Books by Ellery Akers
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New Book: Winner of the 2024 Blue Light Award
A Door into the Wild: Poetry and Art
Blue Light Press
A Door into the Wild won the 2024 Blue Light Book Award.
Praise for A Door into the Wild
“…An eloquent delight to page through, one poem and hand-drawn illustration at a time. A fascinating, reflective, thought-provoking and memorable read from cover to cover….Especially and unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, and college/university library Contemporary American Poetry and Landscape Art collections.”
– The Midwest Book Review
“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
“In her newest book…poet Ellery Akers brings all her senses to bear in her experience of the natural world. That world is a place filled with music: the sounds of birdsong, the clopping of a horse, moths tapping against a glass…. It is a place where fog blurs the trees and covers the moon with gauze. There is the smell of wet dust, of smoke. There is is the tangy taste of fresh pine needles. This is a world of poetry as prose, and prose offered up by the spoonful: each poem is just a few lines, each poem contains a universe. …..exquisitely elegant poetry.”
– Doris Ober, Point Reyes Light
“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
ASIN : B0CYSJ77YR
Publisher : Blue Light Press (September 24, 2024)
Paperback : 88 pages
ISBN-13 : 979-8350929829
Item Weight : 1.11 pounds
cover art: “Mill Valley Lumber”
© 2015 by Tom Killion
Swerve: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance
Blue Light Press
BookAuthority names Swerve Winner, Best Environmentalism Books of All Time, 100 Best Poetry Books of All Time, and also Best New Light eBooks.
Swerve shortlisted for the Poetry Book Awards, U.K.
Praise for Swerve: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance
“In the world we are in now, and the harrowing world to come, we need poems as guides, and as resistance to the forces that would corrupt and diminish us. For some time now, Ellery Akers has been crafting these necessary poems. Swerve is a book that confronts the primary issues of the 21st century with insight and candor, along with hope and courage.”
Joseph Stroud, author of Everything That Rises and Of This World: New and Selected Poems
“True and brave… I have just discovered a remarkable book.”
Kathleen Dean Moore, environmental activist and author of Piano Tide and Wild Comfort
“…An intelligent and deeply political set of poems.”
Kirkus Reviews
“…Ellery Akers’s powerful poems in Swerve are prescriptions for awareness, bolts of care. Whether about the last inauguration, war, water, bad teachers or climate change — each poem, as in "At Any Moment …" glistens with detail, and attention.”
Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times Magazine
“Original, deftly crafted, intellectually thought-provoking, emotionally compelling, exceptionally memorable, and showcasing an impressive literary talent, Swerve: Poems on Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance by Ellery Akers will prove to be an especially prized and appreciated addition to community, college, and university library Contemporary American Poetry collections. It should be noted for personal reading lists that Swerve: Poems on Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance is also readily available in a digital book format (Kindle, $9.97).”
Margaret Lane, The Midwest Book Review
“…If you have been longing to find a book that is inspirational, exhilarating, and positively embraces taking action to make the world a better place, Swerve is the book for you.”
Savanna Briscoe, Call me [Brackets]
“In a world gone mad, Akers offers her characteristic incisiveness, vigilance, and generosity. These poems mourn and celebrate at once. Akers... has written urgent poems that distill, honor, and lament our world, poems that grab us by the shoulders and wake us up to the reality of human injustice…. And woven through these lines of anger and grief is the powerful, still small voice of hope.”
Maggie Trapp, Poetry Northwest
“Akers’ language is often breathtaking, the imagery sometimes chilling, and the message always serious and empowering. The important takeaway is that it may not be easy to change the world, but it’s not too late. In fact, Akers offers convincing hope at a time we need it most.”
Susan Jones, MMM Newsletter
Publisher : Blue Light Press (January 24, 2020)
Paperback : 74 pages
ISBN-10 : 1421836408
ISBN-13 : 978-1421836409
Item Weight : 4.3 ounces
Dimensions : 6 x 0.18 x 9 inches
Practicing the Truth
Autumn House Press
Winner of the 2014 Autumn House Poetry Prize, judged by Alicia Ostriker
Winner of the 2015 San Francisco Book Festival Poetry Award
Winner of the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Award, Silver Medal in Poetry
Finalist for the 2015 Indie Book Award in Poetry
Finalist for the 2016 Northern California Book Award
Praise for Practicing the Truth
“I was astounded and carried away over and over by the poems in Ellery Akers’ second collection.......Readers will be hard-pressed to find another poet who speaks so honestly and clear-eyed about the anger, grief and joy of this life.”
— James Crews, Basalt
“....spare, moving, and gorgeous.......When Akers writes of her connection to the natural world, we are reminded of Emily Dickinson's precise yet off-kilter images, and reading Akers, like reading Dickinson, is an awakening.”
— Maggie Trapp, Daily Dose of Lit, Extract(s)
“....These stunning poems are a rare combination of confessional poetry and poetry that celebrates the natural world. Reading these poems, one has the feeling that Sylvia Plath and Mary Oliver could have collaborated on this text.....She is fearless as she confronts her own past and peerless as she invites us to regard the healing beauty of the natural world. The almost ecstatic resilience of Akers as a poet and naturalist reverberates in every line of this fine and impressive book....”
— Sonja James, The Journal
“Practicing the Truth is a book of gorgeous knowledge and unlikely couplings. A scientist’s precision marries a painter’s eye marries a Whitmanesque inhabitance of all being—insects, leaves, rocks, weathers, the narratives of many lives, her own not taking precedence over others. These honed, faceted, closely observed poems are no ordinary lyrics—they spring open the hidden wildness of both language and compassion.”
— Jane Hirshfield, Ploughshares
“With the passion and determination of an abuse survivor, the exploring mind of a naturalist, and the soul energy of a language-loving poet, Akers give us not one truth but layer on layer of overlapping truths....”
