—The New Republic
June 16,2010 Poetically,
Cole is the child of William Blake and Elizabeth Bishop... Pierce the Skin, a selection from Cole's six earlier books, confirms
him as a poet of commanding maturity. It is bracing to watch a writer find the right relationship between the subject
matter urgent to him and a style that evolves to meet the needs of that subject. In this dual process of discovery,
Cole lets neither raw material nor style—nor stylization—dominate; in poem after poem, the clashing forces
fight to a draw, and that draw is the work of art. Cole is now such a master of his means, and at the same time so modest
and vulnerable in his recording...He brilliantly channels Marvell, Dickinson, and Stevens, and sounds perfectly like himself—the
fictive self, the voice that holds its own amid squalor. —Rosanna
Warren
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