Fate News

Poet, translator, and visual artist Cole (author, with painter Marina Adams, of Actualities) undertakes a lyric-inflected, experimental journey through gestures of mourning, longing, misrecognition, and threnody and into a series of meditations on fate, mortality, and the limits of being. “Metabolic edge of experiment,” Cole writes in “The Painter’s Measure,” and it’s an apt description of the locus from which she creates in a collection where formal variation is paramount. The book’s opening and closing sections are notable for their meditations on institutional violence (“If you come across an unconscious person take out your weapon. Fire your weapon./ At a swimming pool”) and records of the disorienting nature of life’s changes (“You long for familiarity and for the strangeness of the moon, the dirty snowballs/ And along came that cosmic timeline, crystal, from snow”). Meanwhile, the book’s middle two series shine in their own strangeness as Cole’s restless poetics briefly slow down, pausing in a clarity that is striking and solid. “Along the moraine in the Carolinian forest/ maples had already begun to turn red,” Cole writes to open the former, “Ongoing.” The latter, “Stay Songs for Stanley Whitney,” sees Cole contemplating that painter’s work: “Motion captures color/ its own musical dream.” As she draws readers away from certainty, Cole moves toward a new mode of elegy. (Oct.)