... astonishing.

This collection of Cole’s feels rawer and more personal than those that have come before...layering as it does his art essays with homages to lost friends and analysis of his own 2012 novel, Open City. There are moments when the self-citation begins to feel self-indulgent or when the highbrow tips into the merely pretentious.

While there is nothing else here that quite matches the stylistic brilliance and visceral thrust of that opening essay, Cole’s writing throughout hums with a quiet intensity and sometimes a palpable anger at the inhumanity he witnesses on his travel.

Meditative and complex, the collection also plays with the essay form. There are works within works.

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 this erudite collection of observations written over the past three years, art historian Cole...meditates on art, identity, politics, and literature to decipher 'the fractured moment in our history'.