Swerve: Poems on Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance
"One of the best Environmentalism books of all time" - BookAuthority
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The late W. S. Merwin said Akers's nature poems are a "joy to discover" because they embody a "lost sense of the living world." In Swerve, Akers celebrates the wild while facing climate change, extinction, and loss. These poems confront us with the many threats to our world, eventually guiding us through stages of grief towards hope and action.
The poems in Swerve give voice to the shock, fear, and desperation many feel about the environment. They meditate on the beauty of the non-human world. They champion women in the #MeToo movement who are empowering themselves and making vital changes.
Powerful and compassionate, Swerve is ultimately a call to activism, inspiring readers to "swerve" and demand a better world.
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.
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Become an affiliatePraise for Swerve
"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
Previous Praise for Ellery Akers
"Ellery Akers has the golden gift, with good profit to literature."
--The Washington Independent Review of Books
"Akers finds moments of utter mystery and terrifying beauty in the least expected and commonplace."
--Booklist
"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 gives us not one truth, but layer on layer of overlapping truths...."
--Alicia Ostriker
"There is a kind of radiance in this book--earthy radiance--body light."
--Women's Review of Books
"Practicing the Truth is one of those rare books one can't stop reading. It's that good, that compelling."
--Dorianne Laux, about Practicing the Truth
" ...An intelligent and deeply political set of poems." --KIrkus Reviews