Barrie Cole looks at life through a colorful lens and I love it. I knew upon reading her guest post (read it here) that her poetry and prose collection was going to be a myriad of things...fun, touching, and thought-provoking.
"To Do" does a fantastic job of summing up the every day in a woman's mind. Boy, did I see myself in this one. Though my sons are grown so I don't have that factor, I remember those days, and my mind still runs like that - a mile a minute. "I will cry about so many things and then I will pull myself together with a magic drawstring." Pretty much sums up what women do every. single. day.
"I Know What Happens When We Die" is a beautiful poem. Here is the last stanza:
And then slowly, like a sunset
a territory opens up. We walk into it.
It walks into us. And then, like kids
after school, we shout, I'm home
into the forever.
"Still" is another poem I see myself in. It illustrates how often we find ourselves less than. This..."And I think that if I keep making mistakes, maybe one day, I'll just stay very still because if I don't move at all, I won't make any mistakes, but I still won't be dead. I'll be a still life of myself" and the last line, "I'll try to convince myself again and again that a still life is still a life."
There are several poems about her dreams and they just capture the craziness of them. I have been having some very fantastical and strange dreams of late so I felt myself really relating to those poems. Of the four, "Paris" was my favorite.
"How Things Are" like "To Do" captures how we thought things would be and the reality of what they really are. In a sense, a big mess, yet it's sad to think of it this way because it really is an extraordinary life. This part..."And it's sad that this life feels like a flop especially because sometimes it's just too difficult to remember to put the wash in the dryer until the next day when the wet clothes have already begun to smell of mildew and of cat pee too even though there is not a cat, because some or all of the family members are allergic to cats, so who knows why the cat pee smell and Jesus Christ this life feels like a constant starting over, like a constant begging to have another chance and then getting one, getting another chance, even four or five or six chances, but then failing again..."
The last stand out for me (actually, the entire collection is a stand out) was "Son: Age Three." As a mom of two boys now in their mid-twenties, I was sobbing when I got to the end of this one. Just by writing this poem in the voice of her three year old son, she captures the essence of our children when they're young. It hit hard. When your kids get older, it's so difficult to think about how fast things went by. Remembering them when they were little like this is a blessing, and a curse, because we never feel like there was enough time.
I loved this collection. It's probably one of the most unique I've read and I know it will stay with me. I highly recommend it.
About the collection
Advance Praise
Poet Alison Luterman says, “To enter the pages of Lacquer is a Thrilling Word is to walk inside the wild and wonderful, kaleidoscopically shape-shifting mind of Barrie Cole, appreciating an odd truth bomb here, a moment of delight or humor there, and now and again a totally unexpected light ray of divine wisdom shooting through a dusty stained-glass window that was somehow exported from an ancient Gothic cathedral to a grocery store in downtown Chicago. There are too many delightful lines to quote in a blurb, but let’s just say that she had me at “I am still a good person if I have had an unfortunate haircut, the kind where there are bangs of insanity, the kind wherein cutting more could not even begin to improve it, a haircut that makes purchasing a wig a genuine consideration and I am still a good person if I paid the bill late and I was too anxious to attend the party and too anxious to say hello to the neighbor and so pretended not to see her at all and this was no surprise, because I do this more often than I do not, but I am still good. Probably. ” I’ll leave you to discover the rest on your own.” –Alison Luterman, Author of In the Time of Great Fires and Hard Listening
Poet Alison Luterman says, “To enter the pages of Lacquer is a Thrilling Word is to walk inside the wild and wonderful, kaleidoscopically shape-shifting mind of Barrie Cole, appreciating an odd truth bomb here, a moment of delight or humor there, and now and again a totally unexpected light ray of divine wisdom shooting through a dusty stained-glass window that was somehow exported from an ancient Gothic cathedral to a grocery store in downtown Chicago. There are too many delightful lines to quote in a blurb, but let’s just say that she had me at “I am still a good person if I have had an unfortunate haircut, the kind where there are bangs of insanity, the kind wherein cutting more could not even begin to improve it, a haircut that makes purchasing a wig a genuine consideration and I am still a good person if I paid the bill late and I was too anxious to attend the party and too anxious to say hello to the neighbor and so pretended not to see her at all and this was no surprise, because I do this more often than I do not, but I am still good. Probably. ” I’ll leave you to discover the rest on your own.” –Alison Luterman, Author of In the Time of Great Fires and Hard Listening
“Barrie Cole has long been placing imaginary jars atop imaginary hills. Her ambiguously concrete work layers childlike simplicity over seasoned melancholy to produce piercing, wondrous images of charming, discomfiting transformation. ” –Justin Hayford Chicago Reader
“Chicago’s short-order chef of language and empathy.” –Kerry Reid Ghost Light, Chicago Reader
Available at Finishing Line Press and on Amazon.
Barrie Cole is a critically acclaimed Chicago-based writer who has written more than 15 plays including Reality is an Activity, Capacity, Meaning is Tricky, Reverse Gossip, Elevator Tours and Fruit Tree Backpack along with numerous poems, essays, monologues and hybrid works. Lacquer is a Thrilling Word is her first book.
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