The poems in Lacquer is a Thrilling Word explore unconventional forms- fortune cookie fortunes, drive-thru orders and to-do lists wrestling pleasure from the mundane and ridiculous while reveling in permission, attention and the sublimity of language. There are run-on sentence poems including one about assembling new varieties of mushrooms. There is a poem about angelwatching (as opposed to birds) and another about collecting a bouquet of icicles.
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