Unbound Edition Press today announced it will publish Eleanor Goodman’s second collection of poetry, Lessons in Glass, which is the seventh book in her impressive body of work. The title is scheduled for publication in June of 2026.
In Eleanor Goodman’s Lessons in Glass, intimate domestic spaces and global political landscapes collide. With great lucidity, Goodman’s poems reveal the tenuous but vital ties that knit humanity. Moving between Shanghai’s disappearing alleyways, Roman cat sanctuaries, and American kitchens haunted by grandmother’s hands, these poems interrogate what it means to live in a family, a culture, a history. Unflinching in their portrayal of political realities—whether that means the experience of a Chinese dissident who has survived torture, or an American woman seeking reproductive health—these poems nevertheless render the depth and dimension of individuals lives, the unclassifiable imprint of the human.
An award-winning and internationally prominent poet and translator, Goodman is the author of the poetry collection Nine Dragon Island (2016). She is the translator of five books from Chinese, including Something Crosses My Mind: Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni, which was the recipient of a 2013 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and winner of the 2015 Lucien Stryk Prize. Her translation of In the Roar of the Machines: Poems by Zheng Xiaoqiong was published by NYRB Poets in 2025.
National Book Award winner Ha Jin said, “With a calm voice and distinct music, the poet speaks about love and loss and many micro-aspects of the human condition today.”
Peter Campion, executive editor of the press and editor in chief of its literary journal, Revel, said, “Eleanor Goodman is a world class poet. I can’t think of another American poet of her generation who matches the international scope of her attention with such lyric intensity and emotional heat. These poems are immediate, vivid, and built to last.”
Patrick Davis, publisher and editor in chief at Unbound Edition Press, said, “This profound collection is a confidently feminist intervention that pushes back on the limitations the world puts upon women and the human rights violations against dissidents globally.
