Reviews for Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems, 1982-2007

The average rating for Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems, 1982-2007 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-08-28 00:00:00 Gary Vanalstyne Bringing together sixty-six poems written across twenty-five years, Pierce the Skin features poet Henri Cole's most memorable work from his first six volumes of verse. In his earlier poetry Cole tends toward the close observation of nature and his childhood, whereas he later expands his focus to include themes of selfhood, isolation, pain, and love. Across all his work, though, Cole adheres to conventional or self-imposed forms, and he prefers the accessible to the abstract. While many of the poems were finely crafted, they read as too tranquil and detached from sensation for the collection to have left a lasting impact upon me.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-12-10 00:00:00 Bart Kovac I mean........: Beach Walk I found a baby shark on the beach. Seagulls had eaten his eyes. His throat was bleeding. Lying on shell and sand, he looked smaller than he was. The ocean had scraped his insides clean. When I poked his stomach, darkness rose up in him, like black water. Later, I saw a boy, aroused and elated, beckoning from a dune. Like me, he was alone. Something tumbled between us' not quite emotion. I could see the pink interior flesh of his eyes. "I got lost. Where am I?" he asked, like a debt owed to death. I was pressing my face to its spear hafts. We fall, we fell, we are falling. Nothing mitigates it. The dark embryo bares its teeth and we move on.