— Alicia Ostriker
“I've loved Ellery Akers' poems for a long time, and so am heartened to see this book of carefully wrought considerations about the ways we work at living, enduring, surviving, and finding ways to thrive. Akers struggles to bind the natural with unnatural, to understand how we are products of the universe, its explosive and violent energy as well as its silence and vastness....Practicing the Truth is one of those rare books one can't stop reading. It's that good, that compelling.”
— Dorianne Laux
“'Practicing the Truth' [title poem]: A compressed, charged family history, made vivid and convincing by its eloquence about the body, about the need for the mind to make restitution to the past.”
— Eavan Boland
“…Akers makes compelling poems by unfolding, line by line, a secret knowledge. She finds a tipping point in each stanza which becomes emotionally acute; then she holds that line with authority. The result is clarity of purpose, a promise met. We feel someone's in charge, and Akers makes every poem a shared interest with the reader… I can't say strongly enough how story becomes an art form in this book. Ellery Akers has the golden gift, with good profit to literature.”
Grace Cavalieri, The Washington Independent Review of Books
Order from Autumn House Press at info@autumnhouse.org
ASIN : 193876904X
Publisher : Autumn House Press; 1st edition (January 1, 2015)
Paperback : 80 pages
ISBN-10 : 9781938769047
ISBN-13 : 978-1938769047
Item Weight : 1.47 pounds
Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.3 x 8.5 inches
Knocking on the Earth
Wesleyan University Press
Praise for Knocking on the Earth
“Akers finds moments of utter mystery and terrifying beauty in the least expected and commonplace.”
— Booklist
“There is a kind of radiance in this book — earthy radiance — body light.”
— Women’s Review of Books
“This joy discovered within all the plodding difficulties of life is perhaps the greatest achievement of the book. To feel the weight of heavy boots, the boulders, the cold toads and earthworms, and then to rise up and find the language to speak of all of this in the voice of an angel, as in the last poem, "Advice from an Angel" takes vision and skill and courage. Ellery Akers clearly has all these qualities, and the clarity of her language brings it all straight to us.”
— Calyx
“These poems embody a quest for directness and a lost sense of the living world and a way of speaking for that; a quest for clarity of life and language. The pleasure they give comes in great part from the way the truth and simplicity of the experience come alive in the language, of course, and become indistinguishable from it. That life, that oneness, are a joy to discover — and one discovers them again and again in these poems which are themselves poems of discovery. The writing is original in the way that matters, not as a consequence of an effort to be different or trendy, but because of where they come from in the first place.”
— W.S. Merwin
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press; 0 edition (December 1, 1988)
Paperback : 60 pages
ISBN-10 : 0819511625
ISBN-13 : 978-0819511621
Item Weight : 3.2 ounces
Sarah’s Waterfall: A Healing Story About Sexual Abuse
Sarah’s Waterfall from Safer Society Press won a 2010 Mom's Choice Award (Gold) in the Juvenile Books Self-Improvement Category, a 2010 NAPPA Award in the Parenting Resources category, and a 2009 Skipping Stones Award in the Teaching and Parenting Resources Category.
Sarah’s Waterfall is a groundbreaking novel that provides hope and healing for pre-teen survivors. This comforting story of recovery starts when 11-year-old Sarah, an abuse survivor, comes to live with her beloved grandmother. The story unfolds in journal entries, at the start of the school year, as Sarah joins a girl’s survivor group led by the school psychologist. This illustrated narrative contains the latest healing exercises developed by psychologists Peter A. Levine and Julie Henderson and family and child therapist Maggie Kline. Though a work of fiction, Sarah’s Waterfall was written by a survivor for survivors as a healing tool to help girls and women become more empowered.
Praise for Sarah’s Waterfall
“This look at the feelings of an abused child through that child's eyes can let other victims know that they are not alone, and offer comfort and grounding for them. The exercises that Sarah uses in the book have been developed by professionals in the field of child psychology for the treatment of abuse victims.
The illustrations are marvelous, inspiring paintings that show Sarah's story through a child's perspective. This book should be in the hands of every professional therapist who works with abused children and in every school and library. It's a specialized tool with a specific audience in mind, though it could be read by, or to, any child to lay a foundation for prevention of sexual abuse.”
— Review on myShelf.com
“An exceptionally gentle, sensitive tool to aid in the healing process, with lovely illustrations.”
— University of Michigan Health System
“Sarah's Waterfall is as refreshing as nature itself. As a trauma therapist of sexually abused children, I was delighted that Ms. Akers truly took the somatic reins of telling a story that balances the hard work of healing with the resources of comfort, pleasure, grounding and safety as felt in the body. I can't wait to share this with the kids in my practice.”
— Maggie Kline, co-author with Peter Levine of Trauma Through a Child’s Eyes, North Atlantic, 2007
“Sarah’s Waterfall is a wonderfully sensitive, honest, and poignant depiction of a child’s journey toward healing from the devastating impact of sexual abuse. It is a beautifully written, thoroughly readable story… A powerful, original and important resource…”
— Tammy L. Leombruno, M.A., LCMHC
The New England Counseling and Trauma Center
“Sarah’s Waterfall is wonderful. It has a very soothing quality and covers many important issues in a very sophisticated, intelligent way… will help children because it normalizes the issue of sexual abuse and gives kids healthy strategies for coping.”
— Sherri Patterson, M.F.T., founder and director of California’s Touch Safety Program
Publisher : Safer Society Pr; First Edition (March 2, 2009)
Hardcover : 52 pages
ISBN-10 : 1884444792
ISBN-13 : 978-1884444791
Item Weight : 14.4 ounces
Order from bookstores below, or from Safer Society Press at (802) 247-3132.