Books by Ally Acker

The long awaited, vastly expanded update to the 1990 groundbreaking classic used in universities worldwide. Features the pioneering female filmmakers that transformed movies behind the scenes since 1896. A perennial edition.

Volume I : 1896 - 1950's - ForeWord by Judith Crist

Volume II : 1960 - 2010  -  ForeWord by Jeanine Basinger 

One critic wrote about Some Help From the Dead, "These are flawless poems, poems I like as much as any of W.S. Merwin's poems at his best."

In this, her third collection, Ally Acker continues her fascination with how the familiar proves to be mysterious, how the present, past, and future all merge as our lives progress. As Elizabeth Bishop once wrote, the art of losing isn't hard to master. And so with her ear tuned to the ground, garnering wisdom from those who have passed,

Acker listens for the lyrical cadences of nature on what is lost, and found again. 

Ally Acker's Surviving Desire may remind us more of Sappho than of most contemporaries. The same trajectory of desire and longing that arcs higher and higher, the same clear, raw grief at the loved one's denial. 

These are poems with a preternatural sharpness of detail of the natural world, lit up and honed to a knife's edge by the rapt gaze of the poet, to whom desire is the terrible teacher.

                                                                     --Irene McKinney