(And he seems to have forgotten Martha Corey).

First up is Nicole Cooley, whose Afflicted Girls (LSU Press, 2004) I discovered even before my recent poetry kick. Her Salem poems were inspired by a residential fellowship she spent at the American Antiquarian Association, and that archival perspective is particularly appealing to me. Here’s an opening poem, and she gets more entangled from here!

Cindy Veach, my second poet, lives locally and gets just as riled up about the commercialization of the Salem tragedy as I do though she is far more eloquent: check out her award-winning “Witch Kitsch” and this snippet from a great poem about feeding the parking meter on Essex Street in Salem on a freezing midwinter night:

Trials and hangings on repeat. Veach’s poetry is much more about remembrance than rage. She explores the lives and deaths of all the Salem victims in two recent books, Innocents (Nixes Mate) and Her Kind (CavanKerry Press)giving us poetical characterizations which read to me as reinstatement at this time of year in Salem. If you want to counter celebratory Salem 2026 with probings of the human tragedy of Salem 1692, these are the books for you. Here is her poem about Wilmot Redd, a victim of the worst day:

My last poet, wrote a book of poems about historical Marys! In Mary’s Dust (Entre Rios Books, 2017), Melinda Mueller explores a word-world of historical Marys beginning with the Virgin and including Mary Easty, who died on this day in 1692. The poem proceeds (recedes) backwards from Easty’s journey into the afterlife to the night before her execution. Much of the imagery is not pleasant, but of course nothing that happened to those “eight firebrands from hell” was. Flung with the others into crevices among the rocks.