Sundress Reads: Review of Forty Bouts in the Wilderness

Forty Bouts in the Wilderness (MoonPath Press, 2025) by Katy E Ellis is a poetic memoir that plays with the multiple meanings of “bouts” and “wilderness.” It’s about becoming homeless due to one’s spiritual beliefs and finding one’s place when family becomes equivalent to alienation. The book is split into three major parts, giving readers multiple reflections on what family can mean for the family outcast and how powerful grief can lead to reinvention, and a new acceptance.

The first part is forty tercets describing the speaker’s family unexpectedly “calling her from the dust” for her father’s emergency hospitalization in the ICU. Every day is “like the first day of kindergarten” to her, being surrounded by siblings who act as if they never shunned her for years. Visually, the tercets stand upright with immediate tension, as if bringing us into the claustrophobic medical setting with her.

In footnotes, Ellis provides context to the unmooring disassociation she feels with her attendance, including anecdotes of how she questioned her family’s Christianity and its purpose, leading to her religious rejection and isolation from her family. As she binds these episodes with stunning metaphors of nature and fantasy, the imagery brings to the fore beautiful, unsettling grief. One of my favorite sets of lines concludes “Bouts 19~21”’s ninth footnote; during a period of personal distress, “[her] mother and sisters stood in a nearby pasture, bleating mournfully across the strong budding vines of pink-red climbing roses that enveloped the low, fieldstone wall I’d built between us.”

We are with her as she untangles the complexity of her memories with the urgent reality of her father’s comatose state, followed by his faltering health and memory whenever he wakes from his “grisly hibernation.” Her father is the parent who she found the most comfort in before and during her ostracization, and she openly laments his fractured mind:

“What if my father opens his eyes, sees

me as stranger among his children’s ranks?

Brother-sister tides push me out to sea.

A child lost, found, or—? His face a blank.

I fear I won’t survive another sleep

and wade the shadows where forget flows deep.”

Within the footnotes, Ellis also weaves in her family’s history of miscarriages. Another unwanted loss of family that was shared but then hushed, parallel to her experiences as the black sheep. The speaker miscarries twice, a daughter and a son, and her pain for the loss haunts her throughout the chapbook. Miscarriages are brushed aside by her family, and, again, she is comfortable not conforming to their mentality of rarely mourning the dead children. She practices private rituals for hers. In the seventeenth footnote for “Bouts 28~30,” the moon guides her soul to “the pearl’s blue center, where a child resides,” her love for her lost son embraced, kept precious and eternal. 

Part two, “Pilgrim’s Pace,” recalls the speaker’s globe-trotting with her husband to cities of divine respite through Europe and Asia. It is done to help validate herself and to heal from her painful miscarriages. Her free-flowing journey of spiritual exploration and healing contrasts with memories of her stricter Christian upbringing, and her quiet disappointments with her family’s stagnant and willful dismissal of her life-changing experiences. In “Dear Istanbul,” Ellis writes:

“Yesterday, my grandparents offered me weak coffee, cookies and Bible verses… They forgot they found my presence more harrowing than my absence, that my voice no longer harmonizes with the plodding organ pipes that pound Easter hymn-notes like wooden stakes into my heart of doubts.”

What’s powerful about this part to me is that the speaker wrestles with the idea of forgiveness. Forgiveness to whom? For what? Her younger mind once thought she was the one who needed her family’s forgiveness. But through her travels, she gradually witnesses other practices for letting go, for worship, for death, and she reconsiders. In the cityscape of Fatima (“Worthy of Belief”), she makes peace with her wounded spirit, realizing that grace can shape into many forms “like a time-lapse film of a seed come to light / when spirals burst open and sunflowers appear. / She knows my prayers before I do.” It’s a heartwarming section of self-acceptance that feels poignant after her somber childhood recollections.

It is during her travels in part two that she mentions she and her husband had been trying for a child again, and she rejoices in finding a new sense of home in part three, “[Re]turnings.” After she and her husband’s globe-trotting and healing, a period compared to floating in space, they return to North America. First, for mourning, due to her beloved uncle’s passing, her father’s decline, and her lost son.

And she celebrates her five-year-old daughter throughout the grief. Whether it has been her daughter’s playful obsession with gemstones or her careful nursing of a hurt robin, she has been an innocent joy in the speaker’s life, her motherhood helping her “earth into place.” To her daughter (“When You Grow Up and Read This”), she fondly writes:

Feel your breath lift green glass beads
faceted amethyst
each ring of silver on the long chain
where I hung a lighthouse, a Tahitian pearl or a compass—
each morning choosing a talisman more than
lucky enough.

Forty Bouts in the Wilderness has stayed with me long after reading. Ellis’ touching wordplay for truly belonging makes this book unforgettable to me.

Forty Bouts in the Wilderness is available through MoonPath Press

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Heather Takenaga is a poet and writer born and raised in Riverside, CA. She is currently writing short stories and poetry. When she is not volunteering, she is drooling for cat cuddles, moonlit walks, and a reading vacation.