Blue Light Press, paperback

Publication Date: September 24, 2024

Publisher Marketing: 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