Incisive and intensely felt, Stewart Cole's striking debut collection reminds us that we too live in an age of anxiety, disoriented by doubt, and up late, compelled to confront the unanswerable. Sirens draw us to the inevitable fact of human suffering, black-winged redbirds perch aloof above our daily commutes, sex denies and drives our hunger for fidelity, and the comet speaks before it strikes. In an unabashed celebration of intellect and a visceral engagement with our shadowy impulses, Cole's voice veers between the playful and the grave, pillow-talk and eulogy. And despite the odds, love — private, public, and free of false sentiment — emerges cloaked in a wit and intelligence at once elusive and warm. From the urbane and civil to the lustful and dark, the poems of Questions in Bed, in an impressive synthesis of content and contour, depict the heat-seeking of our driven days and insomniac nights.

Questions in Bed

Literature & Fiction

Cole, Stewart

Poetry

icehouse poetry

Poetics of Utopia, The: Shadows of Futurity in Yeats and Auden

British & Irish

Bloomsbury Academic

Watch out for those who have, seek, and hold onto power.So drinkAs the fanged stoat from the rabbit's napeAs though from a flagon of river waterShaken with ancestral ashAs if it isn't knowledge you seekBut some osmotic soul-foodTo be filled up with blursThat might later resolve themselvesInto memoriesTo return to where you really liveWith changes in your bloodLyrical yet shot through with experimental and political veins, the poems in Soft Power are engaged with both the here-and-now of a world on the brink and the hope of something better, a planet where "generations hence / Inactivists will bathe under a sun made safe / By the collapse of oil-can economics."Traversing badlands, sandhills, prairies, suburbia, Miami, London, Dublin, Paris, and beyond, Cole's voice revels in questions of travel while resonating with the unheimlich "Canadalienation" of his expatriate existence. Whether bog surfing, gallery hopping, bug hunting, or meditating on the "strange genre" of national anthems, the poems in Cole's long-awaited follow-up collection to his critically acclaimed Questions in Bed exist in a searching exchange with the world, both entering and being entered by it.

Soft Power

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Books by Cole, Stewart