In her stunning first collection, Vellum, Chelsea Woodard offers us poems whose lucidity of attention grounds an imaginative realism where narrative becomes speculation, witness becomes mystery, and the body a space where desire and dread complicate compassion’s summons to the social order. The honed music here thus reveals a deeper vulnerability. Such is its gift, the way in which poems might be rooted to the difficulty and heartbreak of the physical and yet apart, “their keel and gristle finally set/ into some deathless, disembodied flight.” An astonishing book.
        —Bruce Bond

In addition to her emotional maturity, part of what makes these poems memorable is Woodard’s obvious mastery of language, her flawless sentences, the surprising way those sentences function and “mean” within the lines, the lines within the forms.
        —Claudia Emerson (from the foreword)

Not the least of the attractions of this gifted young poet’s first book is the exquisite, searing precision of her language—the obsessively exact diction; the tropes that map with such stunning accuracy the emotional contours of her narratives; the gestural, almost tactile quality of her syntax—all of these talents focused sharply on what Howard Nemerov said was the singular, most difficult achievement of poetry: “getting something right in language.” I predict for Chelsea Woodard a long and enviable career.
        —B.H. Fairchild