Haley Wooning
is a writer and high school English teacher from the Bay Area. She is the author of Willows Wake and Walk Away (Half Mystic Press 2025) and Mothmouth (Spuyten Duyvil 2019). An avid reader and puzzle lover, she also enjoys playing story-based games with her friends and community.
Willows Wake and Walk Away
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?“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
Mothmouth
“mothmouth flutters across tongue in lyric mist, imagist bliss. Wefting in the tradition of Sappho and H.D., Haley Wooning’s debut collection is an earthy and ethereal palimpsest, each line replete with layered longing. Lovers leak out of the eaves, out of the ether. Wooning woos us here, in the perpetual blue hour. In her deft hands, poetry once again embodies an eternal hue. We can’t help but follow this vulnerable, venerable I, donning a neoclassical cloak with a roaring feral edge: 'I bury my body, I dance / in spells / of wolfskin.' She leads us by the lyre down to Underworld of sublime subconscious—mournfully mellow—'the mouth is quick with coffins.' Hazy and hungry, we follow the blood-trail of lost heroines, 'Helen wanders the edges'—'where are you going, Antigone?' Here is a magic spell to whisper when the world is too much with us; 'hillock, hoarfrost, hush'—'do not forsake that which is tender'—'a song skinned of lyre'—These soulful songs hum in bones long after the lyre stops shaking.” —Heather Woods, author of Bundling
Contact
You can follow me on Tumblr, and contact me directly for interviews, readings, and rights requests at: hwooning19 at gmail dot com