Beg No Pardon

by Lynne Thompson

“In Lynne Thompson’s new collection, Beg No Pardon, the poems move from precise reflections on childhood to the rights of passage of young adult years, and then on to all the days of joy and despair, solitude, longing, and self-knowledge that follow in a life richly lived and acutely observed. Thompson is a poet who revels in language — that ‘house of many pleasures.’ Like the ‘one good eye’ of her ‘Unworshipped Woman,’ this collection delights, ‘it flash—’ ”

—Natasha Trethewey

“There are obvious pleasures here: Thompson’s improvisational sense of the line, her rich, haunted, but not morose sack of images, and her depth of subject combined with an accessibility for which I feel grateful. Her allusions are not "classical," but they are archetypal. If Thompson limited herself to the ancestral/mystical, the collection might become redundant. Instead, she moves into the present tense of sex, and jazz, and blackness, claiming a delicious word-palette. The poems here seduce and confront and refuse to be anonymous — or they revel in the transgressions anonymity affords. They really do beg no pardon.”

— Judge of the GLCA New Writers Award.

“The poems in Lynne Thompson’s Beg No Pardon sing of her Caribbean ancestors, won’t be told the can or can’t do, have the perfume of sin bleeding from their fingertips. These poems drip from lips the color of peril. Here is a deep ode to blackness, an incantatory chant from a deep well full of mythic missives. Read this book.”

—Tony Barnstone