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I am honored to be joining again with writer/poet,
Katy E. Ellis, to have my painting, Quartet at the Pond, featured
on the cover her new book: Forty Bouts in the Wilderness. This
book is a masterpiece; its curiosity and warmth draws me in with
every turn of the page. In a few lines, the imagery radiates;
part of its allure is the permission it gives to slow down and
take pleasure in reading, feel/seeing the moments as they unfold
without knowing where they are taking me. But there is more…as
the writer keeps bravely turning to her own past with fresh wondering,
the elegant restraint on these pages gives way to a sense of life
revealing itself to her, to me, to us, giving birth to awe. I
can’t help but begin to see my own moments with new eyes.
This is a great gift.
Look for publication in March 2025 by Moonpath Press!
Ellis weaves shimmering lines of verse and narrative
into an exquisite prosimetrum (reminiscent of travelogue haibun)
to examine her own journeys: the pilgrim’s search, the outcast’s
blind wanderings…the complicated, shadow-streaked joy of
the prodigal, returned (re-turned) home. These poems cradle grief
and exultation, emptiness and abundance, the keen acuities of
loss…and received grace. This collection - its quietude and
immensity, deftness of language and depths of feeling - is devastating,
stunning, incandescent.
-Sati Mookherjee, author of Eye and Ways of Being.
A detail of my painting, What Appears Two, was commissioned
for the cover of Katy E. Ellis’ beautiful book, Home
Water, Home Land, Published by Tolsun Books, 2022
Autobiographical in reach and structure, Home
Water, Home Land by Katy E. Ellis records and chronicles a coming-of-age,
the creation of marriage and family in conjunction with excommunication,
expatriatism, and recounts Ellis’ experiences during 9/11.
In all these movements—from church, land, and tragedy—it
becomes apparent the collection excavates the realm of the exile
and does so with grace and compassion marking it as an astonishing
book by an exceptional writer.
-Heather Simony MacLeod, The Burden of Snow,
Little Yellow House, Intermission
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