Diary in Irregular Ink ~ Lori Lamothe

About the Book:

Lori Lamothe’s poetry mini-collection DIARY IN IRREGULAR INK traces the connections between past and present, light and shadow, the sublime and the mundane. The poems fuse and dissolve to create an impressionistic, ever-shifting record of seemingly incongruous times, people and places: a nail salon in a shopping mall and a pattern factory during the Civil War, a mermaid in full moonlight and Joan of Arc, a seaside wedding and a post-apocalyptic backyard.

Diary in Irregular Ink is a collection of consistently realized poems that unite to form a tight coherent whole. The poems are irregular in the sense that they are ‘contrary to rule,’ that they don’t conform to expectations—this is a diary but not at all confessional. And we’re meant to notice the ink. While getting a mani-pedi with her daughter, the poet underlines a sentence in a book about physics and it becomes a “yellow ribbon [that] / unravels to infinity / then disappears inside a mirror’s open door.” Open doors are an invitation and a mirror’s open door can lead anywhere, here sliding along a vivid word-scape where images echo across pages, where lines turn corners of surprise, and where the overall effect is that you want to read the poems again. –David Wyman

Lori Lamothe gives us glimpses, snapshots that flow, reveal and sometimes even shock. –Leah Maines, author of Beyond the River