Publisher Description

If two girls are two halves of a deep, lifelong friendship, what does one girl wholly become when the other is gone? Amy Woolard's debut collection, Neck Of The Woods, sets this question as a hero-quest deep inside the mythos of the American South, wandering through childhood stories in which a girl alone must work to save herself. These poems take on what happens when you wake up the morning after something happens, and find yourself in a different world, knowing there isn't truly a way back home. Part-elegy, part-survivor's testimony, Neck Of The Woods maps a path divided into a before and an ever after.

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.

Description for Sales People

An interview with the author: ""I'd also been wrecked by grief over the sudden death of my closest friend, and nearly wrecked by a seven-year relationship I sometimes thought was out to end me entirely. Towards the 10-year mark, I was also finally diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder and began to respond to treatment. The accumulation of all this--at times it felt like I'd just bled out. But turns out, for me there was life after wrecked-life." Collection stemmed from grief, but the poems themselves focus more about how one can rebuild themselves by taking all aspects of their past and present selves to better build their futures.

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