"Early in these pages Norma Cole quotes Hafez as a warning to the gentle reader—that in fact or in practice, 'under every deep / a lower deep opens'—and this book, this incredibly diagrammed advisory concerning both 'fate' and 'news,' plumbs startling depths and arrives at its nal moments with Ornette Coleman’s question—'What do you expect?'— and with Tassadit Yacine’s approximation of Amrouche’s uncomfortable acceptance of Algerian identity—'I am the bridge.' In between, Norma Cole diagrams an astonishingly intricate map of power, the “angel standing in the sun” that John mentioned in Revelations, and how its loci are, again, in fact and practice wide-ranging. And, rife with a homegrown ambiguity, the poems expand—grim Halloween turns up twice like a bad penny, and the police turn up as well. But there’s also a luminous bar of elegies for Tom Raworth, Bill Berkson, Leslie Scalapino, and David Bowie. ('Still Today' ends with a request or admonishment for Bill Berkson: 'So keep on / Proposing paradise.') And Norma Cole instructs, 'the world is / its own music in awe and // space and not at.' Fellow gentle readers, Fate News is good news for all of us."
—C.S. Giscombe, author of Prairie Style

"In Norma Cole’s Fate News, a book whose title turns on its head the derisive 'fake news,' she offers an array of experimental musings on time and art in four sections. In the opening poem she begins in space, with creation and destruction as her focus, and she continues through the first section with a series of occasional poems, elegies, and others written in dedication. Cole’s poems simultaneously shrink the substantial in their gaze ('Distant mountain ridgelines / flatten to paper in daylight') and take in the enormousness of the universe. Her use of form is variable; the book includes prose poems, colorful lyrics, songs, and poems that engage in a wily sense of language play."
—Maya Phillips, Poets.org