At the Lepidopterist's House - Paperback

by Chelsea Woodard (Author)

Winner of the 2024 Poetry by the Sea Book Award

At the Lepidopterist's House invites the reader to explore natural and mythic landscapes, examine the interiors of marriage and the domestic, and consider the bodies of animals as vessels of memory and imagination. At times through the lens of scientific observation or artistic rendering, at others through lived experience, the speakers of these poems face separation from places and people, gathering real and remembered artifacts as a means of better understanding our tumultuous world. This collection is a meditation on the ways one can lose and reimagine home, on what it means to love and to grieve, to find freedom and lightness among the weight of the material and the human.

Author Biography

Chelsea Woodard is also the author of the collections Vellum (Able Muse Press, 2014) and Solitary Bee (Measure Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Southwest Review, 32 Poems, River Styx, Blackbird, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and a residency at Vermont Studio Center. Woodard teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.