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

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.