The Afflicted Girls: Poems

by Nicole Cooley

Twenty individuals were executed and more than 150 imprisoned. The historical body of evidence that remains from the Salem witch trials of 1692 touched the hands, mind, and imagination of poet Nicole Cooley, compelling her to seek entry to an inaccessible past of lies. The Afflicted Girls , so named after the young women who claimed to be victims of witchcraft, spans the centuries to give voice to those both audible and silent on history’s pages―accusers and accused of several wife and husband, servant and master, congregant and minister, and, not least, bewitched and witch. Piercing, enchanting, Cooley’s poems form a remarkable narrative, one that displays the enormous cultural power the Salem witch trials retain in twenty-first-century America.

Genres: Poetry, History

64 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2004

About the author

Nicole Cooley is a poet and non-fiction writer and the author of eight books: five books of poems, a chapbook, a novel and an artists book in collaboration with visual artists Maureen Cummins. Her collection of poems Breach from 2010 focuses on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, Her newest collection Girl after Girl after Girl is forthcoming from LSU Press in 2017. Essay Press published her digital chapbook Frozen Charlottes, A Sequence last year. Her work has been supported by a Creative and Performing Artists Fellowship at The American Antiquarian Society as well as a grant from the NEA. Her poetry and non-fiction has appeared most recently in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, Narrative, and Drunken Boat. She is currently completing a non-fiction project, My Dollhouse, Myself: Miniature Histories. She is a professor of English and the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College—City University of New York.

Reviews

[Peggy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A moving collection of poems about the Salem Witch Trials. Some poems draw from documentary evidence; others match the voices of the times. Some poems speak from the present. In "Archival: Silence" "A slipcase keeps the book of voices safe / till I untie the string holding the broken / spine together". My favorites were the poems belonging to two series: Archival and Testimony; both types displayed a profound awareness of the power of sources, enough so that "History choked me History took hold / of my throat".

This is not a collection in which all poems resemble one another in form and appearance. Cooley uses a variety of poetic methods, for example, an abecedarian "Alphabet of Lessons for Girls" that begins, "A young girl should always be prepared to die." A prose poem, "Mary Warren's Sampler," effectively conveys the mental disorder of an afflicted girl, " I want [my mother's] smooth white hands not my master's fingers pinching the skin along my backbone voice breathing Mary".

This is as concise a history of Salem as anyone could want. It's a book to read multiple times in order to hear what the spaces between words, stanzas, and poems have to tell us. It's terrifying.

[haydée · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting use of archival research to generate some amazing poetic text. Some of the poems are stronger than others, but if you have ANY interest in the Salem Witch Trials and reimagining history for creative text, I would highly recommend this quick read. Also...poetry about witches come on now...:)

[Rach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my goodness what a magical collection. Archival poetry collections have really started to take a place in my heart and I am truly loving it. Cooley does an amazing job at giving voices to the women and some men of the Salem Witch trials.

I am truly obsessed with this collection.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Collection of poems from the imagined perspective of the girls in the Salem Witch Trial. Love the way this poet revisits history with imaginative form and content. (Inspires me when writing about my Schwenks!)

[Elizabeth]

Cooley does a great job of approaching a historic moment: the Salem Witch Trials. These poems range. They shift modes. The book is dark and interesting.

[lindi pomeroy · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was a collection i read for a class focused around the supernatural, and each of these poems were haunting, especially the more i read them. many, if not all, were embedded in rich history, complicating the already complicated and horrible truths known now about the events in Salem through rich word choices and analogy. i reread and reread, and each time i found new and brilliant messages from Cooley's work. if you like poetry, this is a wonderful addition to your shelf!

[Izzy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think the poems are great at spelling out a somewhat vague yet gripping story, much like the archival materials leftover that the final 4-5 poems discuss in more depth. I like the poems, how it's easy to see the thoughts and confusion and anger and desperation of those in Salem at the time. All in all very strong as a collection.

