Gravity and center Selected sonnets, 1994-2022

Collected from across Cole's acclaimed oeuvre, these sonnets embody all the best qualities of this poet's enviable economy of language, evocative imagery, wicked turns of phrase, and sheer lyrical genius. One can turn easily to any page and land on a gem. Some play with rhyme placement and flirt with forbidden desire ("a handsome / priest looked at me like a stone; I looked back, / not desiring to go it alone"), and others astonish with gentle simplicity ("I sit on a rock, / tearing up bread for red and white carp / pushing out of their element into mine"). "Self-Portrait with Addict" is direct and devastating, "There's no animal / that sleep-deprives itself like the human." "Quilt" stitches together alcoholic gay lovers, family shame, and intense psychodrama, "a lively recycling of materials seen often in the South." That Cole manages to range the wide spectrum of human experience within the 14 lines of the sonnet is testament both to the poet's craft and the form itself. Sonnet lovers would be wise also to check out Wanda Coleman's Heart First into This Ruin: The Complete American Sonnets (2022) and Laurie Ann Guerrero's A Crown for Gumecindo 2015).

Suffering is neutralized by love for nature and a Zen mindset ("the sound of water poured into a bowl") in the unflinching 12th collection by Cole (Blizzard). These new and previously collected sonnets are not love poems, though some are sex poems: "My soul-animal prefers the choke-chain." The title poem speaks from the damaged center: "I'm sorry I cannot say I love you when you say you love me." Dysfunctional family relationships are at the root of the speaker's sense of alienation and disgust, viscerally introduced in the preface: "I came from a place with a hole in it, my body once its body, behind a beard of hair." "Chiffon Morning," reminiscent of James Merrill's "The Broken Home," expands on the mother-son relationship: "sour-milk/ breaths rehearsing death, she faces me, her room/ a pill museum where orange tea bags/ draining on napkins almost pass for art." About the speaker's father, he remembers: "My father lived in a dirty-dish mausoleum,/ watching a portable black-and-white television,/ reading the Encyclopedia Britannica,/ which he preferred to Modern Fiction." There's no easy resolution in this showcase of Cole's subtle and evocative rendering of the human experience. (Apr.)