Chelsea Woodard
Winner of the聽2022 Michael Waters Poetry Prize
At the Lepidopterist鈥檚 House invites the reader to explore natural and mythic landscapes, examine the interiors of marriage and the domestic, and consider the bodies of animals as vessels of memory and聽 imagination. At times through the lens of scientific observation or artistic rendering, at others through lived聽 experience, the speakers of these poems face separation from places and people, gathering real and聽 remembered artifacts as a means of better understanding our tumultuous world. This collection is a聽 meditation on the ways one can lose and reimagine home, on what it means to love and to grieve, to find freedom and lightness among the weight of the material and the human.
鈥淚n her third collection of poetry, Chelsea Woodard鈥檚 gifts are in full bloom. Her dexterity with rhyme,聽 rhythm, and tactile animal and mineral imagery recalls Sylvia Plath鈥檚 most formidable and monumental聽 poems of memorial. Woodard鈥檚 craft is, in fact, so polished here as to be almost transparent, showcasing a聽 richness of heartfelt tender emotion, a quietly melancholy awareness of the bodily frailty and transience聽 that defines our shared humanity. Her blend of sophisticated technique and deeply affecting poignancy聽 proves that, like the goddess Eris鈥檚 apples, verse can be outwardly 鈥榞olden and sweet鈥� and yet remain challengingly complex and multidimensional; the poems in this book are at once artfully formed and聽 appealingly free from 鈥榯he gnarled grip // of manners.鈥欌��
鈥揓enna Le
鈥淓ach of the poems in Chelsea Woodard鈥檚 At the Lepidopterist鈥檚 House is crafted with subtle skill, with a聽 keen awareness of the etymologies and sounds folded into the vast resource of the English language. The聽 book has a wholeness and rightness of shape that can only come with thoughtful artifice. What makes her聽 work deeply pleasing, too, is that we see artifice applied so often and so well to the natural world of flora聽 and fauna. To read Woodard on Nabokov鈥檚 favorite being, the butterfly, but also on the humble hedgehog, is to feel more fully alive. Woodard is a poet who brings out in us both the joy and the pain of human聽 attachment, and of attachment to the world beyond the human.鈥�
鈥揗ary Jo Salter
鈥溾�楾here鈥檚 always more to know / about the world,鈥� Chelsea Woodard insists in her stunning new collection,聽 At the Lepidopterist鈥檚 House. A poet 鈥榯asked to visualize / a form,鈥� she makes use of a formidable knowledge of craft and a finely attuned ear to offer the pleasures of 鈥榓 voice holding / the true expression of its shape,鈥櫬� whether her subjects are illness, book mites, an exhibitionist, an imaginary bird, or the bodies of two聽 women found within a ship in a Viking burial mound. If Woodard in her poems acknowledges, however聽 subtly, several forebears, including Dickinson, Yeats, and Bishop, she also assumes her rightful place among our new century鈥檚 voices to 鈥榮ing // to hear the heaviness of sound / falling, to watch its fullness swell / and drop like rain.鈥欌��
鈥揗ichael Waters