Overview

Willows Wake and Walk Away is a dream sequence in the aftermath of trauma. As an unnamed speaker retraces her steps through mist-laced forests and crumbling childhood fairytales, she encounters ancient gods still alive in the faultlines of memory. These are poems of relapse and revelation, loneliness and liminality, asking: what happens after the haunting ends, when the serpent finally sleeps? What does it mean to carry the weight of a heart sloughing off its innumerable dead-and, in the absence of peace, learn to love a life wild, uncanny, and wholly one's own?

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9781948552189

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Reviews

""Positioned between root and rot, beauty and violence, 'ghost-lives' and bruised bodies, Haley Wooning's brilliant Willows Wake and Walk Away is built on ruin and recovery. We follow the narrator across night-dazzled landscapes of phantoms, bones, and forest animals, through unnamable losses where grief is 'a lyre that waits unstrung' to a reclamation of voice. Though loneliness, trauma, and survival are intricately knotted in these poems, the collection offers something other than despair: a tender hand reaching out in the dark, a stay against sorrow and harm. This is a book to return again and again for solace and the reminder that 'when the rot is through, the flowers will consume it.'"" -Simone Muench, author of The Under Hum ""With elemental precision, Haley Wooning writes of aftermath and metamorphosis in language both earthen and ethereal-sharp as bone, soft as breath. The poems in Willows Wake and Walk Away do not merely describe survival; they enact it."" -Sierra DeMulder, author of Ephemera ""Willows Wake and Walk Away is a book haunted by 'the plural of loneliness' in the aftermath of trauma. The 'dream-crazed' and grieving speaker of these lush poems-attuned to the mysteries of the nonhuman living world-asks, 'What endures?' In her search for a fitting myth, she encounters 'no hero to conjure, ' no epiphany. In this poetry collection, what endures is the astonishment of having survived, of belonging to the earth's ever-changing songs."" -Patrycja Humienik, author of We Contain Landscapes

Author Information

Haley Wooning is a writer and high school English teacher from the Bay Area. Her debut poetry collection is Mothmouth (Spuyten Duyvil 2019). An avid reader and puzzle lover, she also enjoys playing story-based games with her friends and community.

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