A Suit or a Suitcase cover art

A Suit or a Suitcase

Poems
Pre-order with offer Pre-order: Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

A Suit or a Suitcase

By: Maggie Smith
Narrated by: Maggie Smith
Pre-order with offer Pre-order: Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Pre-order Now for £3.99

Pre-order Now for £3.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

 Instant New York Times bestselling author and poet Maggie Smith returns with a new collection of poems on the sometimes-blurry distinction between mind and body, and how the self shifts and moves through time and space.

The title of Maggie Smith’s new collection comes from the eponymous poem:

You ask what I’ll miss about this life.
Everything but cruelty, I think.

But you want one specific thing,
so here—I’ll miss my body. I’ll miss

its companionship, how it’s traveled
with me, never leaving me—& by me,

I mean my mind. My soul? My self?
I don’t know what to call it, and besides,

my body hasn’t traveled with me.
I’ve traveled inside it. Do I wear it

or does it carry me? Is the body a suit
or a suitcase?

Within, poems turn over the strange relationships between the body and the mind, the self and the world. With her signature tenderness and clarity of observation, and with stunning swoops of imagination, Smith considers—and reconsiders—what it is to be human: Does one life matter in the grand scheme of space and time? How can it be that we are the same people we were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, but also different people? And could there be more to life, just beyond the borders of we can experience?

Each poem is an ode to the power of our minds and proof that both a life and a self, whether within a suit or a suitcase, is infinitely expandable. Poetry
No reviews yet