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.

I remember I was a child, and when I grew up I was a poet. It all happened at sixty miles an hour and on days when the clock stopped and all of humanity fit into a little chapel, into a pinecone, a shot of ouzo, a snail's shell, a piece of soggy rye on the pavement.

In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?

I study nature so as not to do foolish things.

People, the people we really love, where did they come from? What did we do to deserve them?

Poetry is sentimental to begin with. To write a sentimental poem is an act of redundancy.

In the end I would rather wonder than know