Nicole Cooley – författare

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 kinds: 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.

In Breach, New Orleans native Nicole Cooley recalls Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in gritty, poignant detail, bearing witness to the destruction of a region and to its recovery. Ranging from the urgent to the reflective, these poems speak not only to the horrors of the immediate disaster, but also to family dynamics in a time of crisis and to the social, political, and cultural realities that contextualized the storm and its wake. In the title poem, Cooley invokes the multiple meanings of the word ""breach"" -- breach of the levees, breach of trust -- which resonate with survivors in the Crescent City, and in Evacuation, she recounts her efforts to encourage her parents to leave the city and her harrowing three-day wait to hear from them after they refused. A number of poems, including Write a Love Letter to Camellia Grill, The Superdome: A Suite, and Biloxi Bay Bridge Still Out, offer a broad range of voices and experiences to expand the perspective beyond Cooley's own family. With language and images both powerful and precise, this compelling collection dares us to ""watch the surface of the city tear like loose skin.

Mother Water Ash, a wrenching new collection of poems by Nicole Cooley, explores the personal grief of a mother's sudden death alongside the environmental crises of the storms, fires, and floods that now dominate our world. Examining the landscapes of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, these poems ponder what it means to mourn in the face of ecological catastrophe, and traipse the terrains left by loss.

Cooley’s poems are sharp in all the places it can hurt and soft in ways that comfort an aching soul. Layers of joy, pain, bliss, frustration—no emotion is off limits as these sensual yet valiant poems dig their heels and hold on for dear life as winds of uncertainty threaten to overcome.