Start With A Small Guitar

START WITH A SMALL GUITAR

ISBN 9780988924833

Start With A Small Guitar, from the 2021 Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, is a collection of poems that celebrate and suspect, extol and mourn, despise and pray for love, in all its terrible, bewitching iterations. Neither biography nor dream--despite the way the poems' titles mislead--these poems hope and pretend and, in the end, wrap their arms around a language that gives rise to love's mysteries. The poet hopes that her readers will be bewildered and enchanted, infuriated and left on a precipice.

Start With a Small Guitar is a revelatory work. In these starkly crafted and lyrical stanzas, rules are broken, expectations shattered, new paths are forged and rafters are rattled. Thompson is a deft craftswoman, and her only direction is forward. This, ladies and gentlemen, is where poetry is going. Catch up if you can.

—Patricia Smith, author of Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah

Lynne Thompson’s Start With a Small Guitar is a dazzling collection of love poems, wickedly wise and stitched with the darkest nuances of desire. These poems are rich in childhood play and the adult pleasures of consolation, yet even at their most reflective and speculative these poems are fleshed by the carnal. This new collection of Lynne Thompson’s is either a handbook to bliss or the abyss, and she insists that the reader – each one of us -- decide.

—David St. John, author of The Auroras

Lynne Thompson does what the bravest poets do best—she returns to the past to offer us a glimpse into ourselves. Start With A Small Guitar is the star-filled view from the tarmac, a record of what escapes from the opened mouth, a gaze into the once-locked drawers of memory. In elegant and concise stanzas, Thompson offers us a poetry of necessity as pure as desire and as warm as breath.

—Jacqueline Jones LaMon, author of Last Seen

Excerpt:

Ars Poetica, Ruthless

Like every woman duped by prayer,
our patter comes in sets of three:
believing, unrelated, naked. No one
is upright. No one moves noiselessly.
Language is a porcupine; beggar bones
slighting flesh; filaments kissing.