The Other Love: Poems

Cole’s observant follow-up to Gravity and Center finds him living “a cautious, quiet life.” These are hopeful and gilded poems, managing to suggest the rich life of the mind but never abandoning the body. Many are the length of sonnets and possess an intense lyric quality. They are written in the voice of “a positive figure in unaffected light” who is multifaceted, alert, and the enemy of easy answers: “Lustful, moody, shy, I want to keep revising myself,/ like a protean creature, but in a smartphone-free,/ non-GMO space.” This desire is made explicit at times, in winningly forthright and epigrammatic utterances: “I don’t want to become a dignified man who says what is/ expected of him.” The collection reveals a new edge to Cole’s voice—composed, taut with nerves, but tempered with wisdom—that confers the poems an added layer of authority: “Since we don’t know if we live beyond this life,/ let’s give ourselves to loving.” These are exemplary lyrics of witness. (July)