Resurrection: Poems

By Nicole Cooley

Book Overview

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 Hearst: 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807120596
• ISBN13: 9780807120590
• Release Date: April 1996
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Lyricism and rich storytelling. . .

I love this book. Cooley's extraordinary subjects--Patty Hearst, Helen Keller, Adele Hugo, just to name a few--are like treasures you find in a trunk in the attic, unexpected, rich with memory and story. Highly recommended.

Bodies of Love and Loss

Nicole Cooley's Resurrection gorgeously chronicles love and losses - mothers and daughters, grandmothers, sisters, daughters and their fathers - and chronicles them through the sensuality of bodies that eat and starve, float and bleed, sleep and bathe and touch underwater. This book is for those who love poetry and those who want to love it more.

New talent will surprise everyone....

What can I say about Nicole Cooley? Nobody nowadays injects character into poems. Nicole presents us with a book that spans the 20th century, with the sort of ease we thought Shakespeare left behind. Histrionic? See what she does with Patty Hearst and call me in the morning... Earns the accolades... This is the best book of poetry to be published in the US in the last two years, and I know it. Nicole Cooley is one of those poets who wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror, and travels somewhere else. Little wonder, that empathy for Alice. I hope for much, much more from her.