Little Mr. Prose Poem: Selected Poems of Russell Edson

(Paperback)

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A baby that keeps losing its brain, a cow in a wedding gown, a woman whose chest is a radio bizarre and whimsical figures populate this collection of dreamlike prose poems from Russell Edson (1935-2014), with a Foreword by Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Simic.

A seminal voice in American prose poetry from the sixties onward, Edsons whole career is surveyed in a single volume edited for our times, presenting a new and contemporary view of a poet of startling imagination and strangeness. Craig Morgan Teicher calls us to witness Edsons obsessions with the curious, the absurd, and the peculiar, and the ways in which they can haunt our daily lives. The prose poems in this collection mold our everyday into something extraordinary and unsettling.

Edsons poems are surreal fables in which his characters experience all that life throws at them marriage, parenthood, technological advances, aging, dying, the afterlife through irreverent dialogue and vivid imagery in turns both humorous and grotesque. Russell Edson is a vital and ever-contemporary poet with a unique moral and comedic vision, whose literary career quietly yet definitively shaped the prose poetry subgenre as we know it now.

Reviews

Anyone who was fortunate to hear Edson read his poems is not likely to have forgotten the experience. He made his audiences roar with laughter or sit astonished at what they were hearingthe real surprise comes when we realize that despite all the joking we are reading or listening to, these are not the scribblings of a village idiot, but of a comic genius and a serious thinker. Charles Simic, from The Foreword

Edsons poems are deranged, oracular, logical, ecstatic, pellucid, desperate, filthy, fathomless, and deceptively simple. When I gave a reading with Edson in 2003 I said, Tonight I am reading with one of my greatest heroes. Hes still here with me, always, like a god. Sarah Manguso, author of 300 Arguments

Edson permitted himself to have it both ways, to write prose that reverses each of his sentences simultaneously urges the reader forward into the action of Edsons stories in miniature and also pulls the reader backward. Musical language, artfully loaded words, subtle twists in the plot, and all sorts of meaningful misdirections in Edsons work demand that we reread, that we never quite finish reading any of these poems, which are ever in the midst of revising themselves. Craig Morgan Teicher, from The Afterword

Author Bio

Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of several books of poems, most recently The Trembling Answers, which won the 2017 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey. He is also the author of two books of prose: the story collection Cradle Book and the essay collection We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress. He also edited Once and For All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz. He teaches at NYU and the Bennington Writing Seminars, works as Digital Director of The Paris Review, and lives in New Jersey with his wife and children.