Review by Deborah Leipziger
In a time where we need courage, Linda Carney-Goodrich’s poems help make us brave. In her first collection, Dot Girl, she breaks new ground in her searing poems of redemption and transformation. She takes us by the hand and guides us through her childhood, coming of age in Boston and surviving foster care. In these poems we take flight, move through bracing sea water, experience clouds, amidst violence and abuse. We see the world through the eyes of a child who refuses to be broken; we visit the landmarks of the poet’s childhood, the parks and streets of Dorchester, the ocean.
Growing up in Catholic Boston, amidst abuse, poverty, and misogyny, Linda confronts the past, stares it down and helps us “glimmer in the knowing.” These empowering poems make me feel braver and show how “we call each other home.”
She writes of her mother, conjuring up her accent and turns of phrase in the beautiful and disturbing poem
“My Mother’s Eyes Were Birds” in which her mother’s eyes become “angry owls”. We visit
…stories that become parts
of the body with rooms of their own
In this memoir in verse, the poet evokes both devastation and rapture, taking us from dissociation through to post traumatic growth. Carney-Goodrich intersperses the poems with pages which explain some of the ways psychologists define the phenomenon she or her family experienced: from dissociation and religious abuse to post traumatic growth.
One of the most compelling aspects of this stunning collection is the way in which the poet talks with her younger self, as in “Your Golden Thread,” where she writes:
Each night I send the messages
tied to pigeon feet or auburn strands of hair
like bows back to the girl I once was…
Soul Friend…I am bound to you.
I am the needle of your golden thread.
Linda is a daughter of Boston. The ninth of ten children, Linda attended Boston Latin Academy and eventually received a master’s in education from Harvard University. She studied with the acclaimed poet and novelist, Marge Piercy, in Wellfleet, Massachusetts (which is where I was fortunate enough to meet her). She is the Poetry Coordinator at the Menino Art Center in Hyde Park, a teacher and mother of three.
Dot Girl is very much a book of poems about Boston and Dorchester Bay. The final poem in the collection “The Mothers of Dorchester Bay” is a celebration of women:
And we shall have a new bible,
And the holy name shall be Woman.
The colleges shall be made free.
The classrooms will burst open onto Morrissey Boulevard
And the streets and the monuments shall be renamed.
…
All of Boston shall know their stories
And now we do.
Dot Girl by Linda Carney-Goodrich
Nixes Mate, 2024
978-1-949279-53-5
Deborah Leipziger is an author, poet, and advisor on sustainability. Born in Brazil, Ms. Leipziger is the author of several books on sustainability and human rights. Her collection of poems, Story & Bone, was published in 2023 by Lily Poetry Review Books. Her work appears in numerous anthologies, including Tree Lines: 21st Century American Poems. She is a 2023-2024 Creative Community Fellow, selected by the Jewish Arts Collaborative. Deborah is a Writer-in-Residence at the Center for Spirituality, Dialogue and Service at Northeastern University in Boston.