Lori Lamothe Books

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."

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