In Lewd Wilderness, Dehlia Ackley explores poetic expression in three parts, her original poetry, erasure poetry and film photography. Her poems in “Bloomt from Shadows” are 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.

Sweet Wreath documents art-music in central Alabama & fosters a network of artists working in other parts of the country and world as a means of cultural exchange.  “Our mission is to amplify original voices & ideas through the publishing of albums, zines and poetic literature.  The label's releases are only half of our work, acting as visible markers of activity which also includes activism, oral history documentation, folkloric research, environmental stewardship, hosting community events, potlucks, collaborating with local non-profits and contributing new ideas to the cultural discourse.”

Sweet Wreath (Birmingham, AL), 2023

First edition paperback

96 pages, 26 photos