Description
Topical poems that present the life of the mind— mourning and celebrating who and what is lost as time goes by
All timing all the time! Fate News is poetry in the crosshairs of action (kairos) and clock time (chronos), relentlessly piercing the surface of lyric gesture. Its osmotic exchanges and searching encounters vibrate with the clarity of ercely delicate shouts and murmurs, undertones and overtones. The vision of “Mount Fiasco” is on fire.
Fate is everything. It is the past, love, destiny, the future. At a certain point it comes to fruition, as here in Norma Cole’s Fate News. Working her words through an ecstatic synesthesia, Cole presents the daily life of the mind, mourning and celebrating who and what is lost as time goes by. With her signature deftness she guides her lines directly into your heart. You see and sing with them. Each right word takes your breath away. “Saturation—the world is / its own music in awe and // space and not at these / dynamics of rising” “Two futures coincide”—the lucky reader and this book. “Your somatics are your own” but, you will nd, it is your destiny to be enlightened by this News.
Laura Moriarty, author of A Tonalist
Early in these pages Norma Cole quotes Hafez as a warning to the gentle reader—that in fact or in practice, “under every deep / a lower deep opens”—and this book, this incredibly diagrammed advisory concerning both “fate” and “news,” plumbs startling depths and arrives at its nal moments with Ornette Coleman’s question—“What do you expect?”— and with Tassadit Yacine’s approximation of Amrouche’s uncomfortable acceptance of Algerian identity—“I am the bridge.” In between, Norma Cole diagrams an astonishingly intricate map of power, the “angel standing in the sun” that John mentioned in Revelations, and how its loci are, again, in fact and practice wide-ranging. And, rife with a homegrown ambiguity, the poems expand—grim Halloween turns up twice like a bad penny, and the police turn up as well. But there’s also a luminous bar of elegies for Tom Raworth, Bill Berkson, Leslie Scalapino, and David Bowie. (“Still Today” ends with a request or admonishment for Bill Berkson: “So keep on / Proposing paradise.”) And Norma Cole instructs, “the world is / its own music in awe and // space and not at.” Fellow gentle readers, Fate News is good news for all of us.
C.S. Giscombe, author of Prairie Style
Of all Norma Cole’s collections, Fate News comes closest to the feeling of being in the actual presence of the poet. It’s as if the surface of her life is laid out between the words and we are welcomed to ride, out beyond the coast. “A meteor shower-constellation / as memory of perfection.” This form of rapture feels dependent on the grain and warp of chance. The recurring dislocations are addictive and telling. Norma’s line feels tuned to the point of tremor, channeling and prophecy. “The anticipation continuing the possibility of its / disruption.” This collection also contains “Ordinary Things” (for Tom Raworth), my favorite list poem in recent years. Hold tight, this is the greatest glass box you will ever be dropped into.
Cedar Sigo, author of Royals
Reviews
About the Author
Excerpt
Norma Cole is a poet, translator, and visual artist. Her books of poetry include Actualities, Where Shadows Will, and Win these Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside. Born in Toronto, Canada, Cole lives in the sanctuary city of San Francisco.
stIll toDaY
for Bill Berkson
It’s still today
Be still
Is it far where you are?
Beyond the furthermores and the afterwards
Sway me now
Notice the hook
Or failed star
Or jailed target
The force of it
User interface blindsided
Or neurological space
It has a logic to it, you could
Force an elegy: social practice
The war, the cold river water
Formation, disruption, the lamp
Suddenly begins to flicker
So keep on
Proposing paradise
