Eyes Moving Through the Dark (Orison Books, 2024)
"I read the whole book like I had been drowning and Woolfitt's words were air. Eyes Moving Through the Dark documents loss, but Woolfitt fills that emptiness with sharp beauty and soft grace. If we no longer have the abalone, the letter ð, farm, Eden, buffalo, ash tree, coal, gray wolf, zinc violet, at least we are lucky enough to have these letters and these words. Hold onto this book like we should have held onto all that we have sent missing." —Nicole Walker
"A sprawling Appalachian palimpsest, writing and rewriting the lives and histories of this singular American region. Woolfitt's gaze encompasses all that is beautiful and complicated about the land he calls home, and his family within it." —Alejandra Oliva
"Woolfitt works roots. He starts with the roots of language and tells the stories of the aleph and iota, the æ and the ƿ. He goes on to work with the roots of the trees and plants of the deep woods in his Appalachian home, a place rich with the work of folk artists, activists, grandmothers, and healers of all kinds. In such rich loam these roots stretch and entangle themselves, making collaborations, friendships, and kin with each other, just as each of Woolfitt’s essays seek to do. This extraordinary book that celebrates the beautiful possibilities for connection that exist between and among people, plants, critters, and the troubled waters of the histories we share."
The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go (Belle Point Press, 2024)
“These poems are both elegiac and reverent, grounding in their histories and stunning in their imagery. The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to Go reminds me why poetry can do what no other art form can–both testimony and revelation, it binds us to the past even as it enables us to envision new futures. As Woolfitt writes of Appalachia–’Here, the mouths I feed, / the fuels I go through like water, / the smoldering earth where they’ll bury me.’” —Joan Kwon Glass
“"Here is a people’s history of Appalachia mired in coal slurry and sawdust, thick with the stink of industrial toxins. Woolfitt’s poetic practice uses song and singing to bring a vital music to these 'stories choked by grief.' Here is a history whose melodies are brutally honest, unforgettable, and reminiscent of 'what it’s like to be alive to wonder and dread.'” —Marianne Worthington
“Woolfitt’s slow-burning lyrics haunt and illuminate, telling of waters sickened with coal mine run-off, tree limbs rattling like dry bones, smoldering earth. These poems testify about the devastation wrought by greed and privilege while also daring to imagine a new story, where the refinery captain has thrown his watch away and where weeds transform into flowers under a little boy’s gaze. Deftly balancing tenderness and truth, these poems are an admirable addition to Woolfitt’s already impressive collection of work.” —Leah Silvieus
Ring of Earth (Madville Publishing, 2023)
“The rich quiet of William Woolfitt’s unforgettable Ring of Earth shines darkly with the overlooked and wasted energies of youth and decay in rural America. But there’s also hope here. Listen for it in Woolfitt’s concise lyricisms as he listens for consolation in Earth’s small souls and silences: hearts of trees, eyes of whirligig beetles, wordless water whorls. Such deep empathy does he feel for other beings that his human characters physically experience the anguish of sick waters and trees afire.” —Mandy-Suzanne Wong
“Ring of Earth is full of gorgeous, surprising stories. At times, Woolfitt seems capable of hearing the songs in the hearts of ghosts, and he can put them on the page for you. Yet all his characters, historical and contemporary, are fiercely alive. This book springs from a deep sense of place, and keen knowledge of both the grit and sweetness of Appalachian lives.” —Laura Long
“Woolfitt gives us stories that feel at once modern and as ancient as the Appalachian mountains, pulsing with life, and love, and memory, and tradition, but also not looking away from the hard things. His control of language will charm the reader, pull them in, and fill their hearts.”—Natalie Sypolt
Spring Up Everlasting (Mercer University Press, 2020)
“William Woolfitt crafts a gorgeous lyric, braiding hymn-drenched, pastoral imagery with sonorous music made of our bones. These precise poems read as if Elizabeth Bishop had been born again. Woolfitt will take you to the river and take you to church. He will make you believe that poetry is the sacred portrait, a way of seeing and feeling holiness in the violent landscape of our hearts.” — Tiana Clark
“Woolfitt's poems are bracing: this line a cold gust, that line sure as gravity. They feel as much hewn by a human hand as they feel unearthed, unembedded—raw, whole, and real. In one poem, we observe a man gently collect a dead finch into a plastic specimen bag from which 'he eased the extra air.' In this way, Woolfitt stretches language across his lines. Such closeness, such captivation. Read this book to see more clearly, to feel how much you love the world.” — Ida Stewart
“Keenly observed and empathetically wrought narratives honoring keen details of human connections to places illuminate Spring Up Everlasting.” — Laura Da'
“I fell in love with Woolfitt's Spring Up Everlasting and his naturalist's eye, his imagery, the lushness amidst disaster, economic, ecological, and personal. Woolfitt listens carefully to the sounds of the world and sings every aching note.” — Jenn Givhan
Charles of the Desert (Paraclete Press, 2016)
“Woolfitt's Charles of the Desert is the 'ragged song' of Charles de Foucault, attuned to the 'sweat beneath scratchy coverlets,' 'the hoe and the rake,' and to how a life can be 'all green wood' that, in the work of years, leaps with the strange wildness of faith.” — K. A. Hays
“Woolfitt’s 'pilgrim’s progress' [offers] an achingly lovely canticle to God’s presence as it is both revealed and concealed in the harsh natural world of the North African desert. Richly detailed, lovingly imagined, and exactingly thought through, [it] is a compelling work of art.” — Andrew Hudgins
“Spoken in the voice of the book's titular persona, Charles de Foucauld, the poems present genuine exultation, vertiginous truth.” — Scott Cairns
“Pastoral and meditative, Charles of the Desert depicts the eremitical life of a nomad whose awareness of Christ's eternal love and a body's chronic hunger infuses every turn of his spiritual and geographical wanderings.” — Karen An-hwei Lee
Beauty Strip (Texas Review Press, 2014)
“Woolfitt’s finely honed poems resonate with the language of Appalachia and bristle with the rich scents and textures of farm fields, forested ridges, and streams. Resisting nostalgia, he lays claim to the home place in the most honorable way: by describing it with clarity and painstaking grace.” — Julia Spicher Kasdorf
“In the midst of natural beauty, rendered with such sensuous language that the reader of William Woolfitt’s collection well-nigh swoons, hides desecration, the earth left raw and bleeding behind the ‘beauty strip’ the coal companies create to block from view their destruction.” — Kathryn Stripling Byer
“I love the voice and the passion I hear in Woolfitt’s poems. In Beauty Strip, he names the raw materials of the natural world so precisely and enters the cusps and edge spaces so confidently that the poems both mourn and reclaim the ruined mountains of his West Virginia home. There is hard-earned wisdom and a strong lyric line in these vital poems and William Woolfitt is one sweet singer.” — Maggie Anderson