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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. —Rosanna Warren, The New Republic
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