These Aren't My Woods Anymore by Soon Jones
With irresistible and unflinching honesty, Soon Jones' gorgeous debut collection of poems, These Aren’t My Woods Anymore, captures the experience of living as a mixed-race, queer, Asian American from the rural South.
Jones' poems reflect on a deep connection to the natural landscape, burgeoning sexuality and futile attempts to hide it, the violent homophobia of their church-steeped childhood, and what can only be described as "the unrelenting hunger of the world."
These visceral poems re-live and re-imagine, question and declare. Reading them, we are reminded of how language and life can so powerfully dislocate, and yet how home may be found in re-writing a world of one's own making.
"If I had only one word to describe These Aren’t My Woods Anymore, the debut collection of poems by Soon Jones, it might be lush. This collection is lush in its immersion in the natural landscape of the rural American South. It is lush in the language of emerging sexuality, in what it means to come-of-age ravenous for something too dangerous to name. It is also a collection that interrupts so much of that lushness with the violence of homophobia, of racism, of being a person for whom ‘home’ is complex and ever-elusive—poems that examine, as Jones describes to me in our interview, feelings with no name, poetic truths that hard facts can’t capture." --E Ce Miller, Four Way Review (2026)
"I am so glad to have read Soon Jones' work. I appreciated how this collection spoke so unflinchingly about identity and the grieving that can come with shedding our internal and external pasts. All of it was just so beautifully haunting." --Margaux Williamson, Writer & Bookseller
Publication Date: November 1, 2025
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-64672-365-2
eBook ISBN: 978-1-64672-368-3
44 pages
5" x 8"
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Soon Jones is a Pushcart Prize-nominated Korean lesbian poet and author originating from the rural countryside of the American South. Their work explores the unending cycles of grief, trauma, and finding inner strength in your darkest moments. Soon is a 2017 Lambda Literary Fellow and holds an MFA in Poetry at Oklahoma State University.
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