The Brooklyn Rail

A few weeks before the pandemic lockdown of early 2020 at Wendy’s Subway, I was with Cole for the launch of A Tradition of Rupture—her scrupulously edited and translated selection of Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik’s critical writing. I had worked closely with Cole on the book for Ugly Duckling Presse, and was there to “moderate” (along with Rachel Valinsky) Cole’s conversation with New Directions’ Barbara Epler and UDP’s Silvina López Medín. “Moderate” is, of course, the wrong verb for what we were doing, or could do. After some fairly standard intros and remarks, the place was suddenly engulfed in a literary firestorm as Cole performed an off-the-cuff mini-lecture about Pizarnik’s criticism—her essays on fellow writers, some of them contemporaries and friends, like Julio Cortázar. Cole channeled Pizarnik’s Molotov cocktail of criticality and emotional openness to the written word…. We were all on the edge of our seats, and I noticed Barbara Epler staring at Cole wide-eyed, perhaps even a bit frightened. I think we all were.

Cole’s talk and the book itself spurred us to contend with Pizarnik as an intellect, a critical thinker, rather than comfortably fall back on the played-out, gendered image of a depressive exile poet of emotional turmoil and eventual suicide. Here, as in much of Cole’s work as a translator, educator, thinker, and poet—and in her whole being, it seems—Cole took aim at complacency, and with Pizarnik as her spirit-guide, she modeled for the audience that night an embodied criticism, as Pizarnik had done for her.

Cole was a friend for nearly twenty-five years, and I thought it would be forever. She was not just a friend of course. It seems I’m not the only one who would say that she made you feel like a co-conspirator, a comrade in a common cause… though I can’t formulate exactly what we were marching for, or toward. Something like internal freedom twined with clear-eyed critical relation to the world and each other… a small, autonomous utopia that also extended beyond those present and even those living.

Over the years, she would pop in and out of the scene, or many scenes, without having missed a beat, just as she’d drop in and out of our lives, picking up on conversations that went on in a kind of pointillist, or Bergsonian fashion, for years, never losing the thread. When she was there she was totally in it. And when she wasn’t, you knew she was involved in some other investigation—some deep dive into an emotional and/or intellectual experiment that would enrich her and thereby also enrich you the next time you met, though you didn’t know when the next time would be.

Over the last several years, the two of us seemed to be in a wave of more frequent contact, and, as Cole was making a new life and dealing with her health, after long phone calls, she’d impress upon me that I was helping her in some pretty profound way, that I was really there for her. I say this because it’s not so often we really know that we’re making a difference, or fully feel a close one’s gratitude. Cole had a way of making you know that it was real, for her and for you.

This past April, Cole had me come to her class at Bard NYC—she and her students were exploring the histories of NYC culture-making and, in particular, how poetic communities are formed and how they come together to produce culture and context—the work of poetry and the work that makes poetry possible. As usual, she had lots of ideas about what we could talk about. When I arrived, she pulled out an archival trove of my own past—the printed pages from my first reading at the Segue Reading Series some twenty years ago, a xeroxed artists’ book I had made in an edition of ten or twenty copies, and other equally old ephemera. To my surprise, she had saved all of it. After much spirited conversation about poetry publishing, translation, the various paths into poetry, Cole asked me to read from my most recent book, pointing to specific poems: “Read from here to the end,” she said, “that’s where it really opens up.” Altogether, I left that class buoyed as a friend, and as a poet, feeling like it mattered. That’s how Cole did it, for me and for many others.

Just a few weeks before she disappeared, we were at her good friend Rodrigo Toscano’s for a pool party that crowned the New Orleans Poetry Festival. She was both relaxed and excited in her wound-up sort of way… a little jumpy, quick-witted as usual, sprawling on a chaise, and suddenly springing forth into the crowd. That is, she was, in her way, happy. Her eyes had that slightly restless look I had come to know—taking in the multifarious present, and hungry for the next step, the next word, and every next meeting.

I am writing this down while on an Amtrak train, heading north along the muddy-green, sunlit Hudson, rolling past some of the places where Cole and I hung out sporadically in various seasons, and where I—along with many others—hoped to cross paths with Cole this summer and many summers onward.

I think it was a year ago, maybe a year and a half, when I came to Pete’s Candy Store to hear Cole read in the series she would soon be curating with Sam Truitt and then Iris Cushing. I hadn’t heard her read her own work in a long time. It was, as you’d expect, pretty riveting—the poems were by turns caught up in word-loving ecstasy, then prickly and barbed in ironic distance, sometimes recalling the Latin American neo-Baroque tradition. Her reading itself was peppered with self-effacing remarks, though she was clearly aware of the brute force of her new work, of how unafraid and free it was.

Afterward, we caught up over cigarettes in the nearly-silent garden out back (it was cold out that evening), and I asked her if what she read was part of a longer manuscript, and if she’d want to publish it with me at Winter Editions, which had just recently opened for business. After a short pause, she said yes. It was a whole-hearted affirmation of the kind perhaps few people I know could muster at a moment’s notice, and a vote of confidence in me, in my friendship, especially considering that I the press had only done two seasons of books. I was thrilled.

Since then, I nudged periodically. We were both excited about working together and we made a plan that she’d hand it over to me this summer. I wish I’d pulled it out of her sooner, of course, but what’s really most poignantly lost is the feeling of futurity, the joy of knowing we’re on this long march together.

—Matvei Yankelevich, June 2025