LONE LILY

Out of print.

Published in the Spring 2021 Collection.

Tariq Thompson

  • “Reading Tariq Thompson’s LONE LILY I kept thinking of that Hannah Arendt line about how “the new always appears in the guise of a miracle”— these poems feel both totally new, and totally miraculous. Thompson is a visionary poet: “Beneath the southern sun, beneath my own fear, I daydream a loving world.” But he’s also a gifted formalist, a singular syntactical architect. It’s thrilling to witness the emergence of a real lyric talent. I will be reading Thompson’s poems for years and years.”

    KAVEH AKBAR, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf & Pilgrim Bell

  • "With these poems, Tariq Thompson animates Black communal history as an intimate companion to their lyric voice, furnishing our accepted notions of individuality with meaningful echoes of the plural. Somehow, in the midst of their striking meditations on the contours of solitude, Thompson offers us a love letter to the Black literary tradition. This book is F.U.B.U. Watch out for this poet."

    IMANI DAVIS

  • “In LONE LILY, Tariq Thompson is a seer, evocative and tender, conjuring the wonder in grief and the grief in wonder. So brutally does he love the desolate, the peripheral, the lonesome that he, in this communion, becomes them, speaking to the figures populating his poems like beloveds reflected in a mirror. By weaving through prophecy and remembrance, misbegotten history and the wounds from its waging, Thompson tugs on the thread that binds myth and making with a bewilderment that’s soft as petals and incisive as teeth. Open these pages and watch them teem—there’s sentience blooming in their lines, in the grace and twine of their movements. If you’re able, at some point, to put this book down—good luck with that—I think you’ll find that it will not, in fact, let you go. Lucky you.”

    ANTHONY THOMAS LOMBARDI

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