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Touch: Poems

3.9/5 ( ratings)

Henri Cole’s last three books have shown a continuously mounting talent. In his new book, Touch, written with an almost invisible but ever-present art, he continues to render his human topics—a mother’s death, a lover’s addiction, war—with a startling clarity. Cole’s new poems are impelled by a dark knowledge of the body—both its pleasures and its discontents—and they are written with an aesthetic asceticism in the service of truth. Alternating between innocence and violent self-condemnation, between the erotic and the elegiac, and between thought and emotion, these poems represent a kind of mid-life selving that chooses life. With his simultaneous impulses to privacy and to connection, Cole neutralizes pain with understatement, masterful cadences, precise descriptions of the external world, and a formal dexterity rarely found in contemporary American poetry.

Touch is a Publishers Weekly Best Poetry Books title for 2011.

Language: English

Pages: 67

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Release: September 13, 2011

ISBN: 0374278350

ISBN 13: 9780374278359

Touch: Poems

3.9/5 ( ratings)

Henri Cole’s last three books have shown a continuously mounting talent. In his new book, Touch, written with an almost invisible but ever-present art, he continues to render his human topics—a mother’s death, a lover’s addiction, war—with a startling clarity. Cole’s new poems are impelled by a dark knowledge of the body—both its pleasures and its discontents—and they are written with an aesthetic asceticism in the service of truth. Alternating between innocence and violent self-condemnation, between the erotic and the elegiac, and between thought and emotion, these poems represent a kind of mid-life selving that chooses life. With his simultaneous impulses to privacy and to connection, Cole neutralizes pain with understatement, masterful cadences, precise descriptions of the external world, and a formal dexterity rarely found in contemporary American poetry.

Touch is a Publishers Weekly Best Poetry Books title for 2011.

Language: English

Pages: 67

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Release: September 13, 2011

ISBN: 0374278350

ISBN 13: 9780374278359

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