Endorsements

"In this immensely powerful work, Antoinette Cooper traces her own encounters with the U.S.'s medical industrial complex, necessarily writing a larger history of Black women's health and the catastrophic legacies of state violence that continue to be perpetrated and perpetuated today. Cooper writes her story into a gathering place -- an essential, vibrant text of reckoning and testimony. She makes a critical intervention, a ceremony, and a tool for our present. A brilliant, needed language which ruptures silences and writes us into its choirs."

—aracelis girmay, author of the black maria

"UNRULY is a symphonic braid of “resilience, resistance, and refusal,” a testament to the strength and lyric power that can emerge, as one poem’s title attests, “When a Scar Grows a Mouth.” The voices that rise from these pages take us from speaking in tongues to the fire sermon’s consuming flame to “deviant vajayjays,” mixing and remixing a many-faceted monument to Black women’s pain. Throughout, the inescapable fact is laid bare: “Violence has happened here.” Cooper recounts the horror of gynecological experimentation on enslaved women, the abuse of Black women in clinical and domestic arenas, and the pervasive disparities that persist in contemporary medical treatment, bringing to light the countless ways Black women’s “fungible / bodies move without consent in the direction of he / who has the most to gain from their possession.” A memoir of chronic illness stitched over this vast under-network of scar tissue—the fascia of the historical, collective body—the book reminds the reader over and over that no suffering is individual: “When my new doctor asks if there are / any illnesses they should know of, I tell them America / is my pre-existing condition.” Across these variegated pages, Cooper conducts a polyphony of the past, present, and possible futures, a chorus comprising “we multi-tongued women / whose bodies are abandoned houses / with dominion over the nothing / and everything.” To pick up this book is to bear witness to an act of radical counternarrative and healing—“an offering, an altar, an uprising.”
 
—B.K. Fischer, author of Ceive, winner of the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and former New York State Poet Laureate

"Artist, poet and survivor, Antoinette Cooper has presented readers a healing balm with her new book UNRULY. Its pages are filled with equal parts memoir, lamentations, liberatory manifestos and poetry. Cooper has given us a soul offering with UNRULY and I am positive that readers will emerge fulfilled and healed."

—Deirdre Cooper Owens, Historian and Author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology

"Your lovely, painful, and difficult work...is excellent and heartbreaking, yet your willingness to voice these truths is comforting. Thank you mightily for your courageous work. It is a blessing for all of us."

—m. nourbeSe philip, author of Zong!, recipient of the 2020 PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature and the 2024 Windham Campbell Prize

"UNRULY powerfully unmasks the scream that resides deep within—a pain that never surfaced—raw and clear, the voice that speaks for centuries of voices in our midst. Antoinette Cooper's life, fight, and revelation cast into 'Poetry of the Edge' is a magnetizing, passionate account of her personal and collective journey."

—Thomas Hübl, author of Healing Collective Trauma, founder of the Collective Healing Conference, and internationally renowned teacher of trauma-informed healing

"Antoinette Cooper's UNRULY is a collection marvelously broad in scope and also so exacting and skilled that it leaps off the page. UNRULY tells the story of the Black female body, and the medical abuses and neglects suffered since arriving in the United States. From the 19th century, when gruesome gynecological experiments were conducted on enslaved women without anesthesia, to patients in 21st century Baltimore suing a gynecologist for sexual abuse, to the poet's own experiences being ignored and belittled by the medical system in the face of her serious illness, Cooper's work resonates now more than ever. UNRULY is a necessary, alive, and evolving collection, compelling the reader back to the page again and again."

—Lynn Melnick, author of I've Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton

“Antoinette Cooper’s astonishing debut collection, UNRULY, remembers, rewinds and frees the harmed haints to roam the hospitals: ‘Mt. Meigs, Alabama./ 1845. / 17-year-old Anarcha,/ an enslaved African woman,/ labored for three days. Birthing/ left her bruised in the places/ where only her God could see.’  Applause for such a generous and stylized collection; you’ll find illustrations of medical instruments, graphs and charts, living rooms for odes to come home to and a framed poem ‘Chocolate Cyst.’ Be patient as you weep: ‘Sat in solitary confinement/ with only My pain.’  With heaps of prophetic Gwendolyn Brooks and echoes of Beah Richards’ ‘A Black Woman Speaks’ and trills of Abbey Lincoln’s ‘First Came a Woman,’ Cooper historicizes and situates the Black female body through the public and private spheres of intimacy, agency, rebellion and sisterhood, neighborhood and family, malpractice and cruelty. This hybrid, interdisciplinary work is urgent and ripe.”

—Rodney Terich Leonard, author ofSweetgum & Lightning, winner of the Georgia Poetry Prize

"Out of her near-death struggle with the agony of endometriosis and a medical profession systemically blind to her pain, the poet Antoinette Cooper has written a visionary history of the Black woman's body. She celebrates its strength and its beauty, at the same time she unsparingly documents the suffering inflicted brutally upon it by society. UNRULY transcends genre, deploying an astonishing range of narrative techniques, from lyric to epistolary, from documentary to prayer. What we hear, in all these registers, is the testimony of the body itself, rising up and speaking out from centuries of trauma, generations of enforced silence and invisibility."

—Bill Wadsworth, Former Executive Director, Academy of American Poets

"Antoinette Cooper's UNRULY unflinchingly describes the brutalities that for centuries have been committed against Black women in the United States. The materials it collects on the origins of modern gynecology in medical experiments performed on young Black women in the nineteenth century need to be more widely known. Powerfully mixing genre and media, UNRULY includes poetry, prose, image, and documentary text. It not only writes about the body—it also writes from the body. Sometimes this body sings, and sometimes it fragments into pain. Yet as UNRULY unfolds, moments of tenderness and joy weave and work their way toward wholeness and healing."

—Alan Gilbert, Poet and Critic; Author of The Everyday Life of Design

"UNRULY is a powerful book which speaks to intergenerational experiences of black women in the global diaspora and within African continent under the scourge of the two leprosy hands of Abrahamic religions. More have been written about the traumas inflicted on black males, topped by the tragic castration in the Arabia and sodomisation in the Americas, but little has been written about the hysterectomies performed on black women in the Arabia or the tragic dehumanization the black female suffered and continue to endure in the Western world. UNRULY shocks our collective complacency into awakening through the goriness of the vivid portrayals of how "civilized" societies treat the black female. Framed in these poems are ontologies, epistemologies and axiologies which are definitive of intellectual vistas waiting for exploration.

The portals of UNRULY demands tenderness that is only hypocritically sermonized in the Hippocratic oath even in the 21st Century, and the experiences recounted by the author are contemporaneous. The impact this anthology will have in many disciplinary climes can only be imagined - medicine, psychology, philosophy, religions, etc. It is a must read to all who have suffered and continue to suffer—including those whose fate has been to dish out suffering to others, for whatever reasons.”

—J. Ayotunde Isola Bewaji, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of the West Indies, author of Black Aesthetics: Beauty and Culture, and Editor-in-Chief of Caribbean Journal of Philosophy

"UNRULY is a profoundly intimate narrative. Antoinette invites readers into her internal landscape, using the tools of transparency, honesty, and vulnerability. Through her journey from intergenerational trauma to ancestral healing and rebirth, she allows us to travel alongside her. Reading UNRULY is a sacred invitation and a precious gift that will both break your heart and inspire you to dream."

—Karen Crawford Simms, MAMFT, Founding Director, Trauma & Resilience Initiative, Inc.