Norma Cole is a poet, painter, translator. Among her poetry books: Mars (Listening Chamber '94), Moira (O Books '95), and Contrafact (Potes & Poets '96). Scout, a text/image work, is forthcoming (Krupskaya '02). Translations include Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (Burning Deck '00) and Anne Portugal's Nude (Kelsey St. Press '01). She teaches at San Francisco State University, the University of San Francisco, and in the MFA program at Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles. A Canadian by birth, Cole migrated via France to San Francisco where she has lived for the past twenty years.

Praise for Spinoza In Her Youth

"...mixing verse and prose to trace varying forms of thought.... [Cole] achieves a rich abstraction that extrapolates the self's refractions..."
--Publishers Weekly

"... a dizzying spectacle of verbal acrobatics.... I admire the sheer adventure of this collection . . . each [poem] is embedded with vivid moments of emotional clarity that also comment on what it is to read / write a poem . . . Cole has a delightful talent for illuminating the crossroads of theory, language and humanity."
--Arielle Greenberg, HOW2

"Cole's minding of both fluctuation and coercion delineates the possibility and compromise of
being numerous, vigilantly."
--Jennifer Scappettone, Poetry Project Newsletter

“…this readerly journey has a kind of ‘genius’ of its own.”
--Patrick F. Durgin, Electronic Poetry Review

“Cole is an unabashedly philosophical poet, as well as being firmly rooted in her process and boldly juxtaposes images of the quotidian and ‘subjectivity in the objectification of the gaze.’”
--Christopher Arigo, Pleiades

“In Cole’s Spinoza, power’s feminine side is desire, the always doubled power of material forces, the very act of seeing, the different attributes (the language) of the same substances. Where power serves to crush by identification and repression, desire serves to dismantle, not to destroy, but to liberate through de-idealization, de-identification. This is the inspirational quality of Spinoza In Her Youth, the way the ideas do not lead to a state of idealization, but to the experience of their power to create: as Cole writes, ‘readership, a polymer.’ Later she adds, ‘How manifestations come after the end.’”
--Standard Shaefer, Aufgabe

"[Cole] is a poet of consummate intelligence, a deft and compassionate company..."
--Robert Creeley

"With this volume [Cole] reasserts her position as a major voice within contemporary poetry."
--Andrew Benjamin, author of Art, Mimesis and the Avant-Garde and Present Hope.

From Spinoza in Her Youth (pages 37-38)

Excerpt of SPINOZA IN HER YOUTH

In the cavern of a story, a man and his book report.
^^^
^^^
Guess who I’m going up with?
Who? I pretend, asking not to know. Who has not pretended
THAT?
^^^
^^^
She bent lower over her armful of daises.
^^^
^^^
Caught up in the subjectivity emanating from the extending
phrases of the photographer/writer*, I am first one then the
other in this room, now through this reading existing.
^^^
^^^
The ever present sense of loss is neither sentimental nor
metaphorical, unless it can be apprehended as a metaphor for
itself.
^^^
^^^
“Before I lose it.”
^^^
^^^
Is she the same person as the little girl who once gathered daises
by the armful?
^^^
^^^
Light is the evidence of motion, the trace of gesture. Is the
image of the model then the evidence of stillness, its trace, its
stand-in?
^^^
^^^
It was a small apartment in fact. The dining room became the
spare bedroom when his mother-in-law visited. She visited six
months every year. Where did she live during the other six
months? A fan spins at the ceiling. The woman wearing shoes
with cork soles enters. They are slippers, but she uses them as
street wear.
^^^
^^^
In the dark in a long exposure he writes on her body with light
from a certain distance with his left hand as he stands by the
camera on its tripod. With his right hand he controls the length
of the exposure. The smell of burning charcoal interferes with
the voices.
^^^
^^^
Properties and Models:
Afternoons in cities have colors as do voices and faces. Individuals
sitting for their portrait seek their subjectivity in the objectification
of the gaze of the photographer “How do I look.” Here is
the camera’s inanimate lens, and here is the operator whose gaze
is of an unprecedented interiority. What to “present” to this
circumstance. He tells her to look at his hand, an oblique vertical,
doubt’s exclusion.
^^^
^^^
His Blindness:
In fact, he doesn’t believe in it.
^^^

*The blind photographer referred to is Evgen Bavcar.