Horse with Hat was a finalist for Poetry in the 2014 New Zealand Post Book Awards and won the Jesse Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry

Horse with Hat, is a conversation with her father, who loved books and ideas but struggled with PTSD after the war, and with a tough steep farm out in the back country. Brendan O'Brien's collages, cut out of a family Bible and Garth Smith's cigarette card collection, make their own kind of music. As in the poems, figures in the collages appear, disappear, then make another entrance in a different form.

Her poems appear in Best New Zealand Poems 2009, 2011, 2014, 2016 and 2017.  In 2014  Agnus Dei was short-listed for the Bridport Prize (UK) and was a place-getter in the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize (US). 

Marty Smith has been awarded an arts grant to work on a book of non-fiction, following the people who work in the stables of the Hastings racecourse to look at what they risk, and why.