7, Mina Starsiak Hawk revealed the news when she released a pre-recorded episode of her podcast, " Mina AF ."

"Today, I filmed my last few pickups for 'Good Bones.' Not 'Good Bones' Season Eight, but for 'Good Bones," she said. "So it is officially, 'That's a wrap, folks.' And the series premiere or, you know, the last season of the series, will air a few months from now, and it's the end of an era.

"I had to say goodbye to some people today that I have spent my last almost 10 years with," Starsiak Hawk continued.

Although "Good Bones" is ending, the HGTV star noted that she's "super, super proud" of the network for "making a show for the last eight years that, for the huge majority of the time, has been super representative of who I am, who the boys are, what we’re doing, and it was really important to me from the beginning to do that.”

What is HGTV's series 'Good Bones' about?

"Good Bones" stars Karen E. Laine and daughter Mina Starsaik

"Good Bones" is a long-running HGTV show that features Starsiak Hawk revitalizing homes alongside her mom, Karen E Laine, in her hometown of Indianapolis. With Starsiak Hawk's background in real estate and Laine's knowledge of the law, as a former attorney, the two ladies turn run-down homes into stunning remodels with a little help from their crew, including Starsiak Hawk's half-brother, Ted.

In 2019, Laine announced that she was retiring from their company, Two Chicks and a Hammer. Although she was no longer employed there, she still appeared on "Good Bones" to help her daughter out.

On Starsiak Hawk's podcast , she noted that the show's production team has seen her go through many different life changes, including getting married to her husband, Steve Hawk, and having their two kids, Jack and Charlie.

“They’ve seen me get engaged, get married, be a foster parent to my niece, have Jack, go through IVF, have Charlie, and then all just the regular daily struggles. And I think y’all would agree, but you’re hardest and maybe meanest to the people closest to you because it’s safe, so we’ve kind of become family for each other and kind of done that.”

"We kind of created this weird big, dysfunctional family that just came to an end today and it's so weird because with family, you don't end that relationship, no matter how dysfunctional it gets. Sometimes, you probably should. But it was goodbyes," she added.

When did 'Good Bones' premiere?

"Good Bones" premiered in 2016 and it's set to air its final season, Season Eight, on Aug. 15 at 9 p.m. ET on HGTV.

What can we expect from the final season of 'Good Bones'?

According to Starsiak Hawk's Instagram post shared last month, the Season Eight premiere of "Good Bones" will follow Mina, Karen and their team "as they revamp a junk-filled duplex, complete with an attic space and a basement, located in the Bates-Hendricks neighborhood. To turn a profit, Mina will transform the attic into a rental income unit for the new homeowners by adding bedrooms, a kitchen and living room, all with a modern touch."

Why is 'Good Bones' ending?

D+, Good Bones: Risky Business, Mina Starsiak Hawk, Working.Day

On her podcast, Starsiak Hawk's explained that she was in agreement with HGTV to end the show.

"This is a good decision," she said. "This is something that was made together with the network."

Starsiak Hawk noted that has felt a lot of stress doing the show because she felt she had a lot of responsibilities.

"It's not my job to keep two dozen people employed for the rest of their lives or all the things that I was putting on myself that was making it really, really hard to function as a normal human being because I always felt the weight of so many other people's worlds that I put on my shoulders," she said. "No one else did that to me. There's no blame game to play there."

She continued, “I got to a point where I think I kind of felt like, whether it made sense or not, it felt like I was fighting for my life, or fighting for my family’s life, fighting for my employees’ lives, to figure something out, to find a solution, to find the next thing," Starsiak Hawk added. "And I just became a version of myself that I really didn't like because when you're fighting, when you feel like you're fighting for your life, it's not the best version of anyone."

What's next for Starsiak Hawk and Laine?

Well, before "Good Bones" premiered in 2016, Starsiak Hawk was working as a real estate agent and Laine was working as an attorney, according to HGTV . But, now that "Good Bones" is coming to an end, it seems that Starsiak Hawk has been thinking about the next steps for her and her family.

