Praise for Draw Me After "Peter Cole has been merging the work of poet and translator for nearly half a century, reminding us that writing is always a translation--of thought, impulse, feeling, memory, image, time . Cole's voice is incomparable." --Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's "It is rare for a poet to produce a book as memorable as The Invention of Influence (2014) and then bring forth another title that is just as distinct and remarkable . An outstanding collection." --Michael Autrey, Booklist (Starred Review) "A stunning book. Beautiful, delicate, tough, intricate, clear--often in the same poem. This really is 'equipment for living.'" -- Christian Wiman , author of Survival Is a Style "'Waking the letters from their slumber': that's Peter Cole's mad, sublime task in these phantasmagoric poems.
Every line of this book breaks the literal--the letters--into visionary scenes where sorrow marries joy and blessings almost rhyme with curse. A revelation." -- Rosanna Warren , author of So Forth "Peter Cole shows himself in Draw Me After to be our great master of ekphrasis . Visually, sonically, rhythmically, semantically, his are some of the most inventive, witty, profound, and genuinely beautiful lyric poems of our moment." -- Marjorie Perloff , author of Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics Praise for Peter Cole "One of the best religious poets writing in English." --Anthony Domestico, Commonweal "Peter Cole's work defies traditional distinctions--between old and new, foreign and familiar, translation and original. [The] rigor, vigor, joy, and wit of his [poems] have expanded the imaginative capacities of what the unimaginative might call his 'target language'." --Joshua Cohen, Paris Review "[Peter Cole's] poetry is remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigor with delight in surface, for how its prosody returns each abstraction to the body, linking thought and breath, metaphysics and musicality.
Religious, erotic, elegiac, pissed off--the affective range is wide and the forms restless." --Ben Lerner, Bomb Magazine.