Little motors: some love letters by Justin Lacour
Bottlecap Press, 2024
Review by Stephanie K. Merrill
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Take a trip in these little motors that hum. The little letter poems in Justin Lacour’s chapbook are epic in their smallness, epic in their playfulness, epic in their gravity. I found myself savoring them one by one. As in all good poems, much is gained from multiple readings.
Justin Lacour’s style in these poems is sometimes reminiscent of Richard Brautigan’s writing in Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt. Lacour writes: “…and later i dreamed of a fox taller than me in the morning i sat down and wrote some lines about your hair.” Sometimes Lacour’s style is reminiscent of the electricity of Khadijah Queen’s I’m So Fine as Lacour writes seamlessly about apparel: “You’re wearing a black maternity dress even though baby is a toddler…something has changed my dreams of you have become radical.” And always these poems are filled with the transcendent love that speaks to the light of being: “already the poem has gone from talking about power to thinking about your body you say the poem is lost you want a new poem where the snake serves you and begins to swallow this poem.”
Who does not love a poem that makes the reader laugh out loud, that confesses to dreaming about making out with the governor of Michigan, that reaches into Ancient Greece in the middle of watching your love paint her nails black? The juxtaposition here has some power:
i’m sorry last night in a dream i made out with the governor of Michigan she kept telling me
how much she liked my poems and if i’m going to apologize for this let me also apologize
for my grandfather who sincerely believed part of America died when women began wearing
pants… my grandfather never got to read Lysistrata where women control sex… i read it in bed while
you paint your nails black
This unabashed truth of the heart matters as it moves the language beyond the one-dimensional realm of the intellectual.
Form is function, and the form of these poems in Little motors: some love letters represents the edgy messiness of love; stream of consciousness defies the status quo that says text must be tidy. The lack of punctuation feels like an act of resistance, a tribute to the speaker’s love, a deference to the power of women, even in their half-life status bestowed upon them by our culture: “If given a chance you say men concoct things half woman half monster like Medusa or Stupefyin’ Jones” and “the feminist magician saws a man in half but she puts him back together differently i think or she doesn’t put him back at all.”
I am reminded of the recognition of the half-life of women that Adrienne Rich speaks about in her Twenty-One Love Poems: “this still unexcavated hole called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.” In fact, the poems in Little motors: some love letters become more overtly feminist as they drive towards the ending poems:
the women are immune to the sirens’ song it’s like a striptease the women already know how it ends
but the men jump ship en masse to swim towards the song this is the part of the epic where the
women debate Marx discuss what’s left of Freud… when i find you you say jewelry is not vanity women
needed it when they couldn’t own land
Words here are built around the scaffolding of affection. They climb through history that is sometimes hidden or forgotten.
The poems in Little motors: some love letters have a voice that is true–one that has the ability to take over the page in its own way. Love is not sentimental in these poems, but couched in the details of singular moments germinating from memories that transcend time and place:
no you say we will watch the rain come down soaking the chickens the same rain that somewhere
soaks horses soaks coati a kinkajou you’d own a kinkajou also known as a night ape if it was legal
you want it to be legal and you outdream me…and so like a snake devoured by a bigger snake your
dreams keep eating my dreams
Quiet understanding leads to this moment; the placement earlier of “we will not be watching Treasure 2 Book of Secrets again no” with the rain coming down adds to the multidimensional quality of the poem.
Never underestimate the power of small. The poems in Little motors: some love letters are richly textured in depth and in breadth as they converse with both ancient and modern archetypes in their “punk chivalry.” In reading these poems, it feels a bit like the motors are little spaceships heading to Venus (where some say women are from), transcending this grounded earth. Little motors: some love letters is an accumulation of writings that portray a fearless love that is manifested in fearless language.
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Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans with his wife and three children, and edits Trampoline. He is the author of five chapbooks of poems and his first full-length collection, A Season in Heck & Other Poems, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press.
Stephanie K. Merrill (she/her) is a retired high school English teacher. She has works published in a variety of literary magazines including Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, UCity Review, and Trampoline Poetry. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Her first full-length collection, Finding the Heart, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. She lives in Austin, Texas.
ID: Cover of Little motors: some love letters by Justin Lacour.
Psaltery & Lyre 