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The New Republic -- J une 16,2010
Poetically, Cole is the child of William
Blake and Elizabeth Bishop... Pierce the Skin, a selection from Cole's six earlier
books, confirms him as a poet of commanding maturity. It is bracing to watch a writer find the right relationship between
the subject matter urgent to him and a style that evolves to meet the needs of that subject. In this dual process of
discovery, Cole lets neither raw material nor style--nor stylization--dominate; in poem after poem, the clashing forces
fight to a draw, and that draw is the work of art. Cole is now such a master of his means, and at the same time so modest
and vulnerable in his recording...He brilliantly channels Marvell, Dickinson, and Stevens, and sounds perfectly like himself--the
fictive self, the voice that holds its own amid squalor. -- from
Making a Soul, Rosanna
Warren
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