Neck of the Woods - Paperback

by Amy Woolard (Author)

If two girls are two halves of a deep, lifelong friendship, what does one girl become when the other is gone?

Amy Woolard's debut collection, Neck of the Woods, takes up this unanswerable question as a hero's journey through the mythos of the American South. In poems that wander the landscapes of childhood, Woolard gives us a lone girl who must learn to rescue herself, carrying both the beauty and the burden of survival. These poems trace the disorienting moment of waking into a world forever altered-the morning after loss, after violence, after revelation-when the familiar has fallen away and there is no way back home. Neck of the Woods is a book of thresholds, where elegy meets testimony, where the intimacy of friendship collides with grief, and where the fractured self begins to speak its own name.

Author Biography

Amy Woolard is a writer and legal aid attorney working on court & criminal justice reform, education, safety net, health, and poverty policy & legislation in Virginia. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the University of Virginia School of Law. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as The New Yorker, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Fence, Virginia Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, & the Best New Poets 2013 and 2015 anthologies, among others, and garnered prizes from Indiana Review and Puerto del Sol. She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Breadloaf Writers' Conference. Her essays have appeared in Slate, The Guardian, Pacific Standard, and The Rumpus, as well as Virginia Quarterly Review, which awarded her the Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction in 2016. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.