"Poet, translator, and visual artist Cole (author, with painter Marina Adams, of Actualities) undertakes a lyric-inflected, experimental journey through gestures of mourning, longing, misrecognition, and threnody and into a series of meditations on fate, mortality, and the limits of being. 'Metabolic edge of experiment,' Cole writes in 'The Painter’s Measure,' and it’s an apt description of the locus from which she creates in a collection where formal variation is paramount. The book’s opening and closing sections are notable for their meditations on institutional violence. . . . As she draws readers away from certainty, Cole moves toward a new mode of elegy. "

Publisher's Weekly

"In Norma Cole’s Fate News, a book whose title turns on its head the derisive 'fake news,' she offers an array of experimental musings on time and art in four sections. In the opening poem she begins in space, with creation and destruction as her focus, and she continues through the first section with a series of occasional poems, elegies, and others written in dedication. Cole’s poems simultaneously shrink the substantial in their gaze ('Distant mountain ridgelines / flatten to paper in daylight') and take in the enormousness of the universe. Her use of form is variable; the book includes prose poems, colorful lyrics, songs, and poems that engage in a wily sense of language play."

Poetry.org