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 "we've gestated nothing but rage." Here, I believe, is where Gill wants us to start. —Monica Prince, author of A Choreopoem
Rendered in pigeon wing and trachea, worm and teeth, incense and exhaust, Erika Gill's Lone Yellow Flower manifests the world—ragged, raw, and beautiful—as scrying pools to peer into interiority, to see love and rage and sorrow riot, writhe, and swirl. This is a book for anyone who has stood before the opened earth and let the scent of loam take them elsewhere, for anyone who has cut their palm and saw there an unspoken language. "a millstone at my neck / toss me in the mossy pond / my craft would make me float" —Todd Dillard, author of Ways We Vanish and Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance