Love Letters to Ghosts

Good-Schiff's poems are generous invitations, offering glimpses into what waits "below the surface of the everyday," as well as illuminating moments that show how "our singularities [don't have to] divide us." Animated by all the poems that have come before it, an invitation to a simple card game illuminates what can be gained by our willingness to embrace what we all share-light, shadow, to see and be seen.
- Elena Georgiou, Lambda Literary Award-winning poet; author of Mercy Mercy Me and The Immigrant's Refrigerator

The Ghosts in these poems are not just memories; they include Cinderella, Goldilocks, a fairy godmother, and a real grandmother, each of which gets promoted, so to speak, into symbolic knowledge in the journey to discover one's true self. Good-Schiff accomplishes all this in a rewarding poetic journey any reader will find enlightening.

- Gary Metras, Easthampton, MA Poet Laureate Emeritus; author of Marble Dust and Vanishing Points

Whether enacting a tea party with Emily Dickinson, Princess Diana, and Barbara Bush, or speaking in the voice of an old shoe not transformed into glass by Cinderella's fairy godmother, these are imaginative, associative elegies. "Here On Earth," an ode to once-desired occupations, recalls, "I wanted to be an astronaut, / to see an earthrise / from our rabbit-faced moon-" and closes with an ars poetica gesture: "anything whole / is not found, but made / with effort, against time." From noticing how September returns roses after summer swelter, to telling time by the growth of jonquil, these poem-letters consider how we mark time-through the natural world, through relocations and relationships, through how and who we love, through the perspective gained by its passage.
- Rebecca Hart Olander, author of Uncertain Acrobats