Girl after Girl after Girl: Poems

Barataria Poetry Series

by Nicole Cooley

The poems in Girl after Girl after Girl celebrate the connections between mothers and daughters from generation to generation. Through an acknowledgment of mothers’ unconditional love, the memories evoked by physical objects, and the stories mothers pass down, these poems explore the common thread that stretches backward and forward, running through the lives of women and binding them together in an unbroken chain of years.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

Published September 13, 2017

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

[Claudia Cortese]

Phew. Read this book in one day—I couldn’t put it down! Nicole Cooley uses kitsch and objects—antique dolls, cookbooks, stamp collections, museum mannequins, old jewelry—to open into the speaker’s story of surviving childhood abuse, becoming a mother, caring for her daughters and inhabiting her own body and sexuality in this violent, misogynist world.

These poems are, in a word, delicious—there’s sugary cakes and cocktails throughout—while not being sentimental or saccharine. “Whisking egg whites with two cold spoons with my daughter, in the kitchen, / the whites, most grotesque, most drawn-from-a-body, much worse // than yolks. The recipe requires meringue stiffened / into peaks that startle, that most resemble breasts,” the speaker describes, revealing how the grotesque, the violent, the dangerous lurk beneath even our sweetest surfaces.

[Carolt_reads]

Want to know my thoughts? Check out my vlog filled with live reactions:

https://youtu.be/lkOoFoLeetY

[Therese L. Broderick]

At last! A poet who dares to write fervently from her place as a mother of beloved daughters, while also writing ferociously from her position as an uncompromising feminist. Nicole Cooley is an unequivocal "heiress apparent" to that greatest of feminist/mother poets, Sappho.

[Deirdre Fagan]

I very much enjoyed the imagery and themes of these poems. Powerful, magical, nostalgic, disconcerting, and disturbing all at once.

[Emily Pérez]

This book interweaves contemporary girl and motherhood with historic girl and motherhood, using museum pieces as launching points. It's a smart and at times breath-taking collection.

[Jennifer]

A moving, thoughtful, engaging book.