Trouble, Poems, including “Hannah Alive” by Anne Harding Woodworth

Anne Harding Woodworth’s poems trouble the senses and the intellect, offering new encounters with the world we see and thought we knew.

Winner, 2022 Meredith Award for Poetry

Sample Poems by Anne Harding Woodworth

“Trouble marks Anne Harding Woodworth’s emergence as one of our foremost nature poets. But it’s human nature she evokes, in all its variousness and responsiveness. Wit, humor, irony, formal invention; all flourish in these richly evocative poems, ranging from infancy through senescence. She limns the emotions—love, of course, but also cruelty, jealousy, fear, rage. Sickness and health, life and death take on new clarity through Woodworth’s compelling voices, her reasoned and unflinching gaze. These are poems to savor, and revisit.”—Werner Gundersheimer, Director Emeritus, Folger Shakespeare Library and member, Board of Advisors, American Poetry Review

“In the opening poem of Trouble, as the 80-year-old speaker named Hannah meditates on death and various ways of committing suicide, she says, ‘Euphemisms are the result of embarrassment.’ Anne Harding Woodworth’s poems never blush and turn away. These poems zoom in on people who have been glossed over with the euphemism ‘troubled,’ from a mother who continues to push her dead son on a swing at a playground to a person who takes pleasure in torturing others. Other poems—especially her ‘convolutes,’ which are collages of language from Cosmopolitan, Washington Post, and other media—zoom out to consider our collective human condition. What a haunting, engaging book! I hope you’ll read it and let it trouble you in the ways we all need to be troubled right now.”—Katie Manning, author of Tasty Other and The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman, and editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review.

Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of seven books of poetry and four chapbooks. Her work is widely published in print and online. She is a member of the Board of Governors at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA, and of the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, where she lives, when she isn’t at a beloved cabin in the mountains of Western North Carolina.

ISBN:978-1625493613, 140 pages

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Also by Anne Harding Woodworth:

Spare Parts: A Novella in Verse

The Artemis Sonnets, Etc.

The Eyes Have It

The Spare Parts Saga