[Eli Eli · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is an astonishing recollection of the many different accusations and experiences of the women involved in the salem witch trials, some of which were adults and some of which were children. each poem had to be read and reread but with each read it became more and more robust and complex.

[Sarah Key · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gorgeous collection!

[Sarah Karasek · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't think I've ever read a collection of poetry that seems so well researched but didn't require any research to understand. Cooley makes history personal.

[catarina · Rating 4 out of 5]

LOVE, but lots of repeated imagery

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intelligent work, poems, written in the historical wake of Susan Howe, Anne Carson and Jorie Graham, as in the longer projection of Muriel Rukeyser's political and intellectual commitments. The archival recuperation is embodied in the personified voices of Dorcas Good, Giles Corey, Sarah Carrier and others connected peripherally to the Salem Witch Trials of 1692; the mode is kitsch, pastiche, parodic atavism; the post-modernism entails a recursive "raising" of the present moment of writing, or its occasion, to surface of the historical text. Cooley, trained (at Iowa) as a prose writer, is unsurprisingly attuned to a certain mannerism of the pastoral blank verse tradition, namely a loose-type, or protractedly subordinated sentence: so, e.g., in Dorcas Good's voice: "In jail, a yellow bird || sleeps in her [mother's] arms, sucks her milk as I once did." This particular case of subordination is not terribly unusual to note in a prose text, but then there's this, in the poet's own voice: "I won't describe | the Reverse World, || the game my sister and I played on the ceiling of our room, || how we lay side | by side together to name an orphanage of little girls, | their tiny beds lined || up and linked like letters of the alphabet . . . " You don't see many sentences like that in a novel. Repeated, as the loose-sentence type is in "Genealogy," from which the above is taken, the lexical patterns are easy to spot, so Cooley provides an illusion of impassioned control, but there's not much dynamism in the sentences themselves -- it all comes from the stitching and hemi-stiching of the couplet-lines and it can come to seem a deadness in the making, in relation to which the Carson-like gimmicks can seem, indeed gimmicks. The occasions fail to become, within the poems, occasions of language, so the project can come to seem a projection of the author's desire that the project be done. It needs more warrant than that.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nicole Cooley, The Afflicted Girls (Louisiana State University, 2004)

Nicole Cooley starts here from a popular point in American mythology, the Salem witch trials. When you're tackling something that's been done so many times, you have to take a different tack than others have. Cooley elects to spend much of the book telling the tales from the points of view of some of the more minor characters. Everyone's shown us the Salem witch trials from the points of view of the accusers, the Mathers, etc. But when did you last see the story from the point of view of, for example, Giles Corey, who was pressed to death, or Nathaniel Cary, who broke his wife out of prison and helped her escape? Later on in the volume, Cooley leaves the confines of both Salem and the seventeenth century and draws comparisons between the Salem trials and other incidents in the country's history as well:

“...Heat drums against

their necks. They want to believe a spirit
can lift them out of themselves. They want
to believe they lift each other. Light
as a feather.”
(“The Afflicted Girls, New Orleans, 1978”)

It's solidly-written and it works. Worth checking out if you run across it at the store. *** ½

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Writing a collection that revolves around one historical event is a bit tricky. In fact, I would say that it's impossible, but I have read a few books that actually accomplish this feat. I believe that Nicole Cooley's book, The Afflicted Girls, a collection about the Salem Witchcraft Trials is a mixed bag.

Cooley mixes persona voices with personal narratives of her own research about the Salem Witchcraft Trials. For example, Tituba, the slave in one of the households, is given a voice in the poem, "Testimony: The Wake of History". In another poem, we hear from Ann Putnam (who, according to the historical notes found at the end of the book, was the only girl to publicly acknowledge her guilt). In yet another poem, Dorcas Good, a four-year old child who accuses her mother of witchcraft is given a voice. These were poems that I found more interesting than the poet's works about her research, although it is certainly clear that the poet did her research. The poems are well documentated, and the information found at the back of this collection was interesting and new (well, much of it was new to me!)

[Adrienna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am a poet and wanted to read other works.