Resurrection: Poems

Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets

by Nicole Cooley

Frida Kahlo, Helen Keller, Diane Arbus, Alice Liddell, Patty Hearst, Snow White, Thumbelina―real and imaginary women transfigured by suffering―speak in Nicole Cooley’s Resurrection, winner of the 1995 Walt Whitman Award.

As Cooley explores the bonds between sisters, mothers and daughters, grandmothers and granddaughters, this important book follows a chorus of women’s voices along a hallucinatory nexus of terror. These are the voices of the martyred, the imprisoned, the exiled, the silenced, the forgotten, and as they shift from east-ern Europe to Cambodia to New Orleans, it becomes agonizingly clear that our world with its ritualized misogyny is a dangerous place for women.

“Patty A Love Poem,” addressed to the sister who wasn’t kidnapped, compares the inexorable winnowing away of personality through terror, brutality, and violation with its counterpart-the charade of “normal” family life.

With a vivid lexicon of religious imagery―guilt, punishment, baptism, crucifixion, and, of course, resurrection―Cooley unflinchingly casts in lines of crystalline limpidity the voices of all women who through violence or fear were denied childhood.

Over all of them floats the reassuring specter of Rose, a Hungarian matriarch, voice of guidance, of communal wisdom, of warning. Resurrection is an eloquent rendering of extreme psychological states―a disturbing invocation of rage, tenderness, solidarity, and ultimately of hope.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

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

[Peter Kerry Powers · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had the privilege of getting to meet Nicole two or three times earlier in her career, and got this book back in 1997. There's a haunting and Gothic quality to these poems and some of the rest of her work, as the narrator struggles with and against the memories of others, especially other women who define and in that sense limit her experience. The book is lyric in one sense, but it is not simply or straightforwardly a bout the poets voice in song. It is a struggle to both give voice to collective family memory, but also achieve a voice over and against that obligation, or perhaps through it.

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Her first collection, Nicole Cooley shines with fairy tales and her own past. My absolute favorite poem of all time is in this collection. It involves Sleeping Beauty and her mother and for anyone who has "mommy issues" it is a must. This is an absolute companion to the Afflicted Girls. Amazing.

[Jean · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lovely, haunting wonderland garden of poems. While they didn't settle into my soul, as some poetry does, there were lines that gave me chills. Also, the poems as a whole work well together--they weave family history, Alice Liddell and Charles Dodgson, and fairy tales into a strangely cohesive story. It's a story made of hints and shadows, rather than one that's told in bold light, but I felt I knew the characters all the same.