Cole’s poetry is remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigor with delight in surface, for how its prosody returns each abstraction to the body, linking thought and breath, metaphysics and musicality. Religious, erotic, elegiac, pissed off—the affective range is wide and the forms restless.
—Ben Lerner, Bomb Magazine

Remarkable poems by the widely acclaimed poet and translator of Hebrew and Arabic poetry.

Things On Which I’ve Stumbled

Poetry by Peter Cole

In Peter Cole’s remarkable book, Things on Which I’ve Stumbled, the forces and sources that have long driven his work come together in singular fashion. Plumbing the past as it soars in the present, the collection rides a variable music that takes it from an archeology of mysterious poetic fragments unearthed in a medieval Egyptian synagogue to lyrics suffused with a “normal mysticism” and poignant political commentary on the blighted hills surrounding modern Jerusalem.

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Paperback (published September 1, 2008)

ISBN
9780811218030
Price US
14.95
Price CN
17
Trim Size
6x9
Page Count
96

Peter Cole

Contemporary American poet and translator of Hebrew.

Cole’s poetry is remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigor with delight in surface, for how its prosody returns each abstraction to the body, linking thought and breath, metaphysics and musicality. Religious, erotic, elegiac, pissed off—the affective range is wide and the forms restless.
—Ben Lerner, Bomb Magazine
Peter Cole is best known as a matchless translator of Hebrew poetry. With Things on Which I’ve Stumbled he matures into one of the handful of authentic poets in his own American generation.
—Harold Bloom
One of the very few writers to achieve enduring fame as a translator, [Cole] looks at the long, international history of Jewish literature, the modern enterprise of translation, the troubled contexts of his Middle East, as well as marital love … Anyone with any interest in Cole’s topics will cherish this admirable book.
—Ana Luísa Amaral, Publisher’s Weekly