Observable Readings
Nicole Cooley and Brad Richard Remember Hurricane Katrina
Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 09:21 PM
A native of New Orleans, Nicole Cooley found herself half a continent away when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast in August 2005. The following August, Cooley and her family drove Highway 90 from Florida to New Orleans, through the swath of devastation that the hurricane had left behind. Cooley then began work on Breach, a stunningly passionate and accomplished response to the disaster. Its poems are skillfully crafted, revealing a poet's ear for language and a documentarian's eye for detail. In an interview for the blog "How a Poem Happens," Cooley cites as influences two of her favorite poets: Muriel Rukeyser and C.D. Wright. The lineage is clear: Like those of Rukeyser and Wright, Cooley's poems merge the political and the personal, depicting people and places with a passionate adherence to the facts.
That blending of the factual and the figurative can also be seen in Cooley's The Afflicted Girls, which explores the Salem witch trials. Based on archival research, the poems in The Afflicted Girls use primary text, persona, and formal innovation in a way that recalls Rukeyser's seminal The Book of the Dead. Cooley's Milk Dress, which was co-winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books, meditates on pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood in a way that is intensely personal and yet firmly connected to the political.
The daughter of poet Peter Cooley, Nicole Cooley is the author of four books of poems--Breach (LSU Press, 2010), Milk Dress (Alice James Books, 2010), The Afflicted Girls (LSU Press, 2004), and Resurrection (LSU Press, 1996)-as well as a novel, Judy Garland, Ginger Love (Harper Collins, 1998). She also edited the "Mother" issue of Women's Studies Quarterly in 2009 and collaborated with the artist Maureen Cummins on a multi-media artist's book, Salem Lessons. She has won the Walt Whitman Award, the Emily Dickinson Award, and grants from the NEA and the American Antiquarian Society. She is professor of English at Queens College-City University of New York, where she directs the MFA program in creative writing and literary translation. Cooley lives outside of New York City with her husband and two daughters.
You can read some of Cooley's poetry at her Web site. To hear an interview with her on radio station WWNO, click here.
Brad Richard's Motion Studies, which visits Katrina-flooded New Orleans as well, won the 2010 Washington Prize from The Word Works. He also is the author of the collection Habitations (Portals Press, 2000) and the limited edition chapbook The Men in the Dark (Lowlands Press, 2004). A recipient of fellowships from the Surdna 
Foundation, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and poetry winner in the Poets & Writers' 2002 Writers Exchange competition, Richard chairs the creative writing program at Lusher Charter High School in New Orleans.
He was born in Port Arthur, Texas, and raised in New Orleans, where his father is a painter, an artist, so the artist's son went to the University of Iowa with its famous studio program, then matriculated to Washington University and its studio program to study Wallace Stevens' ekphrastic craft, before returning to New Orleans to teach. But in the disturbances of Hurricane Katrina, he was pushed away, back to Texas, and Motion Studies marks yet another return, to the place where he is his father's son, commemorating the loss of his father's world, as well as his father's return to work, in poetry's democratizing divisions into planes of attention. Whitman's "twenty-eight young men bathe by a shore" begets the six nude figures of Thomas Eakins' The Swimming Hole on the cover of Motion Studies. Whitman fathered many. And now Richard has done Eakins, in doing New Orleans, a "return in the fullness of other selves." To read some of Richard's work, click here and here.