Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems, 1982-2007 by Henri Cole

Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems, 1982-2007

$17.00
Sale price  $17.00 Regular price 
Skip to product information
Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems, 1982-2007 by Henri Cole

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems, 1982-2007

$17.00
Sale price  $17.00 Regular price 

Members save $1.70. Learn more about Membership »

Ready to ship in 3 - 5 days

A GENEROUS SELECTION FROM ONE OF OUR GREATEST LIVING POETS

Henri Cole has been described as a "fiercely somber, yet exuberant poet" by Harold Bloom, who identifies him as the central poet of his generation. Cole's most recent poems have a daring sensitivity and imagistic beauty unlike anything on the American scene today. Whether they are exploring pleasure or pain, humor or sorrow, triumph or fear, they reach for an almost shocking intensity. Cole's fourth book, Middle Earth, awakened his audience to him as a poet now writing the poems of his career.

Pierce the Skin
brings together sixty-six poems from the past twenty-five years, including work from Cole's early, closely observed, virtuosic books, long out of print, as well as his important more recent books, The Visible Man (1998), Middle Earth (2003), and Blackbird and Wolf (2007). The result is a collection reconsecrating Cole's central themes: the desire for connection, the contingencies of selfhood and human love, the dissolution of the body, the sublime renewal found in nature, and the distance of language from experience. "I don't want words to sever me from reality," Cole says, striving in Pierce the Skin to break the barrier even between word and skin. Maureen N. McLane wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Cole is a poet of "self-overcoming, lusting, loathing and beautiful force." This book will have a permanent place with other essential poems of our moment.
Book Details
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN:
9780374532666
Binding:
Paperback
Pages:
160
Authors:
Henri Cole
Published Date:
2011-03-15
Language:
English
Shipping

Ships directly to you from our US distribution partner. US delivery only.

This title is printed to order. Printing takes 3–5 days before it ships.

Estimated total time for this book on its own:

  • Economy 6–13 days
  • Expedited 5–10 days
  • Priority 4–9 days

Orders with more than one book may arrive in separate deliveries. Pre-orders always ship separately once the book is released.

Returns

We offer a 30-day return policy, which means you have 30 days after receiving your item to request a return. To be eligible for a return, your item must be in the same condition that you received it: new, unworn or unused, and in its original packaging. See details on our Return & Refund policy.

About Henri Cole

Henri Cole holds degrees from the College of William and Mary, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and Columbia. Born in Fukuoka, Japan, to a French mother and an American father, he was raised in Virginia. Middle Earth won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 2004 and was a Pulitzer finalist that year; Blackbird and Wolf won the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 2008. He received the Jackson Poetry Prize in 2012 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2017. He was poetry editor of The New Republic from 2010 to 2014, and published a memoir, Orphic Paris, in 2018.

If this information requires correction, please contact info@thepoetryshop.com.

You may also like

If any information on The Poetry Shop contains an error that requires correction, please contact info@thepoetryshop.com