Publisher's Synopsis
Winner of the 2024 Blue Light Press Book Award, A Door into the Wild is both a celebration of California landscapes and a meditation about love, loss, and the healing power of nature. In this collection of prose poems and drawings, multifaceted poet and artist Ellery Akers offers the reader a profound tribute to the Earth.
"It is rare to find an artist who can wed their mark-making to the music of their poetry. Ellery Akers is one of these exceptional creatures. Her book, A Door into the Wild, is a sublime conjunction of word and image and an invitation to the reader to participate in an extraordinary conversation between dazzling drawings and subtle, heart-rending poems. This book is a gift."
- Gary Young, author of Even So: New and Selected Poems and That's What I Thought
"Ellery Akers is a poet and a naturalist, and a devoted observer of the natural world. Her drawings have the casual authority of the Scottish artist Joan Eardley, scale shifting between forest and meadow, sunlit pond and shimmering ocean. In her gorgeous new book, A Door into the Wild, those drawings are intercut with a series of brief but radiant prose poems. Encounters with nature are at the heart of her work: epiphany, delight, and interspecies communion."
- Christian McEwen, author of In Praise of Listening and World Enough and Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down
About the Author
Ellery Akers's newest book, A Door into the Wild: Poetry and Art, won the 2024 Blue Light Book Award. Among her previous collections of poetry are Swerve: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance (2020), which won BookAuthority's Award for the Best Environmentalism Books of All Time; Practicing the Truth (2015), which won the Autumn House Poetry Prize, an Independent Publisher Book Award, and the San Francisco Book Festival Poetry Award; and Knocking on the Earth (1989), named a Best Book of the Year by the San Jose Mercury News. She is also the author of a children's novel, Sarah's Waterfall (2009), which won a NAPPA Award, a Mom's Choice (Gold) Award, and a Skipping Stones Award. Among her other honors are the Poetry International Prize, the John Masefield Award, Sierra magazine's Nature Writing Award, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, and Headlands Center for the Arts. Her poetry has been featured on National Public Radio and has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, Poetry, and many other journals. Her nature essays have appeared in The Sun, Story Quarterly, California Living, and in anthologies such as Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals (1998); Short Takes: Model Essays for Composition (1999); and Stories from Where We Live: The California Coast (2001). An award-winning artist as well, Akers has exhibited in museums and galleries nationally, including the Anchorage Museum, the San Diego Museum of Art, and the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art. She lives on the Northern California coast and teaches private poetry workshops.
