Poetry. During the European witch trials, over one hundred thousand people were prosecuted for maleficia. The vast majority were women. Many were unmarried. Many owned property. Some were midwives who counseled village women about their health, their pregnancies, and their marriages. Others were simply nonconformists. MALEFICAE tells the story of one so-called witch: a woman who, like many others, was once seen as her village's savior, but became the focus of the villagers' fear and rage when disaster struck. This book-length series of poems seeks to re-create the terror and inhumanity of the trials. Incorporating language from trial records to papal bulls to incendiary theological documents, these poems explore the intersection of forces that led to the persecution of people who were deemed different and therefore dangerous—forces alarmingly similar to those still operating today. At the center of all of this is the woman who was called a witch: her story, her wail from the center of the flames. In allowing her new testimony, in allowing the dead to speak, MALEFICAE gives voice to the voiceless victims of the trials. "In this incantatory series of lyric poems Emma Bolden finds a new way to write about an old (though still current) subject. This book speaks in many tongues, many vivid, and living tongues."—Thomas Lux "Emma Bolden's MALEFICAE is an ambitious and powerful accomplishment. Informed by historical records of European witchcraft trials, it is wholly contemporary in its layered complexity and poetic craft. Incantatory rhythms, shifting perspectives and voices, and vividly rendered dream/nightmare imagery make these poems hypnotic and haunting. The contrast between historical content and contemporary form—between fact and imagination—intensifies the dramatic impact and reminds us that the past is, in one form or another, always present."—Eric Nelson "Lust, freedom, repression, sin, shame. The fearful, oppressive denial of female empowerment and agency. MALEFICAE has all the conceptual intelligence of a Feminist study, but it makes its argument via artful imagined experience. This is a poetry 'possessed' of a musical and rhetorical mastery that cast their own incantatory spell, compelling us to feel the thin membrane between modernity and our past, between pragmatism and inner mystery. It made me think of those Anne Sexton poems that utilize and transcend her confessionalism, speaking not just for herself, but for all women."—Mark Cox

Maleficae

Literature & Fiction

Bolden, Emma

Poetry

GenPop Books

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. "What MEDI(T)ATIONS leaves us with, then, is a universal articulation of suffering evident across many levels of expression (form, narrative, autobiography, cultural critique) and the spaces—both the whiteness which separates printed words on a page and the gaps between our various selves—that best articulate the rendered experience."—The Southern Literary Review

medi(t)ations

Noctuary Press

House is an Enigma is an investigation of the language used to house descriptions of the body, which so often seek to define and determine the boundaries and behaviors of the spirit that lives within. Written after Bolden’s radical hysterectomy, during which she noted her doctors’ use of house metaphors to describe her body and discuss her inability to have children, these stunning poems set out to expose the fissures in the foundations of the language we use to define human bodies and their behaviors, using these cracks as a lens through which she can see her own body, at last, as her own flawed but beautiful home.

House is an Enigma (Cowles Poetry Prize Winner)

Bull City Press

During the European witch trials, over one hundred thousand people were prosecuted for maleficia. The vast majority were women. Many were unmarried. Many owned property. Some were midwives who counseled village women about their health, their pregnancies, and their marriages. Others were simply nonconformists. Maleficae tells the story of one so-called witch: a woman who, like many others, was once seen as her village's savior, but became the focus of the villagers' fear and rage when disaster struck. This book-length series of poems seeks to re-create the terror and inhumanity of the trials. Incorporating language from trial records to papal bulls to incendiary theological documents, these poems explore the intersection of forces that led to the persecution of people who were deemed different and therefore dangerous—forces alarmingly similar to those still operating today. At the center of all of this is the woman who was called a witch: her story, her wail from the center of the flames. In allowing her new testimony, in allowing the dead to speak, Maleficae gives voice to the voiceless victims of the trials. "In this incantatory series of lyric poems Emma Bolden finds a new way to write about an old (though still current) subject. This book speaks in many tongues, many vivid, and living tongues." -- Thomas Lux "An ambitious and powerful accomplishment. Informed by historical records of European witchcraft trials, it is wholly contemporary in its layered complexity and poetic craft. Incantatory rhythms, shifting perspectives and voices, and vividly rendered dream/nightmare imagery make these poems hypnotic and haunting." -- Eric Nelson "Lust, freedom, repression, sin, shame. The fearful, oppressive denial of female empowerment and agency. Maleficae has all the conceptual intelligence of a Feminist study, but it makes its argument via artful imagined experience. This is a poetry 'possessed' of a musical and rhetorical mastery that cast their own incantatory spell, compelling us to feel the thin membrane between modernity and our past, between pragmatism and inner mystery." -- Mark Cox

Volume 2 (Regional Series, Volume 1: Alabama Issue) includes original chapbooks by Pattti White, Laura Hendrix Ezell, Emma Bolden, Jennifer Horne, and Jim Hilgartner. V 2 also includes facsimiles of The Sex Life of the Fantastic Four by Michael Martone and The Fortune-Teller by Jessica Smith.

The Chapbook, Volume 2

Martone, Michael

White, Patti

Horne, Jennifer

Smith,Jessica

The Chapbook

Ezell, Laura Hendrix

Hilgartner, Jim

United States

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

For readers of Susannah Cahalan’s Brain on Fire and Porochista Khakpour’s Sick, this exquisitely wrought debut memoir recounts a lifelong struggle with chronic pain and endometriosis, while speaking more broadly to anyone who’s been told “it’s all in your head”\nIn Catholic grade school, Emma Bolden has a strange experience with a teacher that unleashes a short-lived, persistent coughing spell—something the medical establishment will later use against her as she struggles through chronic pain and fainting spells that coincide with her menstrual cycle.\nWith The Tiger and the Cage, Bolden uses her own experience as the starting point for a journey through the institutional misogyny of Western medicine—from a history of labeling women “hysterical” and parading them as curiosities to a lack of information on causes or cures for endometriosis, despite more than a century of documented cases. Recounting botched surgeries and dire side effects from pharmaceuticals affecting her and countless others, Bolden speaks to the ways people are often failed by the official narratives of institutions meant to protect them.\nBolden also interrogates a narrative commonly imposed on menstruating bodies: the expected story arc of marriage and children. She interrogates her body as a painful site she must mentally escape and a countdown she hopes to beat by having a child before a hysterectomy. Only later does she find language and acceptance for her asexality and the life she needs to lead. Through all its gripping, devastating, and beautiful threads, The Tiger and the Cage says what Bolden and so many like her have needed to hear: I see you, and I believe you.

The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Soft Skull

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Books by Bolden, Emma