On Instagram , she wrote, "In all honesty, the last decade has been leading up to this moment, but what’s next?"

On her podcast, she added, "Hopefully, very exciting things to come."

While the specifics may be a huge question mark, Starsiak Hawk expressed that taking care of her family and herself are at the top of her priorities list.

"What are my actual responsibilities? And they're pretty simple. It's to take care of myself, it's to take care of my kids, work together with my husband to do those things, to really take care of my family and make sure we're always safe, fed, happy, healthy."

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Why Is ‘Good Bones’ Ending? Mina Starsiak Hawk Reveals Real Reason Behind Show’s Cancelation

  • Oops! Something went wrong. Please try again later. More content below

When Mina Starsiak Hawk announced that Good Bones was ending after season 8 , fans were left in disbelief. The HGTV series, also starring her mom, Karen E. Laine , featured a cast full of colorful characters and fascinating home design projects. Drama has continued to surround the show in recent months, leading many to question the real reason why the series was canceled.

Why Is ‘Good Bones’ Ending?

During an episode of her “Mina AF” podcast on August 7, 2023, Mina revealed that she filmed her last few scenes for Good Bones . The reasoning she provided for the show’s end was simply the fact that she “just needed to switch it up.”

In the weeks that followed, more information came to light about some of the challenges faced behind the scenes by Mina and her renovation company, Two Chicks and a Hammer . The HGTV star claimed that she “butted heads” with city planners responsible for approving construction permits in Indianapolis.

“I have done everything I could possibly do to try to work within the system,” she told the Indianapolis Business Journal in September 2023. “It’s tricky because in local government, very few people are in charge of a lot of big decisions. It seems for a long time this plan for the city to have urban density, growth and development was not actually being enacted by the people making those decisions.”

The TV personality also called out decision-makers whom she thinks use their own personal architectural preferences when it comes to signing off on permits.

“They’ll take one thing they’re allowed to do and then bend you over a barrel for 10 other things,” she continued. “I have to go back to my architect eight or 10 or 12 times to try to meet this moving target.”

In a statement to the outlet, a spokesperson for the city addressed Mina’s claims.

“We understand the benefit of showcasing the diversity of Indianapolis’ neighborhoods, housing and people, and we appreciate Two Chicks and a Hammer’s commitment to our community over the last eight years,” the statement read. “In that time, city agencies, recognizing the significance of the show for Indianapolis, often engaged with the team to guide them through the requirements and rules of our planning and permitting processes. These requirements are derived from state laws and local ordinances, and we must equitably enforce them for all Indianapolis residents and businesses.”

Renovating 13 houses per season proved to be quite a challenge for Mina and her crew, ultimately leading to the decision to end the show .

“For the last two years, I’ve known,” she said. “It was, ‘Y’all, I’m losing it. I can’t keep doing what we’re doing, in terms of the pace and the finances of it. We need to start making a plan.’ We’ve been talking about what works for [production company High Noon Entertainment] and what works for us for a long time.”

What Happened Between Mina Starsiak Hawk and Karen E. Laine?

In addition to Mina’s claims about the challenges of working in Indianapolis, she also opened up about facing a rift with her mom . During an episode of her podcast on August 28, 2023, the realtor told podcast listeners that she and Karen were not “in a great place.”

“There's a lot more construction people don't see,” Mina explained in an interview with People a few weeks later. “There's a lot more contractor issues people don't see. There's interpersonal family dynamics that people don't see.”

While filming the season 8 premiere, Mina and Karen were in a “challenging place.” The former restaurant server revealed that she and her mom had “a knockdown drag-out [fight] during demo.”

“I think family business is hard enough on its own,” she shared. “And from what people know from the show, my mom and I are thick as thieves, best friends and because they just don't know anything else, they assume that's how it's always been. And I think a lot of people really aspire to that, so they don't want to know other stuff, which is fine. But my mom and I have had a very rocky relationship since I have memories.”

