He is, Eliot Weinberger has written, "an urban poet whose city is Jerusalem; a classicist whose Antiquity is medieval Hebrew; a sensualist whose objects of delight are Mediterranean; an avant-gardist whose forms are the meditation, the song, the jeremiad, the proverb.

"[3] The American Poet noted that "prosodic mastery fuses with a keen moral intelligence" in Cole's work, which the reviewer says is distinctive for its unfashionable engagement with wisdom and beauty.

[4] Writing in Bomb magazine, poet and novelist Ben Lerner observed that 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.

"[6] In 2017, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published his Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations, which The Paris Review Daily called “a wise and radiant collection,” saying it “cannot be recommended strongly enough.”[7] Poet Christian Wiman, meanwhile, wrote: “I love this book—for its idiosyncratic music, its moral and spiritual intelligence, and the balance it maintains between pain and joy, provocation and solace.

Poet and translator Richard Howard described Cole's work as "an entire revelation: a body of lyric and didactic verse so intense, so intelligent, and so vivid that it appears to identify a whole dimension of historical consciousness previously unavailable to us.

"[9] Cole has also published highly praised translations of contemporary Hebrew and Arabic poetry and fiction by Aharon Shabtai, Yoel Hoffmann, Taha Muhammad Ali, Avraham Ben-Yitzhak, and others.