No Batteries Required
No Batteries Required
No Batteries Required, by Ellen Dooling Reynard, is now available as a paperback and a PDF (as well as wholesale and through most distribution channels)! This poetry collection examines the world around Ellen from the perspective of her inner world. As a senior, she looks back on her life, its joys and sorrows, its loves and losses, while she navigates the unknown currents of old age and ponders about the journeys of life, death, and what lies beyond.
Observing the natural world, she recognizes what is to be learned about the human condition from animals, insects, and plants. In the final title poem, Ellen muses about the craft of writing with a pencil, which she describes as a simple computational device with one end for ‘enter,’ the other end for ‘delete.’
Ellen spent her childhood on a cattle ranch in Jackson, Montana. Raised on myths and fairy tales, the sense of wonder has never left her. A one-time editor of Parabola Magazine, her poetry has been published by Lighten Up On Line, Current Magazine, Persimmon, Silver Blade, and The Muddy River Poetry Review. She is now retired and has relocated to Clarksville, Maryland, where she will continue to write fiction and poetry. She is currently working on a series of ekphrastic poems based on the work of her late husband, Paul Reynard (1927–2005).
You can find Ellen on Facebook.
To learn more about Ellen and No Batteries Required, check out our recent interview with her.
Thank you to everyone who tuned in on April 30 for Ellen’s virtual book launch, the finale of our April Poetry Series (a celebration of Yellow Arrow Publishing’s incredible poets and our fifth birthday). You can find the book launch on Yellow Arrow’s YouTube channel here.
Cover by Alexa Laharty (@alexaelisabeth).
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS:
“The poems in No Batteries Required are charming, thoughtful, engaging, always accessible. There is much to recommend this collection of lyrics, so devoid of literary pretensions, so rich in its devotion to close observation, a taste for speculation, and a compassionate heart.”
--IVEN LOURIE, The C.G. Jung Foundation Book Service
“One of the purposes of literature is to evoke a relation between feeling and mind in the reader, to provide the material for a feeling that's all over the body and in the gut. Poetry does this economically by arranging words in such a way that the words themselves relate to each other, through their sound and through their rhythm. We need to be very grateful to our poets for what they give us. And Ellen Dooling Reynard is a poet.”
--BARBARA WRIGHT, Amazon reviewer
“A heartwarming collection of vignettes that weave together a beautiful patchwork of poems reflecting the vulnerability and wisdom gained from the author’s firsthand experience with love, loss, laughter, and life.”
--LINDA DRAPER, Amazon reviewer
“No Batteries Required serves up wry humor and yet remains down to earth. The book offers unpretentiously direct impressions that surprise and delight.”
--ROBERT SCHWENDEMAN, Amazon reviewer
“The writing in No Batteries Required is lyrical, funny, poignant and so very true. Highly recommended.”
--RW, Amazon reviewer
“No Batteries Required, by Ellen Dooling Reynard, is a charming little book. It combines memoir, musings on daily life, observations of nature and animals, and even humor, to give us a picture of a creative, and an emotional, life.”
--Carol L. Gloor, Highland Park Poetry