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‘Good Bones’ Cast Member Tad Starsiak Speaks Up Amid Family Fight

W ith the final episode of “Good Bones” about to air on HGTV and the family estranged, cast member Tad Starsiak is speaking out about working through “negative feelings.”

Mina Starsiak Hawk and her mom, Karen E. Laine, have starred on HGTV‘s “Good Bones” since its 2016 debut. But Tad, a contractor on the show who’s Starsiak Hawk’s half-brother, has been part of the cast since the beginning, too. According to Starsiak Hawk, he’s also been part of the family fight that led to the demise of “Good Bones.” The last episode of the show’s eighth and final season will air on October 17, 2023.

On August 28, two weeks after announcing the cancellation of “Good Bones,” Starsiak Hawk revealed on her “Mina AF” podcast that tension between her and several family members on the show was a big reason for the series’ demise.

“My mom and I aren’t in a great place,” she said. “My brother Tad and I aren’t in a great place. My brother William and I are in a kind-of-like-nonexistent place. It’s complicated without even being complicated. We don’t really engage much and the last engagement wasn’t super-positive, and that was maybe a year ago.”

On October 11, Tad — her half-brother and a project manager on the show who often provides comic relief and optimism during stressful renovations — uploaded an Instagram post with his reflections on “negative feelings” and “being angry.” Though he didn’t specifically mention his family’s rift, many fans suspect his comments were made in response to the ongoing drama.

Here’s what you need to know:

Tad Starsiak Posts About Anger After Half-Sister Mina Starsiak Hawk Accuses Him of ‘Awful’ Comments

Starsiak Hawk, 39, hasn’t shared many details on what caused her family’s rift. But she did cite “work ties” and “financial ties” as part of the problem in one recent podcast and, on the September 18 episode, she spoke about a nasty exchange with Tad.

“My brother Tad said some really awful stuff to me and I’m sure he would say that I’ve said some awful stuff to him too,” she revealed. “But the most recent stuff he said to me, he can’t say it’s not what he said. He can’t say I misunderstood. It’s in text and it’s black and white and that was kind of my final straw there.”

Tad, who turned 30 in September, has not responded publicly to her comments, but on October 11, he posted an Instagram video of himself talking about working through negative feelings.

“One of our biggest problems as human beings is that we’re meaning-making machines,” he said while sitting on his couch. “We think we have to apply meaning to everything, and it makes sense because your brain is always trying to stay a step ahead of you and figure out a narrative of why something happened, but we need to learn how to turn that off, too.”

Tad, whom HGTV has described as a “mental health and wellness guru” in addition to his construction expertise, then gave readers an analogy to explain his point.

“If you’re driving down the road, and someone honks at you or someone gives you the finger, you know, usually our first reaction is anger,” he said. “We start to feel negative, but there’s power in the pause. We don’t have to feel that way. You can let that moment pass without it meaning anything. I know that’s crazy, but you can. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

He finished his monologue by stating, “Life is so, so short, and the meaning that you give to things needs to be powerful ones.”

‘Good Bones’ Fans React to Tad Starsiak’s Post About Anger

In the caption of his post, Tad also wrote, “Recognize the power in the pause and release those negative feelings. We only get so much time to live on this earth, why spend any amount on it being angry? It’s just not worth it.”

His statements generated a variety of reactions from his followers, including one former “people pleaser” who wrote that it’s unhealthy to avoid anger and that it’s an “essential and a valid emotion!”

Tad replied, “I 100% see your point of view. Any emotion is a valid emotion and no one gets to tell us otherwise. What I’m suggesting is that we learn emotional skills that help us move through negative emotions more quickly or bypass them all together. I still get angry, but I’m actively working on letting more things go so I can stay centered in a happy calm state”

Many fans suspected his words were directly in response to Starsiak Hawk’s estrangement from other family members, writing that they hope the family can heal and come back together to make good memories together, like the “Good Bones” episode in which he received a bachelor pad makeover.

“To hear that you’re having trouble as a family hurts my heart,” one fan wrote in her comment, which Tad liked. “My husband used to say that words are like bullets. Once they’re fired, all you can do is deal with the carnage they caused. You can’t brush this under a rug, and you certainly can’t act like I didn’t happen. I’m not saying you’re in the wrong. All I’m saying is you have to sit down together and work this out. You need each other even if you think you don’t. I wish you the very best in life and love.”

Inside Mina Starsiak Hawk’s Complicated Family History

Tad and Laine are clearly on the same side of the family feud, but they’re not blood relatives. The family behind “Good Bones” is a complicated one. So much so that Starsiak Hawk and Laine filmed a video for HGTV in 2017 to try explaining their family tree.

Laine married Casey Starsiak, the mother-daughter duo said as they created a diagram on a giant easel, and they had three kids — William, C.R. and Mina.

Starsiak Hawk then crossed out the line drawn between her parents to symbolize their divorce and said, “Real life hits you over the head and this gets snapped out.”

After her parents’ divorced, they both married multiple times and had additional kids, per Yahoo.

Laine married a man named Randy and they had a daughter named Kelsy, the outlet reported. After that marriage ended in divorce, Laine wed another man named Mick, but it’s unclear when they split. In 2015, she began dating Roger, married him two years later, and they are still together.

As for her dad Casey, Starsiak Hawk said, “Then Dad married Cheryl, and dad and Cheryl had Tad and Jess.”

“Then they got divorced,” Laine quipped.

In fact, before and after her marriage to Casey, Cheryl was married to a contractor named Lenny who appeared on “Good Bones” during its early seasons.

Tad Starsiak Leaned on Karen E. Laine After His Mom Died When He Was Young

Sadly, Tad’s mother Cheryl died when he was 12, he shared in a tribute via Instagram. Already connected to Tad via her ex-husband Casey and their kids, Laine took him under her wing, according to Screen Rant.

“When I was going through that rough time, every day I woke up and she was there for me,” Tad told HGTV in 2018. “It’s great having her as a teacher and as another mom.”

When Tad posted a photo with Laine on October 10, his caption questioned whether “Good Bones” is truly ending.

Tad wrote, “There’s only two episodes of Good Bones left this season…and forever!(?)”

The “Good Bones” series finale will see Tad planning a future with his girlfriend Anna, from moving into a renovated home to proposing, per HGTV. The episode will premiere on October 17 at 9 p.m. Eastern time.

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This article was originally published on Heavy.com

The post ‘Good Bones’ Cast Member Tad Starsiak Speaks Up Amid Family Fight appeared first on Heavy.com .

Mina Starsiak Hawk and half-brother Tad Hawk

These Are The 15 Best Renovations Featured On Good Bones

Mina and Karen

After seven seasons on HGTV with "Good Bones," mother-daughter duo Mina Starsiak Hawk and Karen Laine have made our jaws drop over and over again with amazing house transformations. The founders of Two Chicks and a Hammer, an Indianapolis, Indiana-based construction and real estate flipping company, are committed to revitalizing Indianapolis neighborhoods, one house at a time. Unlike the typical Chip and Joanna Gaines model of buying the worst house in the best neighborhood, Mina and Karen look to deindustrialized areas where homes are often abandoned and derelict, buying at low prices and investing much of their own money in their home renovations. And these two are known for keeping it real on the show, which is part of what makes them so loveable, says Country Living.  

We were lucky enough to speak with Mina Starsiak Hawk in an interview about her new show, "Good Bones: Risky Business," which premiered in early September 2022. And to get ourselves pumped up for the new spinoff series, we wanted to look back at some of our favorite renovations from the original "Good Bones" series. 

