Winner of the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry

Ultimately, the lyrics in Hoodwinked read as odes to mortality. They marvel nonstop, unsentimentally, and with necessary ambivalence, at the world as given and the human inability to consistently rise to the exhausting challenge of making every second count. These poems constantly acknowledge that 'all flesh is grass.' They make us hear the wondrous, terrifying hum of impending obliteration, while at the same time never growing immune to beauty, never ceasing to be curious about what the grass itself makes of our common temporal conundrum. —Amy Gerstler, from the introduction

The vast majority of images in the poems of Hoodwinked are of everyday life, an ordinary, common life filled with ordinary beauty and common events; but the repeated theme of death and decay draw these images into magnified, sharp focus. From the start the poems read like the memoir of a survivor. There are in fact two or three references to war, but the overall impression is of occupation, an imprisonment in the unforgettable reality of universal entropy. David Hernandez writes fearlessly, unapologetically and coherently of the vital subject of inevitable deterioration.—Hayden's Ferry Review

Under all the surfaces, is where these zany, ever-present poems roam. You have to pay close attention, reading, to catch up to the riddle and its revelation here. Hernandez is not fooling around, but this book brilliantly fools with our expectations and inability to focus on what's in front of us. —Carol Muske-Dukes in The Huffington Post

A poet with a gutsy voice all his own. —Rattle

Each poem feels fresh and surprising....[Hernandez's] humor is sharp and insightful, the kind that, when the topmost layer is peeled back, reveals an honest survey of its environs. —The Journal

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