Of Marriage
Of Marriage
Nicole Cooley
da Vinci Eye Finalist
“[Of Marriage] is by turns confident and questioning, as the speaker considers the promise of matrimony — lifelong contentment and security — and its realities.”
—The Washington Post
June 2018
ISBN: 9781938584770
Available in both print and digital formats.
Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans and has published six books of poems Her first book Resurrection, won the 1995 Walt Whitman Award and was published by LSU Press in 1996. Her second book, The Afflicted Girls (2004), was chosen as one of the best poetry books of the year by Library Journal. Her book Breach about Hurricane Katrina and her family's experience was published by LSU Press in 2010 as was Milk Dress, which came out with Alice James in 2010. In 2017, she published Girl after Girl after Girl with LSU Press which won the 2018 Devils Kitchen Award for Established Poetry from University of Southern Illinois.Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, Boston Review and The Feminist Wire, among other publications. She directs the MFA program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College—City University of New York and lives outside of New York City with her family. www.nicolecooley.com.
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Additional Praise:
“Cooley brings an impressive range of literary forms, voices, and conceptual lenses to bear on lingering questions about language and intimacy in her accomplished seventh collection.”
—Publishers Weekly starred review
“The routes and ruts and rewards of marriage live in Cooley’s new book. . . .Her long lines feel like stabs of perseverance. . .”
—The Millions
“Sublimely talented Nicole Cooley doesn’t define marriage so much as surround it with that most relational part of speech, the preposition ‘of.’ Her captivating, furious, tender collection Of Marriage is not a story—though there’s a twosome, with two daughters as well. Instead it’s a series of chilling, strange, and gorgeous metaphors with images about the marriage contract in body, soul, and law. Marriage as koi pond, construction paper, salad fork: what is this union, the poet-wife provokes us to ask, if not the unique hold of one person to another? (Cooley means chokehold as well as embrace.) In couplets and comparisons, with a grace as formal as a medieval marriage vow and as hard as a kitchen floor, here is Cooley’s art at work, taking up the challenge of the ultimate bond.”
—Molly Peacock
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