Old Scooter Poetry by Karen Lee

Have you ever ridden on a scooter, wind in your hair, the road laid out before you like a ribbon of gravel, dirt, and concrete?  Find that path through the Old Scooter Poetry of Karen Lee, in her unique tribute to the world of scooters and the people who ride them.  Lee manages to bring to life the fervor of the scooter rider, personified in the delicate art of maintenance this machine requires.  These poems remind us of what freedom on a sunny day might really feel like, if we are traveling that day on a scooter that’s up and running smoothly.  Her work is vivid in sounds and scenery, the vroom of an engine and the sputter as it dies, and the beauty of a roadside outlook on an autumn day.  Follow her poems as they wind through the life of a scooter, its incarnation as a Vespa, and the riders who love to drive them.

—Mary Sexon, author of Marriage Maps and Driven Destinies, Her Addiction An Empty Place at the Table. Sexon has five Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net.

Karen Lee’s chapbook, Old Scooter Poetry, is a delightful collection of poems regarding her husband’s passion for collecting retro scooters to fix and ride. Besides being a sometimes passenger she also becomes inspired by the old scooters. Here she commemorates them in poems of humor and concern which honor and document her husband’s love of his vintage scooters. She even falls a little for the old scooters herself, evident as she writes “Slow drifting by the moonlight/on an old scooter is all/it takes to find/romance.” You will find reason to enjoy the journey with these old scooters as you move through Lee’s poems.

–Lylanne Musselman, author of It’s Not Love, Unfortunately and Staring