After These Messages

Author: Sean Cole Publisher: Lunar Chandelier Press (2022) 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. Ads don't wait for you; you have to catch up to them. A hallmark of Cole's poems is how quickly they can suggest a whole story, and a second or third version of that story, before veering into a whole new train of associations. You don't sit down to read a Cole poem; you glimpse it through the window of