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  • C. J. Martin (bio)
Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside. Norma Cole. Omnidawn. http://www.omnidawn.com. 104 pages; paper, $15.95.

Norma Cole’s new book of poems is a fact book. Two long sequences—“14000 Facts” and “More Facts”—comprise the bulk of what’s here. The poems are angular, explosive. Their crystalline syntax offers nothing short of an encounter with the remarkable world. But to clarify what’s at stake in even the poet’s own efforts at observation, Cole offers the opening poem, “Facetime,” as cautionary envoi:

Santa from a tank, sun over The minarets Signs of identity Soundtrack—by and by

When the morning comes Heartfelt thanks

Even if American crusaders for democracy abroad startle at the fact that not everyone says thanks for the tanks, Cole’s poem doesn’t startle, but it sets out regardless. The inquiry that embarks blithely on a fact-finding mission conceals a threat that Cole works to lay bare throughout this book. Despite being fundamentally shared, events are multiple, refracted across cultures and continents, and mediated by observation itself—so that to seek out fact in a militarized world means not only sifting through the remains but knowing that one’s efforts are likely implicated in the destruction.

In the aftermath of a (jolly) tank invasion, there’s this dance:

One knee bent, the other Straight out behind, as if

You turn suddenly Deep into a pirouette But instead stay still Then fold to the ground

Arms, legs folded as fact

Lightness is crucial in this work that strives to hold disparate facts aloft. The fallen body, “folded as fact,” also lifts off in an abstraction of body. The dance “you” do leaps nimbly across lines, but it’s also a danse macabre (i.e., your last). I linger on this first poem because it exemplifies the locomotion of Cole’s book: at every turn the poems turn, double, double back, pirouette then fold, often lighting on travel or exploration or thematizing a kind of itinerancy. Win navigates, divagates.

Throughout, Cole complicates our sense of how to establish a context for understanding the world, how to assemble a sketch of what happened, positing that, above all, our findings needn’t presume to be final. In “More Facts,” she clarifies: “illusions // questions / are facts.” In “14000 Facts,” she adds translation to that list, which in her rendering multiplies a text, rather simply relocating it. Cole points to two different translations of a phrase from Song of Solomon 2:4: “He mistook ‘and his banner over me / was love’ for ‘set love in order in me.’” Rather than test whether we recognize which phrase is a translation from the vulgate, these lines simply stress the mistake of conflating one phrase with another. But this is an observation, not a corrective: misunderstanding, mistake is a fact.

The book’s title resists grouping all of the contents under one heading in order to reassert relation itself, highlighting the interrelatedness of seemingly discrete parts of a world. Cole’s is a prosody of groups, multitudes. Though I’ve called the first poem an envoi, it’s also a piece in a set, one or two facts among many.

Part of what Cole curates in “Facetime” is arrangements of words as sets of sounds or textures—as part of a sonic progression, moving alongside whatever’s taking shape in the syntactic or semantic meaning, and hovering just outside etymology. The path from “tank” to “Heartfelt thanks” is a traversal of sets announced from the very first word (“Santa”). Likewise, the move from “fact” to “maps” serves as this book’s manifest: one can’t simply catalogue without encountering the innumerable world, since a catalogue itself is dynamic, an encounter with “Things of time and space.”

The book deploys several formal strategies for navigating that encounter. In the first long sequence, “14000 Facts,” Cole explores the line as concretized, adopting segmentivity itself as an organizing principle. Just a few poems in, the poet offers a succinct manifesto on the sculptural nature of poetic lines as perceptive units:

(Not the other way round)

thought shards lined up

little ships lit up...

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