1. Robin egg blue cottage

An Office Becomes A Home, Season 2, Episode 3

Mina and Karen turn a dilapidated countertop manufacturing business into a functional, ultra-cozy home. Our favorite detail has to be the robin egg blue scalloped siding and mirror-tiled fireplace. 

2. Industrial meets boho glam home

Little Pink House on Palmer, Season 4, Episode 3

When the ladies purchased this awkward 1 bedroom duplex for $30,000, we couldn't wait to see what they'd do with it. They took down walls, played with color, and created a darling tiny kitchen that we'd love to cook a meal in. 

3. Breezy and beautiful, but not easy

Free House Expensive Reno, Season 5, Episode 8

With an all-in budget of $60,000, we didn't have high hopes for the run-down 2-bedroom property. When they created a space that felt homey, luxe, and family-friendly, we were blown away. We were especially charmed by the swinging bed in the kid's room. 

4. Rough shack to love shack

Starting from Scratch, Season 5, Episode 8

Having a hard time recognizing that house on the left? It was hit by a car and couldn't be saved. For $10,000, this deal was too good not to take on. Luckily, they were able to pull off an amazing rebuild and make a $40,000 profit. 

5. Hoarders horror show

Saddest Home on Sanders Street, Season 3, Episode 2

The left panel may look like something out of "Hoarders" instead of "Good Bones." This house had creepy doll moulds and sinking appliances and had to be torn down. But the home they erected in its place is stunning. We are especially fond of the butcher block countertop. 

6. To bistro table, or not to bistro table

The Greenwich Village Townhome, Season 5, Episode 4

When Karen stepped back from Two Chicks, there were some communication mishaps. In this episode, Karen and Mina disagree about creating a bistro area in the narrow alleyway. To compromise, Mina installed French doors, and the prospective buyers loved this thoughtful, dog-friendly detail.

7. Duplex to single family home

Duplex Remodel Double Trouble, Season 1, Episode 10

Turning a duplex into a standalone home isn't as easy as just smashing down a few walls, but the "Good Bones" crew manages to do it with style and class. Our favorite detail of the episode? Karen's reclaimed dinosaur toy she turns into an objet d'art. 

8. 50 shades of brown

Eyesore Overhaul, Season 2, Episode 9

Bought for $45,000, this Bates Hendricks haunt was at the high end of their initial investments. With a ton of space and bizarre use of wood paneling, they had their work cut out for them. They were able to transform this "turd on a hill" into a breezy, coastal cottage. 

9. Shaky grounds

Small House, Big Problems, Season 2, Episode 11

Having a tough time imagining how a 730 square feet house filled with trash with a foundation that's resting on a car jack becomes a cozy, spacious home? That's what "Good Bones" is for. They managed to infuse it with style and charm, including herringbone butcher block countertops. 

10. Starting fresh

Empty Lot To Home Sweet Home, Season 3, Episode 7

Breaking with traditions is what separates "Good Bones" from other renovation shows, and in this episode, Karen and Mina start with a blank canvas on an empty lot. They build up a darling boho-chic bungalow that would attract the hippest of individuals. 

11. Fountain Square fanatics

Shiplap Surprise, Season 4, Episode 5

In the Fountain Square neighborhood, house values have skyrocketed, meaning you get less house for your money nowadays. Mina and Karen worried they wouldn't be able to make a functional but welcoming floor plan, but they knocked our socks off. The crown jewel of the house is the shiplapped eat-in kitchen. 

12. Tree-riddled foundation

Eastside Americana Cottage, Season 7, Episode 2

The duo purchased this house sight unseen and, upon arriving, immediately saw the crooked foundation totally overwhelmed by stray tree roots. In addition to fixing the foundation, they also added a second story and addition to the house. Our favorite part is easily the reclaimed piano-turned-bench detail. 

13. Italiano inspo

Teardown To Italian Treasure, Season 6, Episode 9

If you've watched a lot of "Good Bones," you know these ladies don't tear down homes easily. But for this fire-damaged Arizona Street spot, it was a must. They built a massive home with plenty of Tuscan villa charm, including a countryside mural and black iron railing. 

