Norma Cole's rich and rigorous poems delight in and disrupt the framing structures of language, memory, history, so as to inhabit new fluencies of possibility. Informed by a diversity of subject matter (including emotional, political, philosophic), each poem finds its balance of form and content upon the knifepoint of a lyric integrity that is as responsive to the gravity of experience as it is to the fallibility of our means of representing it.

NORMA COLE is a poet, painter, translator. Among her poetry books: Mars (Listening Chamber '94), Moira (O Books '95), and Contrafact (Potes & Poets '96). Scout, a text/image work, is forthcoming (Krupskaya '02). Translations include Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (Burning Deck '00) and Anne Portugal's Nude (Kelsey St. Press '01). She teaches at San Francisco State University, the University of San Francisco, and in the MFA program at Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles. A Canadian by birth, Cole migrated via France to San Francisco where she has lived for the past twenty years.