Cole, Sean: After These Messages

Lunar Chandelier, paperback

Publication Date: May 1, 2022

Publisher Marketing: Esteemed public radio producer Sean Cole’s AFTER THESE MESSAGES is built around a series of poems written on the fly. Like Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, written during his lunch breaks at MOMA, Cole wrote poems while watching TV advertisements. Like ads, the poems are speedy and compressed, packed with argument and imagery, sometimes sublime, sometimes hilarious, but always bordering on the hallucinatory. They weave in and out of the dramedy of this fine collection -- interstitial featurettes that punctuate the action of what you sat down to watch in the first place. Cole’s music is rapid percussions, flipped utterances that mean at least five things all at once.

AFTER THESE MESSAGES marries the plain-spokenness of one of public radio’s most esteemed storytellers, with the buoyant fabulism of O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, and Kenward Elmslie. Unlike a lot of experimental poetry that reads like a lab report of the experiment, Cole’s poetry pulls the reader into the exuberant middle of the experiment, so that we can experience the doubled pleasure of mystery mixed with discovery.