Alibi Lullaby

Reviews / Votes

"A Canadian who has lived in San Francisco since 1977, Cole has been an important figure in the city's poetry scene for decades. A teacher, translator, and painter, as well as the author of more than a dozen books, Cole brings an impressive skill with the chiaroscuro of obscurity and lit clarity to this sequence of lyric poems whose title (blurring law court and childhood bedroom) references a distancing of body and mind. Treating her readers as present and wakeful co-creators, Cole invites us, in the opening poem of Alibi Lullaby, to, 'Take a Look,' connecting observation to both 'history' and 'power,' where 'memory' is part of a 'truth cure-' (as the poet notes with characteristic wryness, 'it's a start'). Edgy, whiplash quick shifts of tone and collage-like juxtapositions make this read or ride exciting." * California Review of Books * "Formal permutations, microshifting syllables, hastened, conjoined, and reconstituted sonicscapes undergird Alibi Lullaby. The presence of the multiply heard/seen/felt/touched in Cole's work pluralizes the sensorium. She acutely observes cultural and political ossifications. Alibi Lullaby attends the evidence and residue of the social and historical event whether here/elsewhere, everyday minutiae, prosodical vulnerability and verve, geopolitical strife-the registers of tenderness and suffering." -- Myung Mi Kim, author of "Civil Bound" "Cole's rigorously spare poem sequence is a lyric like no other today, charming its listeners not to sleep but toward a principled wakefulness. Compressed poems bristle with tensions between language and form, precision and abstraction, lyrical affect and flat critique of a systematic claim of distance ('elsewhere') from incidents of harm. Cole's elegies, laments, and invocations deliver a 'gentle summons' against an 'implicated garland of/ witnesses' and 'bodies of/ knowledge/ resisting a solution.' A beautiful, simmering provocation, Alibi Lullaby challenges and enchants through the deep, dark night of our contemporary day." -- Kimberly Alidio, author of "Teeter" "Alibi is elsewhere, and lullabies draw us near. As with much of Cole's work over the years, the space between is where music exists, where our songs, our indeterminate attention, find their potentialities. The songs in this book are where our world, in all of its fractured hallucinations, oscillates with the hopefulness of some other, less brutal realities. And it is here, in the incantatory music of hope, of the possible, that we are sung into with these poems. For all the darkness that looks to bleed us apart, the language issuing from these pages guide us to be near. Celan once told us that there are songs still to be sung beyond mankind. Here, we have them." -- Jerrold Shiroma, editor of duration press "Cole recognizes the impermanence of all things, the broken and breaking state we live in, and often try to ignore. She knows the measures by which we locate ourselves in the world (and discourse) have been tampered with, removed, overturned, blotted out, supplanted by lies, and nostalgia for an age that never existed. Cole knows it is happening to everyone, everywhere. A noted translator and accomplished visual artist, she is acutely attuned to the intricate shifting relationship of image, sound, and meaning, as attested to by the title of her book, Alibi Lullaby. . . . The sounds emanating from these powerful poems is our collective heart. The meanings, and there are many, arise out of our well-founded anxiety. Inhabitant of a shattered world that is disintegrating further, she asks if we 'fall under the apprehension/of seeing and looking away.' It is the single most pressing question of our time." -- John Yau, author of "Tell It Slant"