Cole’s poetry is remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigor with delight in surface, for how its prosody returns each abstraction to the body, linking thought and breath, metaphysics and musicality. Religious, erotic, elegiac, pissed off—the affective range is wide and the forms restless.

Peter Cole is best known as a matchless translator of Hebrew poetry. With Things on Which I’ve Stumbled he matures into one of the handful of authentic poets in his own American generation.

One of the very few writers to achieve enduring fame as a translator, [Cole] looks at the long, international history of Jewish literature, the modern enterprise of translation, the troubled contexts of his Middle East, as well as marital love … Anyone with any interest in Cole’s topics will cherish this admirable book.