Alibi Lullaby [Paperback]

A collection of poems that embrace musicality and locate the patterns of ancient songs in the body, nature, and world events.
 
Alibi, in Latin, meant “elsewhere,” and “lullaby”—from lull, to soothe, and bye, near, close by—has elements linguistic elements that appear across cultures. Music, from ancient songs recorded on tables to contemporary compositions, share related framing elements that have persisted across time: formal patterns and rhythms, peaceful and hypnotic movements, and elements of terror arising from the moving frontier of “thrill, dread, certainty.”
 
In this collection, Norma Cole considers the ancient and transcendent patterns of music, finding them through nature, heart sounds, the spectral elegance of blood flow, the murmur of melody, and many diverse patterns and beats. Sounds of summer, massacres, “empathy through distress,” unknowing, energy, suspense, and fragility echo throughout the poems and other writings. Drawing on a poetics that embraces formal freefall and looks forward while holding up the shifting mirror of memory,Alibi Lullabyis a lyrical montage at the edges of musicality.
 Norma Coleis the author of poetry books includingFate News,Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside,Where Shadows Will,Collective Memory,Spinoza in Her Youth, andActualities, a collaboration with painter Marina Adams. Her translations from French include works by Danielle Collobert and Jean Daive. Cole has published poems in literary magazines includingGramma,Posit,BrooklynRail,Art in America,Hambone,Sulfur, andConjunctions, and in anthologies such asAmerican Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New PoetryandBest American Experimental Writing. Cole was born in Toronto, Canada, and she lives in San Francisco.