Spinoza in Her Youth

In the five sequences of San Francisco poet Norma Cole's fourth collection, ""the sleep of reason/ considers progression/ gives you a sample"" with ""all the creatures/ tumbling out onto the tabletop of definition."" Spinoza in Her Youth moves from ""The Vulgar Tongue"" through to ""Desire & Its Double"" and ""Conjunctions,"" mixing verse and prose to trace varying forms of thought. Embedded prose poems such as ""Artificial Memory"" and much of the 31-page title sequence achieve a rich abstraction that extrapolates the self's refractions: ""the idealization of the face/ in the year -1/ nothing but a shadow/ she so became her name/ so first, this faith, it was/ a social tool.""