Gravity and Center

New and selected sonnets from Henri Cole, a poet with “a quality of daring that is rare in our poetry” (Louise Glück). I take joy in considering my generation. I rewrite to be read, though I feel shame acknowledging it. Scattered among imposing trees, the ancient and the modern intersect, spreading germs of pain and happiness. I curl up in my fleece and drink. Gravity and Center collects almost thirty years of deeply original work by one of America’s greatest living poets. As his writing has grown and changed, Henri Cole has conceived and articulated an approach of his own to one of poetry’s most enduring and challenging forms: the sonnet. Cole writes in his afterword, “I believe a poem is a sonnet if it behaves like one, and this doesn’t mean rhyming iambic pentameter lines. More important is the psychological dimension, the little fractures and leaps and resolutions the poem enacts . . . For some