The Afflicted Girls - Paperback

by Nicole Cooley (Author)

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.

Author Biography

A native of New Orleans, NICOLE COOLEY is the author of Resurrection, which won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, and the novel Judy Garland, Ginger Love. Her other honors include Georgia Poet of the Year in 1997, the Balch Prize for Poetry from the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the "Discovery"/The Nation Poetry Award. She lives in New Jersey and is an associate professor of English and directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York.