“Reading any one of his books is like stumbling upon the exposed tip of a massive underground landmass, one that he’s spent the better part of a decade mapping but the entirety of which he has yet to image … This book eschews argument in favor of a tender enfolding. In this sense, it’s a culmination of a style and a set of ideas he’s been honing since his novel Open City … The effect is like realizing that what you thought were stray notes cohere into song when you listen across a long enough interval. These repetitions teach us how to think along with Cole by calling our attention to details that might seem easy to ignore … The effect is a delirious sense of second sight. Cole brings the unseen realm of poetry into vision, exposing a reality that’s not beneath the surface so much as caught in its interstices.”
–Ismail Muhammad, Slate, June 15, 2017
