Poems

By Eve Wood

256 pages. Full color illustrations throughout.
Paperback.

$28.95 | 9780954600690
April 2026

Co-published with Smart Art Press

A four-part collection of poems and epistolary fiction by Eve Wood, accompanied by darkly humorous drawings and paintings from her thirty-year archive.

What did Jackson Pollock say to the tree that killed him? Or the wives of Henry VIII behind closed doors? In her humorous, lustful, and insightful book, Eve Wood imagines the hidden lives (and deaths) of contemporary artists and the women who married Henry VIII, as well as rendering the coded amorous exchanges between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West and pulling wisdom from under Abraham Lincoln’s hat. Eve Wood takes her subjects beyond the looking glass, turns history in on itself and sees our contemporary moment reflected there. Laughing along the way, surprised by her discoveries and her art, readers will find this book to be a panacea for dark times.

Part One: Diane Arbus Goes Shopping | Part Two: The Two V’s: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West | Part Three: A Cadence for Redemption: Conversations with Abraham Lincoln | Part Four: SIX

PRAISE

Praise for SIX
“This book of historical persona poems, spoken by the six wives of Henry VIII, could only have been written by a poet of prodigious imaginative powers, skill, and an enormous curiosity. That poet is Eve Wood and SIX is a wonderful book.” —Thomas Lux

“Eve Wood’s haunted and haunting ventriloquisms of sixteenth-century women remind me of John Berryman’s hallucinatory Mistress Bradstreet. Like Berryman, Wood shows us what might be made of history if poets had their way. —Michael Collier

“Wood’s use of returning and startling imagery pulls us into the haunting and heartless atmosphere into which each [of Henry VIII’s wives] was thrown by marriage. […] Equally remarkable are the poet’s divinings into these women’s relationships with God and nature.” —Kate Knapp Johnson

“Gorgeous and chilling.” —Gail Willumsen

“These poems are a benediction — nuanced, so perfectly crafted in their loveliness […] smart, savvy, tender and in many places, elegant and wise. Buy this book, and live more richly!”—John Fairfield Rice

Praise for past works 

“Remarks on Color is a luminous tapestry of prose poetry that invites readers to embark on a chromatic odyssey. Wood’s stunning synthesis of familiar reality and surreal exaggeration illuminates the complex relationships, emotions and cultural associations we share with these spectral entities. As the amused reader considers the significance of each color in their own personal spectrum, Wood serves up a feast and critique of the colorful world in which we live.  —Tyler Stallings

“Employing the fictive voice of a former president, Eve Wood shifts the perspective on the happenings of our times — where all indicators point to the slow, inexorable collapse of the American Experiment — to the one man who represents the very heart of our onetime democracy and the towering soul of this once-revered nation: Abraham Lincoln. A Cadence for Redemption is a work of narrative brilliance, the arc and architecture of which is seemingly upheld by the merest of lyrical tentpoles — that, in all their brevity, of the poems themselves. Yet the ideas across the collection, and the emotive carry in each one of these songs of love, songs of longing and loss, are as equally affecting as they are disquieting; they are as well, in their grand sum, entirely profound.” —Christopher von Hassett, Riot Material

“Quickened by passion and imagination, the body of poems that makes up Love’s Funeral is astoundingly alive.” —Mark Strand 

“As a lay reader, I found [Wood’s] poetry rich, challenging and instinct with energy.” —Tom Keneally, author of Schindler’s Ark

Eve Wood is a Los Angeles-based writer, artist and art critic. Her writing and poetry has been widely published in magazines and literary journals such as The New Republic, Best American Poetry 1997,The Denver Quarterly, North American Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Santa Monica Review, Poetry, The Seattle Review, and many others. She holds a BFA and MFA (1992, 1994) from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA from UC Irvine (1996) in creative writing. She is the recipient of a Jacob Javits Fellowship and a California Community Foundation Fellowship. Her drawings and paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries such as Susanne Vielmetter, Western Project, Ochi Projects, and Track 16 Gallery, which currently represents her. She is the author and/or illustrator of eight collections of poetry and chapbooks, including The Artists’ Prison (X Artists’ Books) and Remarks on Color (DoppelHouse Press).