Mister Goodbye Easter Island
Jon Woodward
Jon Woodward's brilliant, darkly funny, surreal, narrative poems both participate in and satirize, among other things, the commodification and attendant decay of virtually everything, from saviors to love to apocalypse. With an encyclopaedist'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 and Jesus.
"The flavor of fable and creation myths are at the core of this book, with Woodward often taking a child-like project and (sometimes in a single line) managing to open the entire poem (the entire reader) to deeper possibilities. And so, we go back and read again. The things have something to do with us—something that rebounds off a wall inside we are glad we can’t quite see. It is crucial to the success of Woodward’s poems that he never asks the reader, explicitly, to look at this wall we have."
—The Denver Quarterly
"Woodward's improvisational approach—wild nonsequiturs folded into smoothly flowing syntax—at once evokes the disjunctive surrealism of James Tate and the rhetorical shell games of John Ashbery."
—Library Journal
"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
"Paul Valéry observed that the real is expressed most immanently through the absurd. Reading Jon Woodward we encounter the real fully, in all its delicious and demanding variety. A rigorous poetic intelligence guides these explorations: in the churning, surreal-but-true juxtapositions of our moment, Woodward balances by the grace of his honesty and the purity of his open attention."
—Laura Mullen
about the author
Jon Woodward was born in 1978 in Wichita, Kansas and went to college at Colorado State University. His poems have appeared in many journals including Colorado Review, Barrow Street, The Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, The Laurel Review. His second book, Rain, was published by Wave Books in 2005. He currently lives in the Boston area and works at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Author photo by Tonya Kisner
