Spinoza in Her Youth

Norma Cole's rich and rigorous poems delight in and disrupt the framing structures of language, memory, history, so as to inhabit new fluencies of possibility. Informed by a diversity of subject matter (including emotional, political, philosophic), each poem finds its balance of form and content upon the knifepoint of a lyric integrity that is as responsive to the gravity of experience as it is to the fallibility of our means of representing it.