After Sunstone by Dustin Cole – Noah Fredstrom
August 18, 2025
Surveillance – the idea of the ever-present eye – is no longer relegated to the world of the ultra-developed and urban. Ring cameras dot the landscape of the suburban porches; even in the woods rifle sights, binoculars, and trail cams are the favorite tools of observation. The quiet rural landscape is just as subject to surveillance, and there is a new sense of paranoia that comes with this. In After Sunstone, Dustin Cole captures these ideas, drawing readers into a world framed by optics – weaving together cinematic references, visual imagery, and metaphysical insight. The poems are experienced through a variety of optical lenses—from cameras to Leupold rifle scopes to screens to the gaze of the eye itself, reminding the reader of a fragmented world. The poems are cut from a cinematic cloth, where at times light and shadow blend to create gritty, noirish qualities. But Cole doesn’t just offer shadow and light; he provides what could be described as a Rustic Voyeurism—a raw, almost predatory way of observing. The poems engage with this idea by pulling readers into the act of framing and focusing—whether it’s tracking something through the crosshairs of a scope or observing fleeting moments through the fractured lens of memory.
While reading, I was reminded of the “finger framing” technique, an age-old method used by photographers and filmmakers to visualize a scene through a rectangular aperture made by the hands. This purely analog gesture invokes a sense of distance, as though the looker is always observing the world through a selective lens, both literally and metaphorically. The motif of the “viewfinder” runs like a thread through the collection, where the act of capturing moments, perspectives, and truths is done through technology, memory, and the lens of the mind. The recurring references to light are crucial to the poems’ mood and message. The terms “rays of light,” “sieved light,” and “light behind eyes” repeat through the collection like refracted beams. This broken light becomes a metaphor for perception itself—sharp in some moments, distorted in others.
The shiny remnants of “diamonds,” “perforated beer cans,” and “sequins” in the poems stand in for the fragile nature of what we value and what we perceive. These are not romanticized, polished moments, but are there to capture both the beauty and confusion of a disjointed reality, where nostalgia, memory, and personal history come into sharp focus, only to glint and recede just as quickly. Objects, like images themselves, are shaped by the lens through which we view them, and what we value may often be as fragile and fragmented as the things we try to capture or preserve. What is illuminated and what remains hidden in shadow is never fully revealed; it is always in a state of flux, split through the lenses of perception.
One of the collection’s most revealing moments was an extremely brief paired reference to the fangs of a panther and to the Arch of Ctesiphon, a man-made landmark I was previously unaware of. In my research, I learned this monument was partially made famous by a photograph taken by none other than Roald Dahl. Dahl recounts:
…I even got a lovely big bronze medal from the Egyptian Photographic Society in Cairo, and I still have the photograph that won it. It is a picture of one of the so-called Seven Wonders of the World, the Arch of Ctesiphon in Iraq. This is the largest unsupported arch on earth and I took the photograph while I was training out there for the RAF in 1940. I was flying over the desert solo in an old Hawker Hat biplane and I had my camera round my neck. When I spotted the huge arch standing alone in a sea of sand, I dropped one wing and hung in my straps and let go of the stick while I took aim and clicked the shutter…
This isn’t just a photo—it’s the world through the lens of exploration, survival, human ingenuity, and historical perspective. From a pilot’s bird’s-eye view, I imagine that massive, unsupported arch stands like a ghost in a desert, frozen in time, distant and intimate. Through this, the Arch of Ctesiphon became a potent symbol in Cole’s collection for me—emblematic of the tension between permanence and decay. The act of capturing something alone in the desert—a moment, an arch, a piece of history—is both an assertion of control and a surrender to nature.
The collection’s thematic attention to optical devices, like the photon sieve or the camera obscura, evoke a sense of manipulation, as if perspective is being reshaped. Vision can be a metaphor for control: how we see is as important as what we see. Cole’s poems are a reminder of how we engage with our perceptions, capture them, and how we’re ultimately shaped by them. Time and memory are never stable—like light, they flicker, bend, and distort as we move through them, framing our experiences in ways both personal and universal.
While reading Cole’s poems I continually had visions of René Magritte’s iconic surrealist painting, The False Mirror, where the eye becomes both the subject and the lens. The large, disembodied eye in the painting, with its iris replaced by the reflection of a blue sky filled with billowing white clouds, underscores the paradox of perception. The vast sky within the eye suggests the limitless possibilities of seeing, yet is contained within the narrow, perhaps mechanical, boundary of the eye itself. In this way, Cole’s poems force an association between themselves and The False Mirror, each blurring the boundaries between what we observe and how we observe it, each reminding us that perception is both expansive and limiting.
With The False Mirror’s image of Montana’s “Big Sky” in mind, alongside the shadowy, noirish elements in the collection, this concept “Rustic Voyeurism” began to form. Even in a seemingly isolated, natural setting, the absence of city security cameras doesn’t offer refuge, whether it’s the keen eyes of a hawk soaring overhead, the device in your pocket, or the unblinking gaze of a satellite above. These elements served as a reminder that my observations are not one-sided; I’m not immune to being observed myself. Through the visual references and the cinematic and historical allusions, Cole crafts a landscape where perception is sharpened and fragmented, where the eye can bring both clarity and even more mystery. As the collection unfolds, the reader is reminded that our sense of perception is a challenge and a revelation, a way of engaging with the world that is never simple, never static, and that the lens we choose shape everything we perceive.