14. Campfire to craftsman

A Charred Charmer For Cory, Season 6, Episode 2

Mina's brother fell in love with this Southside craftsman bungalow. This darling home needed major work on its foundation, costing a tiny fortune to repair, but they really nailed the balance between coziness and high-end laddish, leather-bound details. 

15. Scandi chic reno

From Burned Out To Boho Nordic, Season 7, Episode 5

This torched house was in need of major loving. Mina and Karen borrowed influences from modern farmhouse  and Scandi designs to create a family-friendly, boho, ultra-comfy home. And best of all, it's right behind Mina's brother's spot in Southside! 

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Literary Context

“Good Bones” adds to the works of poems rooted in protest, resistance, and empowerment. While not an openly confrontational poem, Smith’s “Good Bones” comments on similar themes to protest poetry, such as social justice and the exposure of grim truths. Poems in this literary tradition tend to advocate for change, raise consciousness, and establish a unified front against injustice or inhumanity. Poems in this category often have to do with peace and justice, calling—as Smith does—for a better world . Examples of other poets in this genre are Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, and Adrienne Rich.

Smith’s “Good Bones” uses the voice of a mother to identify injustices of raising a child in a world where horrible things happen. For instance, Smith states, “For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, / sunk in a lake” (Lines 9-10). Smith’s speaker asks, how does one explain this type of violence to their children? How does one explain to their child that this is the fate of some children?

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Skull and Bones Review

This seafaring rpg has a great foundation, despite feeling like a live-service first draft..

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Like spotting the first sign of shore after years adrift, Skull and Bones has finally, actually found its way to launch. Six separate delays and several different concepts that were forced to walk the plank might make you understandably apprehensive about Ubisoft’s long-brewing pirate game, but after spending over 60 hours hoisting sails and swabbing decks, I’ve had a yo-ho-whole lot of co-op fun with friends and strangers alike. The 17th-century Indian Ocean works well as avast open world to be explored and plundered, the RPG mechanics are (briny) deep with opportunities for buildcrafting alongside your fellow scurvy dogs, and the naval combat you’ll spend bucca-nearly all your time on the high seas engaging with is tactical and consistently entertaining. Predictably, there are still some major concerns common with always-online games nowadays, including performance issues and bugs aplenty, as well as a very small list of endgame activities that become monotonous and grindy in short oar-der . Skull and Bones might not be the AAAA Man-of-War Ubisoft was hoping for just yet, but with a strong start to a live-service that’s got a year of upcoming content mapped out, it’s already quite seaworthy.

Skull and Bones - The Complete Timeline

Skull and Bones was revealed to the public at Ubisoft's E3 conference, on June 12, 2017. It was planned to launch in fall 2018.

Skull and Bones is fairly unique in the grand scheme of open-world RPGs in that it gives you direct control of a ship and lets you sail the ocean as you pillage ports and send enemy vessels to Davy Jones’ locker in search of loot and infamy. Alone or alongside the ships of up to two friends as a fleet, you’ll gather resources and complete action-packed heists to feed your greed and climb Jacob’s progression ladder as you power up your vessel, which is usually a blast. Though it might be tempting to compare this online ocean to Sea of Thieves , Skull and Bones actually has more in common with the Forza Horizon series. They’re both over-the-top, arcadey open-world RPGs where you play as a vehicle, except instead of racing cars with friends, you’re committing piracy in boats – a SeaRPG to Forza Horizon’s CarPG, if the court will allow it. And that laser focus on wonderfully intricate maritime gameplay and commodities/economy simulation is extremely enjoyable most of the time, even if you never get to swing a sword or fire a flintlock like in Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag .

