Norma Cole is a poet, painter, and translator. She is the author of Spinoza in Her Youth, Natural Light, Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems, 1988—2008, and, most recently, Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside. A book of essays and talks, To Be at Music, has been published. Her translations from the French include Jean Daive’s A Woman with Several Lives, Fouad Gabriel Naffah’s Mind-God and the Properties of Nitrogen, Danielle Collobert’s It Then, and Crosscut Universe: Writers on Writing from France. Cole has received awards from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, Gertrude Stein Awards, the Fund for Poetry, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She teaches at the University of San Francisco.

“Now

          I’m

                   free

                          of love

                                       and of posters”

Mayakovsky
6.VI.1924

going back to an absent source, between object and score
brushing away flies with my thoughts the size of postcards burning
“three beautiful women from Prague”—I thought he said “burning”
talking about the picture

realism:--war is kind is the title of a poem the guy told me, a shell in the
kernel, those fluttering flags at the top of the tower, shadow of an arc
against the wall, sun spots on shadow wars

a woman looks at the toe of her boot inventing the present and presuming
a kind of accuracy or at least theatricality, tensions between elements
almost implausible, a fugue, a kind of authorial sampling, funnels

of forms of violence “evidence-based”—

 

Julian Talamantez Brolaski is the author of Advice for Lovers (City Lights 2012), gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011), and co-editor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards (Litmus Press / Belladonna Books 2009). Julian lives in Brooklyn where xe is an editor at Litmus Press and plays country music with Juan & the Pines (www.reverbnation.com/juanandthepines). New work is on the blog hermofwarsaw.

I can't go kicking this rusty blade no further
we can all name ourselves smurves
when the terrors of modernity seem quaint
plash of water
monumental tree trail
tripple faggot
only god xemself
short buff gay
agog in 8 ft waves
of totally tubular efflorescence
remembers those empassioned tweets
on the theme of cursive handwriting