Reviews

Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 by Lucille Clifton

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seeceeread's review against another edition

listen, / you a wonder. / you a city / of a woman. you got a geography / of your own. • what the mirror said

This book gathers Clifton's published work of a decade in a single place. Her favorite themes are easy to spot: ancestral connections, light, trees, the exceptional lurking in ordinariness (the incredible tucked into mundane specifics). She's both secure and curious, open and assertive. And perhaps because some of this was written when she was the age I am now, I am so grateful to see the balances I mean to achieve, the tensions I work to resolve, mirrored and named by another Black woman. Clifton's writing feels like home, like an easy place to delight in myself and my mysteries with a sistafren.

maggiedoodlez's review against another edition

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5.0

Came for the poetry because of “i am running into a new year” and fell in love with the memoir.

cocoaqueenk's review against another edition

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5.0

An underrated poet, Clifton isn’t one of the “literary greats” whose names show up on canonical lists. But she should be. In the forward, Aracelis Girmay says:

“No one writes like Lucille Clifton, and yet, if it were possible to open a voice, like a suitcase, to see what it carries inside it, I believe that inside the voices of many of our beloved contemporary writers are the poems of Lucille Clifton.”

I agree.... Read More

caitlin_89's review against another edition

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4.0

Thanks for lending this to me, Prof. Seeger. I loved it.
I want to re-read it eventually.

I'm not good at reviewing poetry, but I really really liked this.