Tulip Fever

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



Tulip Fever is a power ballad for those of us who see beyond "the obvious world" of jocks, pretty girls, and capitalist illusions of happiness. Lori Lamothe gives us a subversive pastoral from the artist's eye without undermining the ecstatic reds and blues of life. Both floral and rife with urban decay, Lamothe's palette is fire and ice. She paints portraits of the antiseptic cancer ward and sun-drenched New England snowscapes. Even in haunted histories and disaster that "curves out of nowhere," Tulip Fever is a respite you earn for skeptically daring to embrace the magical, fleeting nature of both beauty and intimacy. Lamothe's voice is both gentle and burning-her images dreamy and sharp-and you will be rewarded on your journey "all the way to the edge of knowing."

-Jessica Lee McMillan, author of What You Exceed