Blue on a Blue Palette

(Paperback)

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Blue on a Blue Palettethrough hope and disappointment, to self-realization and acceptance. From free verses to abecedarians to centos, these poems replicate the many ways women travel through the stages of their lives, the journeys and challenges negotiated on a palette encompassing various shades of blue.

The poems in the collection also meditate on the condition of the planet as we navigate issues of race and culture, climate change, the impact of the pandemic, and the loss of landscape and species. The earths seas constitute a dominant metaphor threading the collections themes.

Reviews

"Maybe because Dave Brubecks Blue Rondo la Turk was the first piece of music my jazz-loving daddy ever played for me, and blue is, hands down, my favorite color, I fell head-over-heels for Lynne Thompsons snappy, all systems go paean to blue. Flying a banner of unfettered joy and lucidity, she champions African American resilience (Langston Wont Stay in His Grave) and fearless womanhood (A Womans Body Aging, Still Loves Itself)in the face of everyday ignorance and carnage. With the unfailing wand of her intelligence, empathy, and bulls-eye humor, everything this fast-paced poet contemplates turns to dazzling sparks and sleight-of-hand.

Cyrus Cassells author of The World That the Shooter Left Us

Lynne Thompsons Blue on a Blue Palette is at turnsand, often, all at onceold and new. That is, rooted strong in a long tradition and legitimately experimental. Thompsons range in form and subject matter is equaled only by the deftness with which she handles each. In these pages we get a true blue blueswoman who knows when to whisper and when to wail, one who has lived some, and means to make song of what shes seen.

John Murillo, author of Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry

Author Bio

Lynne Thompson was Los Angeles 2021-22 Poet Laureate and is a Poet Laureate Fellow of
the Academy of American Poets. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Press and Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar; and most recently, Fretwork, winner of the 2019 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize selected by Jane Hirshfield. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Thompson is the recipient of multiple awards including an Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, the Tucson Literary Festival Poetry Prize, and the Steven Dunn Poetry Prize as well as fellowships from the Summer Literary Series to study in Kenya and the Vermont Studio Center. An attorney by training, Thompson sits on the Boards of The Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. In June of 2022, she completed her four-year service as Chair of the Board of Trustees at Scripps College, her alma mater. Thompsons recent work can be found or is forthcoming in the literary journals Best American Poetry 2020, Kenyon Review, The Common, The Massachusetts Review, and Copper Nickel, and the anthology Beat No Beat, among others.