postcards from glasshouse drive by Woody Woodger

“A montage of grief – for a family, a neighborhood, a reality littered with the wreckage of memories and addiction – these poems sear through us like an ‘EpiPen/full of holy water and Adderall,’ desperate to resuscitate us. There’s ‘a sleepy apocalypse stirring underneath’ these words, but also a vulnerability that makes every tremor or shard of glass, every vacant house or dead dragonfly a grim gift that pulls us from disorientation and plants us squarely in the longing of our youth. postcards from glasshouse drive is indeed a collection of messages, compact and urgent, rapt by the details of the extraordinary decay that comprise our ordinary lives: truths too precious to not be preserved.”

–Lisa Mangini, Bird Watching at the End of the World

 “Woody Woodger’s evocative postcards from glasshouse drive explores the tension between decay and spirituality. Here, the physical world is full of cigarettes, cockroaches, and lawn flamingos. A boy finds a body in a black trash bag buried under pine-needles while walking his dog. Against such a landscape, it only makes sense Woodger’s speaker would claim his soul feels ‘oily,’ and that god has a ‘cold thumb.’ But the beauty of Woodger’s poems is that their fresh images point towards redemption through the ‘odd grace of flesh.’ Woodger reminds us that before one enters the room of redemption, one must face the door of their imperfect humanity.”

–Keith Leonard, Ramshackle Ode

“The poems in postcards from glasshouse drive channel the setting and compressed images of Williams Carlos Williams to explore New England’s current heroin epidemic. The speaker struggles to make meaning of and find hope in a world where eulogies for young people are commonplace. The poems ask what might save us—an angel, a court order, a dry breeze, a repurposing, a replanting. But the reality is this is a landscape inhospitable to rebirth, to growth, one where ‘all joy still feels like drops from the roof tarp/landing like god’s cold thumb on your forehead.’ These are dark poems about tragic conditions and mounting losses, but they are beautiful in their precision and in their belief in the power of the imagination.”

–Leah Nielsen, Side Effects May Include