Hecate-like, A True & Just Record invites us to the three- way crossroads of poetry, feminist rhetorics, and early modern studies. Kate Bolton Bonnici weaves together archival materials from the English witch trials, 20th- century poets and philosophers, and her own family. With fury and care, haunted by absences, these poems — all also forms of experimental scholarship — interrogate, disrupt, and play.
 
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'This incredibly insightful investigation of sensational witch trial pamphlets, rendered richly with witch stichomythia, is a communion of conversation deeply engaging historical and present poet discourse. Delightfully provocative lines bring fold and unfold of conjure and inquisition treatise. Here, a multitude of stellar engagements delve spiritedly into what sonic and visual presences may be made of form, utterance, accusation, exchange, and page on the troubled edge of devilish societal inquisition with interplay delivering euphony, cacophony—brilliance—in incantatory verse-play feat. Bring on the prizes, this poetry is delicious!'
 
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, author of Look at This Blue.
 
‘Witch as spell, curse, praise, eulogy, recovery, incantation, archival raid and save, library as cathedral and books as catechism — as befits poetry as anarchic art, in Kate Bolton Bonnici’s hands the sacred is barbaric and the profane is holy. ... She brings the archive to life and recovers lives otherwise lost as fragmentary entries. The way Bonnici grows these bits and pieces into cogent arguments and testimonies, philosophical treatises and affective insights, makes it easy to admire her craft and craftiness, her sly ease among the age-old and complexity of the archive, her care and grace as she handles and arranges dismissive facts about women destroyed by bigotry. ... A wicked and wise achievement.’
 
Fred D’Aguiar, Author of Letters to America and For the Unnamed
 
‘Kate Bolton Bonnici’s project in A True & Just Record is to talk with the dead — and by with, I mean not at but rather alongside, or as in harmony. Bonnici’s imaginative engagement with the language and the thinking of archival texts expands, subverts, affirms, and reimagines enduring questions about gender, authority, and selfhood. Bonnici’s deeply humane book seeks quickening rediscoveries, her poems on each new page reaching to build new and generative connections across times and selves: “And where shall we meet? And when?”’
 
Kimberly Johnson, Author of Fatal
 
'Kate Bolton Bonnici’s A True & Just Record movingly demonstrates poetry’s capacity to forge critical and philosophical dialogue across time and space. Deploying the dialogic rhetoric of stichomythia as a method of both reading and writing, Bonnici stages a conversation among sixteenth- and seventeenth-century plays, poems, and pamphlets; classical and contemporary poetry, criticism, and theory; and her own poetic meditations on memory and loss. The result is a daring and gorgeous poetic conversation that insists on the centrality of form and sound to both personal narrative and scholarly analysis.'
 
Melissa E. Sanchez, Donald T. Regan Professor, University of Pennsylvania
 
Kate Bolton Bonnici holds degrees from Harvard; NYU Law; the University of California, Riverside; and UCLA. Her debut collection, Night Burial, won the 2020 Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Image, CounterText, Tupelo Quarterly, Foundry, Exemplaria, Arts & Letters, and elsewhere. She is an assistant nonfiction editor at Tupelo Press and an assistant professor of English at Pepperdine University.