Alison Woods gew up on the Upper West Side of New York City and currently lives in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The National Poetry Review, Poetry East, Rattallpax, The Kean Review, Salamander, the Western Humanities Review, Rattle and Bigcitylit.com. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University.

Books by Alison Woods:

Alison Woods's Blog.

About New Forest:

"With a mesmerizing combination of passion and metaphor, Alison Woods brings us to discoveries, delights, disappointments, and divinations in New Forest. Lucid but dreamy, sexy but sharp-tongued, Woods is a poet of memory and love. Orchids, camembert, a lover's ear, a child's hand, a kite, a caricature, a father's death, a daughter's mourning--all complicated by the absence of a father for the daughter's daughter--make these poems at once simple and multi-layered, elegant and supple, poignant but crisp. To enter this New Forest is to experience the golden debut of a gifted poet."
—Molly Peacock

"With a mesmerizing combination of passion and metaphor, Alison Woods brings us to discoveries, delights, disappointments, and divinations in New Forest. Woods is a poet of memory and love--orchids, camembert, a lover's ear, a child's hand, a kite, a caricature, a father's death, a daughter's mourning--all complicated by the absence of a father for the daughter's daughter--make these poems at once simple and multi-layered, elegant and supple, poignant but crisp. To enter this New Forest is to experience the golden debut of a gifted poet. Composed in a variety of forms - aubades, pantoums, villanelles, rhymed quatrains - these are beautifully calibrated and musical poems that bring a subtle yet sensual attention to an intimately seen world of 'shadowy disturbances/that bid and accumulate/like algae.' Moments of luminous mother-daughter intervals unfold in 'A Shared Life,' a world of nature described in dune grass, field flowers, constellations, water. Along with a sharp eye for detail, there are daring similes and metaphors: 'The sky cries pink tears' in 'Independence Day', and a 'cascade of angel fish' swim in a dream of dark water. A timeless folklore feeling of quiet enchantments draw me in and yet this poet can disarm with rollicking rhythms as in her joyful celebration of cheese in 'O Camembert.' Reading Alison Woods in this, her first book, I find a true poet, and look eagerly forward to her next collection."
—Colette Inez