Peasant
by Annie Woodford
“The poems in this stunning collection are doors. Turn the handle, dear reader, open the door, and enter.” —Jim Minick
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.
This poetry also evokes in language that particularly delicate form of finger picking called “The Piedmont Blues,” quick as bird call, soft as the voices of the mill workers and subsistence farmers who first crossed racial lines to share or steal a bent note.
The painter Alison Hall (cover art)—who grew up with Woodford in Henry County, Virginia—describes the sometimes junky, haphazard beauty of our place as “architecture without an architect” and Peasant honors that aesthetic.
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.