Mister Goodbye Easter Island

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.

Over the Counter Jesus

It’s no good. I keep smelling something else. The neighbors are pounding on the door. The police and fire officials are playing Jefferson Airplane on loudspeakers outside. The executioners’ guild is on full alert. My guardian angel is chewing through his leg to get away and there’s nothing I can do.

"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. Trans-forming 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