This is a strange book: visionary and dark. It stutters out a kind of music: repeated phrases which accumulate errors and mutate as they go like chromosomes or, as Woodward puts it better, 'visible fissile ribbons.' It's as if we were present for the moments of creation and extinction. Uncanny Valley is ominous and beautiful.

The fear that all this will end. The fear that it won't.

The ghosts swarm. They speak as one person. Each has left something undone.

Thus drivers inching southward will see the phalanx of birds heading west as one spontaneous gesture.

Poetry wants to make things mean more than they mean, says someone, as if we knew how much things meant, and in what unit of measure.

We sleep together in the dark but confuse light with love.

Lily Brown writes with and against things in poems that are coiled up tight as springs (or snakes). A believer in the power of the line, she writes, 'I think the plastics/and sink them' then 'Where is the sand/man hiding the dirt.' These terse, biting poems will make you look around and wonder.