Norma Cole

A collection of poems that embrace musicality and locate the patterns of ancient songs in the body, nature, and world events. Alibi, in Latin, meant “elsewhere,” and “lullaby”—from lull, to soothe, and bye, near, close by—has elements linguistic elements that appear across cultures. Music, from ancient songs recorded on tables to contemporary compositions, share related framing elements that have persisted across time: formal patterns and rhythms, peaceful and hypnotic movements, and elements of terror arising from the moving frontier of “thrill, dread, certainty.” In this collection, Norma Cole considers the ancient and transcendent patterns of music, finding them through nature, heart sounds, the spectral elegance of blood flow, the murmur of melody, and many diverse patterns and beats. Sounds of summer, massacres, “empathy through distress,” unknowing, energy, suspense, and fragility echo throughout the poems and other writings. Drawing on a poetics that embraces formal freefall and looks forward while holding up the shifting mirror of memory, Alibi Lullaby is a lyrical montage at the edges of musicality.

A harrowing meditation on tyranny, torture, and freedom by one of Chil 's most celebrated contemporary poets. In 2001, the president of Chile publicly acknowledged that many of the bodies of the people who had disappeared under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet would never be recovered. The victims had been flown up in planes and, after having their eyes gouged out, were ejected over the mountains and deserts of Chile or the Pacific Ocean. Ra l Zurita's INRI (these are of course the letters nailed to the cross on which Jesus was crucified, identifying him as Jesus Christ, King of the Jews) is a visionary, prescient response to this atrocity, an agonized and deeply moving elegy for the dead in which the whole of Chile, with its snow-covered cordilleras, fields of wild flowers, empty spaces, and the sparkling sea beyond, is simultaneously transformed into the grave of its lost children and their living and risen body. This incantatory, prophetic work--prophetic in the same way that Jeremiah and Isaiah are prophetic, which is to say unapologetically political-- is one of the great poems of our new century.

All timing all the time! Fate News is poetry in the crosshairs of action (kairos) and clock time (chronos). With a topical setlist in four sections, “Local,” “On-Going,” “Stay Songs,” and “Harmolodics,” Fate News relentlessly pierces the surface of lyric gesture. Its osmotic exchanges and searching encounters vibrate with the clarity of fiercely delicate shouts and murmurs, undertones and overtones. The vision of “Mount Fiasco” is on fire.

“The publication of Décimale blanche in 1967 marked a major shift in French poetry, introducing an entirely new sensibility. Fifty years later, Norma Cole’s superb new translation is no less exciting. Not only is it a masterful rendition of this classic, capturing all its spare force and uncanny grace, but it also stands in its own right as an important contribution to American poetry. White Decimal is a striking literary event, and an extremely beautiful one.” —Cole Swensen, author of Noise That Stays Noise

Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside opens with a foreword, an envoi laying out the concerns of the book. The book’s rhythmic geography tracks a shadow epic with its “1400 Facts,” aspects of feats, or anti-feats, events on the ground, but the hero/anti-hero is “you” & “I” & “we” and the narrative is “splinters of stars.” Fact/fiction, the West/Middle East, present/past, surface/depths, sound/silence— antinomies or continua? “More Facts” marks the question, “When// does the past/ begin?” What does it mean, “to be at war”? How do we measure agency or time? Compression, compassion, rigor, reduction, focus. By means of posters, messages, notices, announcements and images. The poems, linked to one another by motion, emotion, image, diction, consider questions & “facts” – what are facts? “It is the simple fact of one’s own existence as possibility or potentiality.” [Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community Ch.11] What are dreams? The book closes with “If I’m Asleep” —don’t wake me.

To Be At Music is the first collection of essays by Norma Cole, who is one of our most respected poets writing in the innovative tradition, as well as an esteemed translator and visual artist. These 21 prose pieces reflect her inimitable ability to make the critical essay an art form that engages both the sensual and the cerebral, the aural and the visual, the analytic and the intuitive nature of her readers. Many of these are essays or talks written in response to invitations to discuss the works of writers and artists such as Hans Christian Andersen, Robin Blaser, Edmond Jabès, Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Stanley Whitney, and Christa Wolf. Each offers Cole's unique appreciation of what it means to read, to interact with a work of art, to write, or to translate, and to perceive each activity as a way to attune oneself anew to the world that is both within and beyond our expected methods of understanding.

These rich and rigorous poems delight in and disrupt the framing structures of language, memory, and history, so as to inhabit new fluencies of possibility. Encompassing a wide range of subject matter, while addressing concerns that emphasise the emotional, the political, and the philosophic, these poems all demonstrate a lyric integrity that is as responsive to the gravity of experience as it is to the pleasure one can find through the means of representing it.