Lone Yellow Flower

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A collection of poetry by Erika Gill forthcoming from Querencia Press.

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Praise

Lone Yellow Flower simmers with a quiet and often lonely fury that eventually turns into energy and knowledge. These poems circulate the body through the veins of nonconformity, emphasizing what love can look like when laid bare. Rather than define itself, this collection resists categorization, offering us a new way to consider allowing access to one’s inner truth. Does anyone deserve the luxury of our honest selves? Do we owe our pain to the world? Gill masterfully attends to these questions and more by telling it plain: “we’ve gestated nothing but rage.” Here, I believe, is where Gill wants us to start.

—Monica Prince, author of Roadmap: A Choreopoem

Erika Gill is willing to suffer the bloody lips, cracked hands, and aching feet that the poetry of embodiment demands. In Lone Yellow Flower, their speaker wanders alone from meadows to city streets grappling with the “cherry hot coin” of mortality and wondering how to bear life in a body that disobeys. In these visceral, high-stakes poems, we see how biracialism, disability, and queerness create labyrinthine paradoxes that are both dazzling and terrifying to explore. Within Gill’s poetry leaves a steadfast earnestness, a voice reminding us that “it is the animal that fears the human in me.” Their blend of icy realism and corporeal honesty results in a collection that is evocative, timeless, and devastatingly honest.

 —Rita Mookerjee, author of False Offering

Erika Gill’s Lone Yellow Flower is an act of rebellion and reclamation. The poet invites the reader to examine the personal and the political, orange juice and carcasses, blackberries and pandemics. Gill breathes poetry into the experiences of heartbreak and a world on fire. Their poetry comes defiantly out of the ashes of old dead white poets and living bloodthirsty oligarchs, certainly outlasting both. Above all, the poems in Lone Yellow Flower are beautiful songs of solidarity, resisting heart-eaters and refusing indifference for fellow humans. When grief feels insurmountable, these poems are a must-read.

 — SG Huerta, author of GOOD GRIEF & Burns

Selected works

Some of the pieces in Lone Yellow Flower have been published previously – you can find selected pieces in the following places:

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