“Terry Godbey’s Beauty Lessons are dynamic narratives of loss and recovery that wrestle with motherhood, domesticity, the body’s frailties, and the unleashed wilderness of desire sucked on ‘like peppermints.’ There is plenty of regret here, and yet, ultimately, this is a book about triumph and redemption.” –Dorianne Laux
“Terry Godbey’s poems are carefully deployed, personally revealing, and shamelessly boy-crazy. In the best of them, she leads the reader through the doors of adolescence and into the house of poetry.” –Billy Collins
“Terry Godbey’s Beauty Lessons is a poetic homage to the fearlessness of women and girls, beginning with learning to ride a bicycle in a dream and ending in triumph over fears and betrayals. Most dazzling are her apostrophic meditations, and a metonymic range that dances among cereal and war games, test pilots, earthquakes and sonic booms. These poems open onto a journey through the whole of a life thus far, and throughout the reader feels buoyed on the fountain of air that held up the rider in the dream.” — Carolyn Forché
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