The award-winning first collection from acclaimed poet Lynne Thompson, this vital book uses the music and language of the poet's hybrid culture to describe a vivid world of Afro-Caribbean heritage.

Extroverted, declarative, jazzy, and vital, BEG NO PARDON commands attention from the first word to the last. Lynne Thompson's poetry is brimming with personality and attitude in the very best sense--pride, dignity, and graceful indignation--in poems about the search for legacy, love of legacy, and joy of legacy. Thompson explores identity from a little-known and complicated beginning, both personally and culturally. Using the music and language of her hybrid culture Thompson describes a vivid world of Afro-Caribbean heritage and late 20th-century life.

"In Lynne Thompson's 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

"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 of mythic missives."--Tony Barnstone

"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

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies.