The Good Girl is Always a Ghost

The poems of Anne Champion’s collection The Good Girl is Always a Ghost start loud and strong with Qiu Jin speaking about her bound feet turning “to concrete / and every step bashes the earth to wreckage, the cracked terrain / wrinkles into canyons and craters, hidden paths for my sisters to follow.” And we do follow through eras and ages, through politics and poetics, through the killing and the healing. Persona poems give voice to forgotten women, to complicated women, and when the speaker arrives in other poems, we see how the “I” herself is complicated by her relationship to these women. In “Dear Marilyn Monroe:” “People tell me I’m beautiful too…I watched them watch you, Marilyn, and I’m afraid.” While the women of this book are ghosts, the poems themselves are what will continue to haunt.

-Jennifer Jackson Berry, author of The Feeder

A woman’s smile / can be a muzzle.” With shocking dexterity, Anne Champion invokes the voices of her foremothers. Like Florence Nightingale, we must become “everything.” Like Sylvia Plath, we should aspire to be “the most terrible thing” until the good girl/bad girl binary collapses, until we are whole. Champion’s poems urge us to wake up, to check our pulses, that the “good girl” has already died-and this is the book that buries her.

-Brandi George, author of Gog