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KFB FEATURED POET | DEC 18

KFB FEATURED POET DECEMBER | NORMA COLE

cole

norma cole

Born in Toronto, Canada, poet, painter & translator Norma Cole moved to France in the late 60s. Returning to Toronto in the early 70s, she migrated to San Francisco in 1977, where she has lived ever since. Her most recent books of poetry include Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988—2008 (City Lights), Collective Memory (Granary Books), Do the Monkey (Zasterle), Spinoza in Her Youth (Omnidawn) and Natural Light (Libellum). TO BE AT MUSIC: Essays & Talks made its appearance in 2010 from Omnidawn Press. Her translations from the French include Danielle Collobert’s It Then (O Books), Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (Burning Deck), Danielle Collobert’s Notebooks 1956-1978 (Litmus), Fouad Gabriel Naffah’s The Spirit God and the Properties of Nitrogen (Post-Apollo) and Jean Daive’s A Woman with Several Lives (La Presse, forthcoming 2011). Cole has been the recipient of awards from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry, the Fund for Poetry, the Creative Work Fund and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. During winter 2004/05, Cole could be seen inhabiting a 1950s living room as part of her Collective Memory installation during the retrospective Poetry and its Arts: Bay Area Interactions 1954—2004, hosted at the California Historical Society. More recently, she curated a show by Marina Adams at the Cue Arts Foundation in NYC. She has a collaboration with Adams in BOMB 114, Winter 2011. Cole has taught at many schools, including the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State.

Source: SFMOMA

We currently carry a number of works by featured poet, NORMA COLE, signed by the author, at the shop, including her latest, FATE NEWS (Omnidawn) selected by Kirby as one of 2018’s Best.

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Fan’s 2018 Picks

 

 

TOBY MARTINEZ DE RIVAS TERROR

Rivas is a total scholar of the apocalypse whose erudition’s mode is its own self-immolation. There’s a clenching drama between the precision of the language and the malady of death that pressurizes it into that precision.

LYNN CROSBIE THE CORPSES OF THE FUTURE

She turns the banality of sickness and frustration into a poetics of honesty. I look to Lynn when I need another mind as sensitive to mourning as a plain fact of life but so much tougher & rawer than my own.

JAMES MERRILL THE CHANGING LIGHT AT SANDOVER

He wrote this with his lover, with a Ouija board. The tongues of the dead summoned mix with a sly liveliness of Merill language, and the whole thing breaks into wraithy wisteria right there in your spirit.

JOE BRAINARD I REMEMBER

Like the essence of New York found its prophet in the voice of this beautiful man with his gargantuan hands. This long poem makes me bend in easy lust, makes me run delight rivulets into the democracy of his memory’s capacity.

BERNADETTE MAYER MIDWINTER DAY*

Reading this reminded me of the stunning, ceaseless, and wise continuity of that thing we too quickly call Life. Bernadette teaches us the universal connectedness of being because she is immune to exclusion.

JACK SPICER AFTER LORCA 

O Jack, who taught me the curmudgeonliness of being Queer. His voice shrouds a palpitating tenderness to the world with a Scorpionic cloak of suspicion, so how heartbreaking when that cloak drops when he addresses his master, his lover, Lorca.

 

FAN WU is Poetry Editor and Curator for the reading series What Queer Reading (wQr), an imprint of knife | fork | book

* On the fortieth anniversary of Midwinter Day, Mayer’s famous long poem written over the span of a day, HOA NGUYEN leads a 3-hour poetry workshop at knife | fork | book SATURDAY DECEMBER 22, 2018  2-5PM VERY LIMITED REGISTER TODAY

This post first appeared at whatqueerreading.com