Woodward, Jon: Want for Nothing

Slope Editions, paperback

Publication Date: March 3, 2026

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Want for Nothing is a linked series of short poems of kaleidoscopic variety, by turns cryptic and blunt, funny and sad, awake again and dreaming again. Collectively, these poems speak of disorientation and longing, but the grudging circumstances of this speech and the irrepressible playfulness powering it are both evident from moment to moment, a dynamic perhaps referred to in the text as "that characteristic charismatic poignant self-involved springtime loveydovey geargrinding flowercore." Formally, the poems are fixed by a pulsing count of words per line, by the steady inhalation of caesurae, and by a punctuation-free flow that washes watercoloristic effect through even passages of simple narration. These formalisms will be familiar to readers of Woodward's previous title Rain, but also will be instantly accessible to readers encountering his work for the first time. What is longing? And what does it mean to remember? Of what consequence is poetic compulsion in hell, or in heaven, for that matter?

"A cartesian tragicomedy. A very normal, very strange, somewhat neurotic consciousness noticing its normal, strange, somewhat neurotic consciousness. Like us all, one pretending to be two. Charming, mechanical, beautiful, embarrassing, vulnerable, readable, laugh-out-loud funny, constantly surprising, utterly relatable."

- Greg Saunier (Deerhoof)

"The bright, precise details of Jon Woodward's Want for Nothing tumble out like the images on a slot machine - juneberries, robots, kittens, BBQ sauce, an octopus - in decisive but oddly weightless fifteen-line stanzas that organize consciousness with the distillation of the sonnet and the forward motion of the ballad. I love the inventive, authentic humility of the speaker of these poems, whose shapeshifting delights, but whose sole delight is aliveness itself: 'A teaspoon of nobody / waiting for its glimmer of daylight.' Want for Nothing is a curative project - a holy well hiding in plain sight."

- Katie Peterson