Reviewed by Karen Malpede
Good Girl
by Holly Coleman
Tough Poets Review, Inc.
July 2026, Paperback, 36 pp, ISBN 9798234104106
Here is a wonderful book about that driest of subjects—syntax—that reads like a lover speaking to her beloved. In “Please Call Me at Your Earliest Convenience,” a poem of endearment to a recorded phone voice, Holly Coleman writes, “I tell myself it’s only a robot, but the longer I / keep him waiting the more human he becomes.” Precision and compulsion are her dominant emotions; submission to grammar and love are her subjects. The poem “Saint Clement” begins: “Every spring I coax a bruise awake / in the soft crease where my thigh begins.” It ends: “One day I’ll peel back my skin, / show myself what mercy costs, / press my mouth to my living relic, / taste how soft I’ve stayed. / I owe you nothing.”
The author of these beguiling, delicately wounded, carefully worded emotions is a college teacher and PhD student of the English Romantics. Like Keats, her language is simple and charged: it sings as it reaches inside to stir the reader.
This slim book, just thirty-six pages, begins with a fifteen-page essay—or perhaps three contiguous essays—titled “Good Girl,” “Spit,” and “The Erotics of Grammar.” The prose is autobiographical and every girl’s story, beginning with how the girl-child is tamed by the mother—in this case, through the correction of grammar—then how she rebels by grabbing at her own sentence structure, riled by adolescent emotions to break grammar/societal rules (again, like the Romantics who were rebellious and young), until she finds the surprising precision required to convey her full passion. Coleman matures as she learns the power of syntax—its “erotic power,” she writes—and then puts that knowledge into poetic practice. From “A Study in Submission”: “Your hand on the back of my neck and everything I know about grammar turns into breathing . . . . The body learns language in reverse: first ache, then verb, then silence.”
This is a chapbook to read aloud, to read to a lover, or to read alone as an act of self-pleasure. In her essay(s), Coleman strives for clarity as she navigates the strict rules of syntax she must master in order to go free—she is a woman expected to say certain tame things who instead writes the forbidden correctly. “The critic’s voice, with its precision and distance, feels almost devotional,” she writes. I am stunned because I believe her.
“Barthes calls the text a ‘fetish object,’” she writes. Passionate language is always a beat away from being obscene. The Romantics teach us that. At our best, we are always writing to a beloved. Coleman begins her book with a fragment from Sappho: “as long as you want.” Sappho, the first known woman poet of the Western tradition—her language has come down to us in snatches, pieces of poems torn apart diagonally by monks so that no woman could feel their sensual force. Yet even in fragments, her verse retains its heat. We feel what is missing within the scant words of what is left. We feel the erotic life withheld, pulsing behind what we are allowed. Hiding within her strict syntax, Coleman’s Sapphic heart beats. It is as if she carries the ancient poet inside her to reveal a sticky, complex passion to us.
Good Girl is ultimately about how the child-lover of language becomes a singular being free of constraint. “Years later, I recognized the same ache in Keats. His clauses pressed against the limits of what they could bear . . .” What a stunning definition of poetry. This is an exciting chapbook: both a fulfillment and a promise of more tightly wrought, rebellious language to come. Published by Tough Poets Review, which also publishes the radical literary journal, in print only, of the same name. Tough poets push at the boundaries. Tough poets take us to the edge and spur us toward action. Words hold us when we need to be held. When we are helpless to know how to be or where to go, language does.
About the reviewer: Karen Malpede is author, and frequently the director, of 22 plays. With the actor-director-producer, George Bartenieff, she co-founded Theater Three Collaborative in 1995. She is author of the memoir Last Radiance: Radical Lives, Bright Deaths (Vine Leaves Press, 2025). She is author of the anthology Plays in Time: The Beekeeper’s Daughter, Prophecy, Another Life, Extreme Whether (Intellect, 2016); editor of Acts of War: Iraq and Afghanistan in Seven Plays (Northwestern, 2011), and author of an anthology of her early work: A Monster Has Stolen the Sun and Other Plays. Her short plays, fiction, and essays on ecofeminism, the climate crisis, a new green Federal Theater, bearing witness, the Iraq war, the U.S. torture program have been published in The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Dark Matter, Howlround, Transformations, Torture Magazine, New Theater Quarterly, TDR, New York Times, and elsewhere. She has taught theater and literature at Smith College, New York University Tisch School of the Arts, and John Jay College-CUNY. McKnight National Playwrights’ Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts, Vogelstein fellow.