978-1-7355727-8-9 (6” x 7.5”, 96 pp, paperback) | Poetry
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“THOU MAKEST DARKNESS,” I GUESS.

“The dizzying sweep of registers of language and feeling in The Amber in Ambrose is not to be feared but embraced, and dare I say kissed on its cover after a full read, which is what I did feeling somehow alive and different. Each poem interposes the self with Woodward’s mind, its own alluring sunset and sunrise.”

−Major Jackson, author of Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems

“I love Jon Woodward’s writing in the same way that I love Philip Glass or Erik Satie’s music—for its circuitous rhythms that, arriving and arriving, always circle back and against themselves, for its active subversion of all readerly expectations. Towards the start of The Amber in Ambrose’s great ending poem ‘Upside-Down Crown’ the speaker asserts:

I was in a food fight at Dairy Queen in Arvada, Colorado in 1995, and I’ve been writing all of the surrounding stuff for years, to reassure you (!?) of the momentary collapse of an otherwise important distinction between uncreated chaos and the depthless delight of mutual existence. I’ll walk you through; I’m getting ahead of myself.

Who does that? It’s 100% perfect in its untrammeled oddity. The Amber in Ambrose is a wholly superb and idiosyncratic collection by a poet who, thankfully, refuses to be anything but himself.”

−Jeff Alessandrelli, author of Nothing of the Month Club


JON WOODWARD lives in the Boston area with his wife Sam. He works at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. His previous books include Uncanny Valley (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), Rain (Wave Books), and Mister Goodbye Easter Island (Alice James Books), and the chapbook POOLGOER and SPELEOGRAPHER (The Economy Press).