Lessons in Glass | Eleanor Goodman | Poetry

In Eleanor Goodman’s Lessons in Glass, intimate domestic spaces and global political landscapes collide with unflinching precision. Moving between Shanghai’s disappearing alleyways, Roman cat sanctuaries, and American kitchens haunted by grandmother’s hands, these poems interrogate what it means to inherit fragility — from family silences about miscarriages and torture to eroding villages and protest squares. Goodman’s spare, muscular language renders the body as witness and battleground, where personal histories of migration, childlessness, and maternal loss intersect with collective trauma. With the eye of a translator attuned to what gets lost and preserved across borders, she excavates the violence embedded in daily rituals, from sorting peppers to scrubbing bittermelon. Each poem becomes a lesson in transparency: what shatters, what endures, and what we choose to preserve in the delicate architecture of memory.