While it’s a bit odd at first that you only ever explore the world by controlling your ship (aside from brief intermissions at the social hub), it took just a few hours for me to not feel like I was missing out on much. That’s primarily thanks to how good the ship-to-ship combat quickly becomes. After a fairly underwhelming opening meant to help you get your sea legs with the glorified hunk of driftwood you’ll call your starting ship, things really open up. Once you start to upgrade and customize your vessel to fit your playstyle, then tackle some of the more challenging areas and activities that require you to seriously up your game, Ubisoft’s strict focus on navals fights works a lot better than I thought it would.

What should we do with the drunken sailor?

Disappointingly, Skull and Bones only has the faintest whiff of a story, which focuses on two of the very few major NPCs: a vulgar English pirate named Captain John Spurlock, and a violent political dissident named Admiral Rahma, neither of whom are particularly interesting. You have a couple conversations with each of these rogues and run a few missions for them that conclude in a boss fight against a particularly mean boat, then they tell you to buzz off and do your own thing just as fast. That’s not to say there aren’t a few likable rogues and skallywags to meet along the way – like Yanita, who introduces you to the world of black market trading with all the enthusiasm and pomp of a circus ringmaster – but NPCs are little more than vendors and quest dispensers with no substantial story connecting them.

It’s especially weird that meatier pieces of the story seem to have been lopped off since I saw them in the closed beta last year, like an early part where you meet a dying pirate named Abel Rassler, who you now just find dead instead. My guess is these changes were made to keep you out on the ocean waves as long as possible rather than lingering in the social spaces, and I certainly found myself spending a lot more time doing just that – which isn’t such a bad thing. Still, I expect my pirate games to have a bit of drama, infighting, and betrayal, and Skull and Bones doesn’t even attempt to tell a story of any substance or consequence, so feel free to make use of that skip button during the few conversations there are.

Instead, your attention is directed toward the compelling treadmill of blasting through increasingly lethal enemy ships and then using your loot to craft better instruments of piracy. Ship-to-ship PvE combat is the star of the show, and it requires strategy, cooperation with other player-controlled vessels, and good aim to pull off at higher levels. For example, when taking on powerful fleets found in later areas, you might want to reconfigure your ship to a tank build optimized for withstanding hits and dealing close-range damage, while your friends focus on DPS or even support options capable of healing allies by peppering them with nonsensically medicinal cannonballs. (How would that even work?) It’s also awesome how great naval combat and sailing the open ocean look, as a lot of effort clearly went into giving elements like waves and cannonfire an extra layer of visual polish – although, on the flip side, NPCs often look animatronic, with dead eyes and robotic mouths.

Crafting new ships and trying out different builds is extremely compelling. Just when I thought I’d built my ideal vessel, I’d see a special cannon or a unique piece of ship armor I just couldn’t live without, then gleefully jump through surprisingly rewarding hoops by attacking certain factions and seeking out rare resources to buy a schematic and craft it. Taking those new toys out to lay the beatdown on any blaggards foolish enough to oppose me is especially thrilling. For example, I spent many hours and tons of resources to craft my first mortar, which unlocked the ability to rain fire from the sky on my enemies like I was calling in an airstrike. Sure, doing so forced me to spend every last scrap of my ill-gotten riches, but can you really put a price on turning your foes into pulled pork? As you dive into the endgame, the builds that open up get downright wild, and you can unlock a ship-mounted flamethrower that spews ghostly blue flames, or rocket launchers that fire dozens of burning projectiles to devastating effect.

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Once you’ve established yourself on the high seas a bit, you’ll also begin to understand both trade routes and the supply and demand they influence in different parts of the world, which adds an interesting economy management minigame to the mix. You’ll even gain access to the black market via The Helm, a clever endgame mechanic that allows you to build and manage underworld businesses by creating and delivering embargoed goods, like opium. This opens up a whole new way to line your pockets, as you can ferry legitimate and illegitimate goods to and fro, buying low in one place and selling high in another, like a pirate with a bachelor’s degree in business. Later on you can even conquer coastal settlements to convert them into manufactories that generate passive income and help you obtain the most powerful equipment. Before you know it, you suddenly find yourself playing Pirate SimCity – or as I like to call it: SimSea-ty – as you manage lumber yards and farming settlements, and it’s a truly awesome playground for the endgame grind.

