Norma Cole, Alibi Lullaby

 

Halo of Blood

oblivious to others
the same hour

apparent order
or actual order

sugar and candle
stand up

fingers of rain
walk without

contradiction
come on

witness the set
another time

The latest from Toronto-born San Francisco poet, translator and editor Norma Cole, following numerous titles over the past decade-plus including Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988-2008 (San Francisco CA: City Lights, 2009) [see my review of such here], To Be At Music: Essays & Talks (Richmond CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2010) [see my review of such here], Coleman Hawkins Ornette Coleman (Providence RI: horse less press, 2012) [see my review of such here], Fate News (Omnidawn, 2018) [see my review of such here] and RAINY DAY (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2024) [see my review of such here], is the poetry collection Alibi Lullaby (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2025), a book-length suite of sharp, short lyrics. Cole’s short poems sit as accumulations of clipped phrases, stitched and quilted lines and phrases that hold to sound and sensation, rhythm and reading, tone and temper. “take a book for instance,” she writes, as part of “On the Sensations of Tone,” “melody incomplete / inexact or paradise // the last to know / accuracy a moment / or the last to know [.]” Through halts and hesitations, parsed language and precision, Cole’s poems move through cadence and sound as much as into and through meaning. Moving between compression and accumulation, her narrative moments set one upon another revealing large, sweeping truths and small mercies. “silent objects / saturation not able / inside the magnitudes / suppression,” she writes across the single sentence of her second poem titled “Mum’s the Word,” “oppression / falling, failing / oblivious [.]”