However , this anthology does not ignore the past , since to understand who the witch is today , we must first challenge the history of her persecution as seen through women ’ s eyes . The poem ’ s first collection , ‘ The Witch House at Salem : Winter ’ by Helen S . Chasin does just this , imagining what the Salem witch trials were like . Though in England , witches were only hanged , globally , witches have been executed in many ways , and the strongest image today is witch-burning . Reminders of this begin Chasin ’ s poem as ‘ Bodies burn at us ’, individual women having become a nameless mass . This violence fragments the form as most lines include abrupt end stops , the speaker relaying a stunted list of what they witness as ‘ Evidence abounds ’. The difficulty for the woman poet is that this part of women ’ s history is largely inaccessible . Of the women that survived accusation and torture worldwide , few testimonies of