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 lives 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

Singular, charming work. Gill's poetry shines where passion, precision, memory, vision, all meet in harmony and chaos. A dynamic collection full of wonder and magic.

- Jose Hernandez Diaz, author of The Parachutist & Bad Mexican, Bad American

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 and Burns

Erika Gill's poetry vibe checks the pulse of us, writing of memorial spaces, aloneness and quiet with the affect of a warm window looking into a broken world. The inner monologue of this collection seems largely to have taken shape within the pandemic's gilded nature; Gill addresses death to come "by covid or cop / enlarged, encapsulating." They write of the heart, that they "never loved with that spare part." They write of ruined blackberries and carpets grieved deeply through the lens of reductive loss. Erika writes through a system of grieving with an open heart, reaching out, into and through the music of Phoebe Bridgers, through the blossoms growing in a neighbor's yard, and in contemplation of a greater good for justice. As the collection tapers away, we feel a sense of having been tapered ourselves; whittled down to our barest bone.

-Eszter Takacs, author of Together We Will Talk Right Down to Earth & The Spectacular Crash