September 13, 2021
In this erudite collection of observations written over the past three years, art historian Cole (Known and Strange Things) meditates on art, identity, politics, and literature to decipher “the fractured moment in our history.” The title (a reference in part to the way old-fashioned carbon paper was used to bring words to life) hints at the varied topics to follow, which—in two dozen essays that span travelogue, autobiography, and family memoir—“collectively argue for the urgency of using our senses... to respond to experience... and intensify our ethical commitments.” In his search for light in the darkness that consumed the time between 2016 and 2019, Cole zeroes in on the work of Italian painter Caravaggio, who wrung inspiration from life’s less pleasant aspects and turned “profound grief” into an “astonishing achievement” with his Entombment of Christ (1603–1604); and Black culture’s paradoxical power to bridge the divide between the “colonial hangover” of Africa and “American experiences of slavery.” Elsewhere, he challenges the Joycean interpretation of the term epiphany, asking readers not to see it as a “narrative device” in which all of one’s problems are patly solved by “flashes of insight,” but instead as an opening of one’s consciousness. Offering a window into his articulate worldview, Cole brings into sharp relief the very humanity he seeks.
Starred review from October 15, 2021
Novelist, essayist, and photographer Cole (Blind Spot, 2017) is a keen chronicler of our fraught times. In this culturally and historically astute collection of essays, he moves expertly and seemingly effortlessly between the refinement of high art and the tragic state of our current world's spiraling chaos. Whether he's narrating his search for Caravaggio's ghost, following bits of pigment like breadcrumbs across Italy, or reflecting on the shadowy sinews of Kerry James Marshall's astonishing body of work, Cole is a discerning witness and documentarian of life and art. In "Shattered Glass," he reflects on a mass shooting in Las Vegas and broken glass as residual artifact, finessing a critique of photography as a means to convey reason out of horror. Cole was born in Michigan to Nigerian parents and raised in Nigeria until his teens, residing in the U.S. as an adult. In the semiautobiographical essay, "The Blackness of the Panther," he conducts a study of Blackness in both Africa and America. From scrutiny of a colonial-era photograph in "Restoring Darkness" to "Experience," in which he considers human senses and our cultural understandings, Cole's engaging collection of essays reassembles the visual kaleidoscope of life now in sharp, exacting prose. Cole should be seen and attentively read. \
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