That’s because, in order to add settlements to your collection, you’ll need to participate in Skull and Bones’ PvP activities, which don’t appear until later on, adding a neat new wrinkle to things right as they start feeling stale with the overwhelmingly PvE foundation. Hostile Takeover is a delightfully sweaty slugfest where participants sail to a settlement and fight for control over it by seeing who can down the most enemy ships (including other players), while Legendary Heists send everyone to attack the same convoy carrying treasure, then let them turn on one another to claim it as their own. There are also cool moments where you’ll sometimes be offered an opportunity to double your dividends when picking up the resources generated by one of your bases, but only if you agree to become hunted by all the other players on the server, who then come zooming across the waves to rip you off. These isolated PvP events are a nice compromise from having griefers constantly attack everyone all the time, since you’ve gotta opt in to each of them, but the reward is usually worth the trouble.

When they work properly, that is, and unfortunately they often don’t. There’s a really common bug where, instead of the Hostile Takeover activity directing you to one area, it points you to six or seven, annoyingly leaving you scrambling to figure out which is the right one (each with their own lengthy travel time). If you pick wrong, showing up late to the right area is basically just wasted time since someone else will have likely gained a commanding lead in your absence. Other times, during Legendary Heists, I’ve had the person who grabs the loot simply never become targetable by other players, completely eliminating the interesting PvP aspect. During one of my “double or nothing” supply runs, Skull and Bones crashed entirely, and my prized coins were nowhere to be found when I logged back on. Issues like these are pretty rampant once you reach the endgame, and they’ll continue to throw a massive wet sail over the whole thing until they get addressed.

Even when these events are working, the endgame is needlessly grindy in its current state, Skull and Bones doesn’t have nearly enough variety in its activities to keep things interesting for very long. Since it costs thousands of gold coins (called Pieces of Eight) to unlock single items, you’re expected to play a whole heck of a lot, long after the campaign has sunk to the bottom of the ocean, and there’s not currently any quests or enemies in the world that require those powerful items to power through them (aside from other players willing to do so for an advantage in PvP). Hopefully the upcoming seasonal content will provide actual reasons to want them, but Ubisoft would also need to add a lot more activities to keep that grind interesting, because right now all you can do is repeat the same handful of tasks, then shuttle your loot from each settlement back to the base ad nauseam.

TieGuyTravis' Favorite Pirate Games

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Although it’s not particularly unique in the live-service space, Skull and Bones is an extremely unstable experience in this early state. I had crashes every couple of hours, pixelated textures that loaded right in front of me, and most irritating of all: constant erroneous notifications popping up every couple of seconds, sometimes repeatedly for hours at a time, clogging up the screen with obnoxious and inaccurate warnings that drove me absolutely up the wall. I still enjoyed most of my time lobbing explosives at unsuspecting merchant vessels, but shiver me timbers, that exasperating layer of jank really made it harder to love.

Skull and Bones isn’t the successor to Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag that many seem to want, and it isn’t many of things Ubisoft itself said it would be at various points in its storied history, but the seafaring RPG we ultimately got is still surprisingly good. Sailing around the Indian Ocean firing cannons, mortars, and giant ballista at your foes is a fun time, the RPG mechanics and cooperative buildcrafting is as deep as the ocean with plenty of awesome gadgets to grind for, and the economy simulator is impressively in-depth. It doesn’t quite fulfill the promise of a decade-long cruise to port yet either, with a thin endgame, almost no story to speak of, and general instability that sometimes makes the adventure feel like a rough draft. But here’s hoping some of those shortcomings can be washed away by the waves of content already planned to come in an ambitious live-service roadmap that’s fast approaching. For now, its maiden voyage is a good start.

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