(October 20, 2025) Nature, memories, emotions, loss, and healing all meet with grace and honesty in the subliminal place in Ellen Lord’s new poetry book Vigil published by the Modern History Press of Ann Arbor, MI.
Illustrated by artist Joanna Walitalo (Pelkie, MI), Vigil includes over 40 poems divided into four sections: “Desire,” “Thin Space,” “Shine,” and “God is Naked Love.” Together, they form a heartfelt tribute to family, community, and the endurance of love. The book employs verse as the medium that gauges the depth of Lord’s feelings and reflection.
Vigil conveys the poet’s Romantic sensibilities as it weighs the ephemeral existence of human life, leaving behind loss and grief, against the grandeur of nature that nurses the human soul by its timeless beauty and healing power. Lord connects this receptivity to nature back to her childhood in the Upper Peninsula, a childhood that was wonderful in many ways yet had its familiar challenges for a young soul. As she recalls:
“I struggled with stuttering in social situations and I took refuge in the natural world which became a lifelong habit. I learned to listen to the voices of the forest and observe nuances of weather and the seasons.”
Author and professor John Mauk (Interlochen, MI), who is the host of the “Prose from the Underground” podcast, felt the music in Lord’s poems in Vigil as he welcomed the finely tuned poems in the book:
“While the individual poems emerge from a singular voice, they form a concert of mood and utterance. Confessions, admissions, declarations, radical assertions all sing together.”
ELLEN LORD, a behavioral health therapist by profession, is no stranger to the literary scene of Upper Michigan. She splits her time between Trout Creek (Ontonagon County) and Charlevoix. Lord often reads at literary gatherings across the region and supports regional writing groups such as Fresh Water Poets and Charlevoices. Vigil is her second book of poetry following Relative Sanity, which was published in 2023 by the Modern History Press.
Readers can follow Ellen’s literary journey at her blog https://www.ellenlordauthor.com/.
Media Contact: Victor Volkman
Modern History Press
734-417-4266
publicity@modernhistorypress.com
