Peasant

Peasant takes its title from a poem by Nikki Giovanni: "peasant food . . . must be mixed with your hands. Grandmother taught us that." These poems aspire to the richness of peasant food (and assert that there is a culture in poor rural America that is complex and beautiful).

The painter Alison Hall-who grew up with Woodford in Henry County, Virginia-describes this sometimes junky, haphazard beauty as "architecture without an architect" and Peasant tries to honor that aesthetic. Plainness and matrilineal power reverberate down through the generations in Peasant, offering continued sustenance and not just survival, but celebration.

Arranged in four sections, the poems in this collection begin by taking the reader into what V.S. Naipaul termed "the ruin of the country," where unregulated capitalism has left behind its detritus and 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 the rural landscape of a declining empire. Yes, Woodford examines Southern Appalachia as a sort of colonial holding of the United States, but this collection ends by rejoicing in how folks (and nature) create spaces of freedom despite the appropriation of labor, natural resources, and culture to enrich those outside the region.

The poems in Peasant attempt to channel the life-force that won't be denied despite such hardships. As Isaac Babel describes folk singers, so may the reader leave these poems thinking they "might not have much in the way of a voice, but they have a joy, mixed with passion, lightness, and a touching, charming, sad feeling for life. A life that is good, terrible, and exceedingly interesting."