Willows Wake and Walk Away by Haley Wooning

Willows Wake and Walk Away by Haley Wooning, forthcoming from Half Mystic Press, is a mixed-style poetry collection that reads like “a dream sequence in the aftermath of trauma.”

I had the privilege of getting to review this book early, and its lyrical narratives, wealth of banger lines, and liminal entanglements with Time and Language were utterly hypnotic!

Through explorations of fairy tale-like scenery and fraught reflections on the speaker’s harm-filled past, Wooning takes the reader through the labyrinthine act of becoming. Having escaped from an abusive situation, the speaker is lost in the reckonings of identity, memory, loneliness, empowerment, and the fear lacing it all along the way. Following a through-thread (literally, “thread” is mentioned frequently), Wooning invokes Ariadne’s string through the mythic Labyrinth, leading further away from the monster but not necessarily toward nor through a fully safe space. Among other Greek myths and senses of storytelling, the speaker encompasses the tragedy of Ariadne’s eventual estrangement and moorlessness brought by choice and circumstance.

Another allusion I interpreted in the collection that brought up many thought-provoking questions around sense-of-self and derealization in post-traumatic living, was the shadows of Plato’s cave. I felt deeply that the speaker in Wooning’s poems was akin to the shadows themselves, trying to decipher if they are real or just a ghost of whatever/whomever has acted in the firelight. Likewise, while Wooning depicts most settings as wide-open places—fields and the night sky being the most popular throughout the book, with forests and beaches also common—rather than the enclosed cave in Plato’s allegory, there remains elements of claustrophobia in Willows with repeated burials under the earth, curling up in corners of rooms, and beneath the breach of ponds.

The speaker spends much of the book not in their literal body, instead embodying and personifying bones, rot, crumbs, trees, and animals. The prevalent themes of depersonalization are told both in rich metaphors and in overt retellings of the speaker’s escape and psychological aftermath. For example: “Should I list what I left behind? My bed, my cat, my parents’ wedding photo, decades I deemed my proof of life.” /// “I pass between them—phantom or hero? It doesn’t matter anymore. I want only to halt my own splitting.” /// “whose form am I in? I tread / sluggish as a marsh beast that slumbers below / starvation’s threat” The use of deconstructed yet recognizable conventions of parable, fable, and folkloric forms such as personified body parts and animals, or the outright mentions of heroes and storytelling, effectively mirror the fragmentation of the speaker’s identity and life story, as well as Wooning’s periodic passages touching on the societal expectations of women as a whole.

By engaging with the known and relatively static concepts of mythos and storytelling, Wooning is able to contrast the speaker’s unknowing and nebulousness in the wake of loss. Not just through the settings and references like the aforementioned, but also through discussions around language itself. Much of the beginning of the book directly states how language is unreachable even if they tried, conditioned to be discouraged in their past, and undesirable in the speaker’s current mental and situational state. As the poems go on and into Part II of the book, the speaker beings to open themself up to the possibilities of transformation, hope, want, reality, and words. She writes, at around the book’s halfway point: “must I find new words / for love?” /// “I humiliate myself and eat it all instead. Bones. Memory. Language where language is not. I waited a long time and nothing waited for me. After recognition comes voice, comes terrible longing.”

All of these elements, mechanisms, and preoccupations are not only executed well emotionally, but with beautiful images and unexpected turns of phrase throughout the collection. A meager smattering of lines that rocked between my ribs include:

“I was helpless against / language’s unpossessable fragments. / The dark webs strung up in the night-water, / scoured like rot over the moon-colored / snout of earth.”

“I watch an entire empire fade across / the dirt’s smeared lips. I am afraid of the world. / The worms that converge / alone in the shadow. Just like that, / I will not be missed. Food / for the gut of greater things.”

“madness is not a thing with color” (very Dickinsonian <3 Actually, much of Part II gives Emily Dickinson vibes, which I highly adore.)

“the earth cleaved by star and time”

“gods lived here once, winds / whipped them nameless, and even this / was forgiven”

Overall, Willows Wake and Walk Away is an extremely bewitching collection. Wooning’s poetry of post-traumatic self-necromancy gorgeously puppets the reader’s sensory experience as well as deep emotional wrenching. Powered with lush visuals and decadent diction, while still staying grounded with comprehensive allusions and poignant questions, this book offers both surrealist introspection and radical acceptance. One of the most powerful books of the year, and certainly one that should thrill all teachers and scholars of poetry for the rest of time.

Willows Wake and Walk Away releases next week on November 18, 2025! Learn more about the collection and pre-order your copy here: https://www.halfmystic.com/bookshop/willows

Thank you Half Mystic Press for the complimentary ARC of this title! I appreciate the early opportunity to read Haley’s work and look forward to seeing the final release out in the world. :)

— Kylie

Willows Wake and Walk Away by Haley Wooning

First Media Reference :’)

KYLIE AYN YOCKEY