Book Details:
Author: Barrie Cole
Release Date: 15 May 2026Series:
Genre: Poetry
Format: E-book
Pages: 102 pages
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Blurb:
Barrie Cole’s Lacquer is a Thrilling Word, invites readers to immerse themselves in the sublimity of language through unconventional forms and inventive metaphors. In this full-length collection of poems and short prose, Cole’s signature word play and strange takes can be found in to-do lists, fortune cookie fortunes, run-on sentences, and more. Each poem somersaults toward the places where the beauty and absurdity in living are revealed in equal parts.
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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…”
Lacquer is a Thrilling Word is the newest addition to longtime Chicago resident Barrie Cole’s catalog which includes more than a dozen plays like Fruit Tree Backpack, Reality is an Activity, and Elevator Tours as well as multiple hybrid works, essays, short stories and monologues. Her work has received multiple Critic’s Choice Selections and other critical praise. A regular in Chicago’s Storefront theater scene, her plays have been produced by Theater Oobleck, Prop Theater, Curious Theater Branch, Labyrinth Arts Collective and others. She has appeared in many live reading shows as well including f Miss Spoken, Write Club, Story Sessions, Poetry at the Green, You’re Being Ridiculous and many others. She lives in Chicago near Lake Michigan with her partner and her two grown children live nearby.,
“Delightful summer read!”
– Iona Whishaw, best-selling author of the Lane Winslow mystery series.
Review
Lacquer is a Thrilling Word by Barrie Cole is an experimental collection of poetry and short prose that finds wonder, absurdity and emotional meaning in the most ordinary corners of life.
Fortune-cookie messages, grocery-store conveyor belts, drive-through orders, traffic lights, to-do lists and household objects all become starting points for imaginative digressions. Author Cole approaches language with almost childlike curiosity, delighting in how words sound, collide and unexpectedly transform one another, while allowing deeper concerns like grief, depression, ageing, parenthood, addiction and romantic longing to surface beneath the playfulness.
Author Cole’s greatest strength is her ability to make association itself feel like an art form. A misprinted pen becomes an estate populated by eels; icicles become a bouquet and then an award for being alive; a cardboard piano used by movers becomes a tender metaphor for the weight a family will eventually have to carry. Forms are equally fluid: the collection moves between conventional verse, prose poetry, invented fortunes, lists, monologues, instructions and exuberant run-on sentences. Pieces such as “Object Relations”, “To Do”, “Still”, “Self Portrait with Icicles” and “The Cardboard Piano” demonstrate how skilfully Cole can begin with something faintly ridiculous and arrive somewhere unexpectedly intimate.
What impressed me most, however, was the melancholy beneath the humour. “Sting” turns from the strange image of a bee-stung tongue towards addiction, childhood trauma and suicide, while “I Knew the Other Ways It Could Be” preserves a stranger’s happiness like an heirloom passed from one person to another. Even the lighter poems seem aware of mortality and disappearance. Cole’s surreal imagery seldom feels decorative; it is often her way of approaching experiences that would become too blunt or painful if expressed directly. There is tenderness here, particularly in the poems about children, friendship, love and the effort required to remain receptive to beauty.
At times, the collection’s abundance works slightly against it. Several of the longer prose poems continue their associative journeys after their strongest emotional or comic moment has already landed, and recurring techniques such as extended lists, repetitions, playful definitions and linguistic detours become a little less surprising when encountered in close succession. A more selective arrangement, with some of the longer pieces gently tightened, could have given the most arresting images even greater room to resonate. The division into three sections might also have felt more purposeful had each section possessed a more discernible emotional progression.
Still, Lacquer is a Thrilling Word is inventive, generous and entirely unafraid of seeming peculiar. It asks readers to reconsider the objects and words they have stopped noticing and to recognise imagination as a genuine means of survival. This will especially appeal to readers who enjoy prose poetry, hybrid forms, surreal humour and writing that can move from silliness to sorrow within a single breath. Barrie Cole’s world is eccentric, vulnerable and remarkably alive, and spending time inside it makes the familiar world outside the book feel a little more enchanted.
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