Dehlia Ackley
Lewd Wilderness
First Edition Paperback
93 pages
26 photographs
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In Lewd Wilderness, Dehlia Ackley explores poetic expression in three parts,
her original poetry, erasure poetry, and film photography. Her poems in Bloomt from Shadowsare glances of observations that use play and mystery to lure the reader into activating their own
experiences and imagination for interpretation. The words create a place for wandering in the mind,
just like a wilderness does for the body. Grate is an erasure of Jean Cocteau’s Grace Notes, which
explores a modality of writing without the act of writing, revealing a text within a text, to create a
new mystery out of an existing mystery. The process of erasure becomes like sculpture, hewing
away at a block of text until a latent subject emerges, like a swan out of a slab of marble. In the last
section of the book, Photographs, Dehlia captures through happenstance the anomalies of nature
and experience. The images notate textures or monolithic shapes, like visual signposts on a path
into the unknown.
“Dehlia is as true an artist as they come. She looks at the beautiful, the tragic, the horrific, the lost,
and she doesn’t look away. Her poems are honest, humorous, devastating, serious and casual,
timeless and of now, subtle and not. To see the world through her developed lens is a gift and
very exciting.” -Erica Schreiner
Dehlia Ackley is a poet, artist, and photographer living in Portland, Oregon with her husband,
Caspar Sonnet, and two cats.
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