Uncanny Valley

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Poetry. Winner of the 2011 Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Competition. The unforgettable, idiosyncratic poems in Woodward's highly musical and obsessively incantatory third collection bring to mind the metaphysical voids of Samuel Beckett's plays and the voyages of Charles Darwin as they rediscover and seek to inhabit an uncomfortably familiar natural world: "A hurricane came and caused the land to open. / Also fire, pestilence, and benevolent compassion. / Much later there was a terrible car accident. / Whatever or whatever climbed out of the wreck alive."

"When I first encountered the poems of Jon Woodward, I was stunned into the state that is my life's joy I was in the presence of the inimitable. UNCANNY VALLEY extends that experience almost into another dimension. These apocalyptic, pixilated poems forge a mythology of our ravaged culture, one that might have been written in the future. If you want poetry to give you a persimmon on a plate, look elsewhere; if you want to know what happens when seven trees fall on the highway and the story is told by a stutterer, this is the book, and it could only have been written by Woodward." Mary Ruefle"