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80 pages, $15, ISBN 978-0-9794582-0-0
Lynne Thompson was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, by parents born in the Windward Islands, West Indies. She received her B.A. from Scripps College and a J.D. from Southwestern University School of Law.
She currently serves as the Director of Employee and Labor Relations at the University of California, Los Angeles. An active member of the Los Angeles literary scene and a Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry has been widely published and anthologized.
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Winner, Great Lakes Colleges Association
New Writers Award
“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.
Read more here.
“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
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How I Learned Where We Come From
When she wants him for the late meal, she calls
supper soon Kingstown-man, curried goat, sticky-wicket
and he responds, testy, not yet ready, Bequia-woman,
Anglican church, basket with no handles.
We children, we laugh, head for the hills
and the tall sweet-grasses, listen for the lilt
of frangipani tantie. She call come in now
pigeon peas, mangoes, poor man's orchids —
then we run, for true, and supper is all
cassava root, callaloo, very little sugar cane
and we're in it all at once: choirsong above
Mt. Pleasant, Port Elizabeth, harp of Paget Farm
till Father, he say no, defends his slipped-on wishes
for Soufrière, Sans Souci, Wallilabou Bay
and so on into the evening, calypso and steel drums,
a little Rasta and Bob Marley for us young'uns
until, finally, we are no longer black ironwood —
wood that will not float.
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