Lessons in Glass

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.

Eleanor Goodman is the author of the poetry collection Nine Dragon Island and the translator of five award-winning books from Chinese. She is a Research Associate at the Harvard University Fairbank Center and a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She has published in journals such as The Paris Review, Granta, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Wasafiri, PN Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.