A powerful fusion of poetry, memoir, and history, this groundbreaking collection makes visible the stories of Black women's experiences with medical racism and bodily autonomy. From a TEDx speaker, collective trauma facilitator, and advisory board member for City University School of Medicine's Narrative Medicine Track—this is more than a book; it's a reckoning. "Cooper's astonishing debut collection remembers, rewinds and frees the harmed haints to roam the hospitals." —Rodney Terich Leonard, author of Sweetgum & Lightning When medical trauma meets historical erasure, UNRULY maps the terrains of personal and ancestral memory, giving voice to both individual and collective experiences of Black women's bodies. From the "mothers of gynecology" to contemporary medical discrimination, these poems become incantations for healing and transformation. UNRULY offers language to the pervasive assaults on Black women's bodies and spirits while daring to imagine a future beyond this legacy of pain. 10% of the author's proceeds will be donated to Black Exhale, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization creating spaces for healing intergenerational trauma in Black communities. www.antoinettecooper.com *****Legacy Book Press LLC is a traditional publisher of personal stories told via non-fiction (like memoir), autobiographical fiction, poetry, or a combination. "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 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. A memoir of chronic illness stitched over this vast under-network of scar tissue—the fascia of the historical, collective body—the book reminds us that 'America is my pre-existing condition.' 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 th