The poems in Lori Lamothe’s fourth collection, Tulip Fever, begin in an extravagant light that shines on unsettling surfaces in the progress of an illness: in weeks spent in chemo fire between knowing and not knowing, attempts at reading signs in everyday occurrences like a dog’s incidental act or a blue Christmas tree freeing itself from cliché, to the realization that survival is mostly about forgetting, and up to the triumphal moment when the “test comes back better/than expected”—a moment that briefly lasts as a time comes for contingency plans “just in case.” The book’s title refers to the first recorded speculative financial bubble, and its lunatic craze, that burst in Denmark in 1637, but it’s not economics that matter here—the tulip bulbs prized most by the Dutch were diseased, infected by a virus that caused them to bloom in exquisite colors and unusual patterns. In these poems, Lamothe turns illness into a conceit, an act of sublimation informing a sensibility purified in flame and always, always staving off a nihilism that would be an easy target. “Be vigilant,” the poems warn, as there can be no escape now that the reality of “my almost death” can no longer be denied.
—David Wyman, author of Violet Ideologies
In her third poetry collection, Lori Lamothe contemplates the connections—and disconnections—that bind us to each other and the natural world. Just as Kirlian photography captures objects in electromagnetic fields, the book depicts the ever-shifting landscape of light and shadow that inheres in ordinary life. These poems about violins, dinosaurs, shooting victims, ghost hunters, heroin-addicted newborns, agoraphobics, trampolines and orchids reveal “energy’s bones” that “shift along the spectrum from health to sickness/presence to absence.” In doing so, they seek to uncover a route through the past that circles back “into the dark surge of endless beginning.”
--David Wyman
Each poem in Happily is charged with intellectual and emotional urgency. A restless, skeptical poetic intelligence is at work here, winnowing experience, sorting out what is real and authentic from what is false and delusional. Lori Lamothe’s desire is to find, name, and otherwise hold onto those precious few things we can really count on. With her richly metaphorical language and an abiding sense of irony, Lamothe takes us on a life-journey with her, and in the process presents us with images not only of betrayal, loss, and disillusionment, but also truly wondrous and hard-earned glimpses of “ordinary miracles,” how the mind’s fingertips, as she writes, might “grasp a rosary of genuine rain.”
—Fred Marchant, author of The Looking House
What does a poet see in a mirror? History unraveling, the intimacy of grief, a daughter before her own reflection? Lori Lamothe’s poetry offers wide words, easy touch, an invitation to dream incandescence. Throughout Happily Lamothe lets us bow at the mantle of paradox, pondering what stones, stumbles and stairways might show us about living. Rest and delight in these poems, friends for seeing new.,
—Becky Thompson, author of Zero Is the Whole I Fall into at Night
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Lamothe’s Trace Elements is an extraordinary debut. These poems turn on images both astonishing and enlightening; and it’s clear the mind behind them is intelligent, sophisticated, and complex. I really love this new voice! It arises from the kind of making that sticks, that enters readers and changes them. Listen, Lamothe’s the real thing: when she sings her sweetest, she is ruthless.
—Renee Ashley, author of Because I Am the Shore I Want to Be the Sea
—Ariana D. Den Bleyker, author of Wayward Lines and Strangest Sea
Lori Lamothe gives us glimpses, snapshots that flow, reveal and sometimes even shock.
—Leah Maines, author of Beyond the River