Winner of the 2018 Ivan Juritz Prize
 
 
‘Cat Woodward’s poetry is a brilliant, telling, teasing reanimation of what lyric can be for us now.  Blood. Flower. Joy! was an exemplary winner of the Ivan Juritz Prize: experimental poetry with guts and flair that manages to be at once strenuously thoughtful and sumptuously sprightly.’
 
 
    – Lara Feigel
 
 
‘Woodward’s collection Blood. Flower. Joy! is a brilliantly vital kaleidoscope of language – unexpected, feral and sharp. In these poems the diction of the modern world rubs against the insolent, wild vocabularies of nature, where the god Pan still rises and burns, and fragments of Shakespeare clatter against the sound of the wind. This is place, voice and thought made urgently, necessarily strange; where poems become spells and the links between the nonhuman and human realms become fuzzy and porous. In Woodward’s work, humour, environmentalism, politics and gender rip each other to shreds, asking the reader to ‘dress sexy/see Tories/go pow pow.’ This irreverent, striking and bristlingly original collection of poems is unlike anything else you’ll read this year.’ 
 
    – Rebbecca Tamas