Little motors: some love letters

Author: Justin Lacour

Publisher: Bottlecap Press (2024)

In Little motors, Justin Lacour writes love letters that incorporate art, mythology, politics, B movies, and Keanu Reeves. Little motors seeks romance and intimacy amid the familiarity and mysterious power dynamics of marriage. In Lacour’s poem, “Marriage is this animal with two heads,/one body,” something awkward but also magical. As the poem progresses, the couple tells each other stories, myths, and fairy tales, gradually transforming their marriage into an epic of their own.

The love letters of Little motors are comic, tender, and vulnerable, comfortable with classical literature, but also with Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter. Little motors plays with the conventions of the romantic poem while, at the same time, never giving up on finding that place in marriage where “there’s no darkness between us.”