Poetry

Blue on a Blue Palette

Lynne Thompson’s Blue on a Blue Palette reflects on the condition of women—their joys despite their histories, and their insistence on survival as issues of race, culture, pandemic, and climate threaten their livelihoods. The documentation of these personal odysseys—which vary stylistically from abecedarians to free verse to centos—replicate the many ways women travel through the stages of their lives, all negotiated on a palette encompassing various shades of blue. These poems demand your attention, your voice: “Say history. Claim. Say wild.”

Praise for Blue on a Blue Palette

“With the unfailing wand of her intelligence, empathy, and bull’s-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 Thompson’s Blue on a Blue Palette is at turns—and, often, all at once—old and new. That is, rooted strong in a long tradition and legitimately experimental. Thompson’s 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 she’s seen.” —John Murillo, author of Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry

“Singing the blues in this beautiful and devastating collection, Lynne Thompson calls on the tradition of poets such as Patricia Smith and Adrienne Rich to examine a culture of injustice and loss for women and for people of color...This is an important collection, one to keep close, as the layers of resilience and hard-won praise grow richer with each read.” —Ellen Bass, author of Indigo and Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poetry

FormatPaperback

Publication DateApril 16, 2024

ISBN9781960145147

$18.00

About the Author

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 four collections of poetry, Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Press and Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar; Fretwork, winner of the 2019 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize selected by Jane Hirshfield, and most recently, Blue on a Blue Palette (BOA, 2024). 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. Thompson’s 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.