Pulley Releases Peasant by Annie Woodford

Today, September 16th, marks the release of Pulley’s latest book – Peasant by Annie Woodford. 

Peasant takes its title from a poem by Nikki Giovanni about her mother’s meatloaf recipe. Giovanni writes, “[S]ince meatloaf is peasant food it must be mixed with your hands. Grandmother taught us that.” These poems aspire to that same richness, that plainness, that matrilineal power reverberating down through the generations, offering continued sustenance and not just survival, but celebration.

Arranged in four sections, Peasant ushers the reader into what V.S. Naipaul termed “the ruin of the country,” where unregulated extraction has left behind its damage, even as there is a deep human urge toward those nevertheless generous landscapes and communities. As the collection progresses, it builds toward an affirmation of nature’s persistence in a rural landscape.

When asked for her thoughts on this release, Woodford calls Peasant “an exploration of how language intersects with class, geography, and work.”  The title, she notes, “is supposed to be a reclamation of an identity I have often carried in shame. I’ve been looking a lot at Breugel’s paintings of peasants and I hope this book feels like one of his scenes – wild, intricate, sometimes absurd, and resonating with mystery and fortitude.”

As Anna Lena Phillips Bell, author of Ornament and editor of Ecotone, writes, Peasant “reveals deeply human efforts to persist in a deeply beloved landscape.” 

Poet Jim Minick, author of The Intimacy of Spoons, says, “the poems in this stunning collection are doors. Each one makes us remember this isn’t the only world, there are so many others. Turn the handle, dear reader, open the door, and enter.”

Links to purchase Peasant online can be found here, or find it at your favorite local bookstore.

About the Poet:

Annie Woodford studied poetry at Hollins College and teaches at Wilkes Community College in North Carolina. She is the author of Bootleg (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2019) and Where You Come from Is Gone (Mercer UP, 2022), which was awarded the 2022 Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. Her micro-chapbook, When God Was a Child, was published by Bull City Press in 2023. She has been the recipient of the Jean Ritchie Fellowship, the Thelma Smallwood Scholarship at the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop, and the Guy Owen Prize by Southern Poetry Review. She has also been a Rona Jaffe Poetry Scholar at Bread Loaf and a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. In 2023, she was the writer-in-residence at Radford University’s Highland Summer Conference.