About the book

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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(Please note that this is a preorder—you’ll receive the book in the mail or your email inbox on or before November 18, 2025. All orders over $60 come with free worldwide shipping. Use the code FREESHIP at checkout!)

Advance praise

“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

Press & reader reviews

Coming soon!

About the author

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.

Reader & launch photos

Coming soon!