Neck of the Woods

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.