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Norma Cole

92 pages
ISBN 0-937013-54-4


Consciousness is everything that could be the case, explains Norma Cole, as she unpleats an amber, or possibly violet, then again lozenge blue dossier enameled with the word Contrafact on its cover. This "false map" is not displaced but augmented by incomplete thoughts--stitches, which are holding their convocation inside a thin film inside a thick fog inside a well. Dive in at your own pitch.
--Charles Bernstein

Astonsihment is the word I save to describe special writing such as this. Norma Cole's work is beautiful-- yes, with sharp edges--musically exact--poetry's curious happiness--and deep as the ocean of language, where is laughs, shadows and overwhelms. The title Contrafact immediately picks the reader up off the floor of the ordinary... A reader may well think of the word catastophe--to turn up or down, to overturn. But cataster means to place among the stars. "She shook the map-case open terribly and ruthlessly." A brilliant book.
--Robin Blaser

Contrafact: not a box within which, but a center around which, "an accumulation of tone." Contrafact: a music almost just being formed, a fine intelligent dancing among words, sentences that take us into "once upon a stitch of time." Contrafact: "I want you to wake up now."
--Rosmarie Waldrop