Poetry. Jon Woodward's surreal, narrative poems satirize, among other things, the commodification of virtually everything, from saviors to love to apocalypse. With an encyclopedist's sense of inclusion, using non-sequitur as an organizational tool, Mister Goodbye Easter Island is peopled with characters from eels and ducks to the Marx brothers, the Legislature, and Jesus.

"Jon Woodward's poems exhibit a rage and humility at the role of the human in the cosmos which makes one want to weep. In addition, his work amazes one with its variety of formal strategies, the multiple ways in which it uses—and often reinvents—our sense of what an image is, collapsing allegory into realism and realism into fable in ways that are vertiginous and deeply instructive. Transforming our current use of wit, of bitter and sweet irony, and bringing honesty back on board as if from the back door of contemporary poetics, Woodward seeks news rather desperately from outer space—and finds it in that huge vacancy, the human heart."
—Jorie Graham

Author City: BOSTON, MA USA

Jon Woodward is the author of UNCANNY VALLEY (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), RAIN (Wave Books, 2006), and MISTER GOODBYE EASTER ISLAND (Alice James Books, 2003). He lives in Boston and works at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.

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