From Booklist
Other American poets of Edson's now almost elderly generation have written and still write prose poems, but Edson has written precious little else. Perhaps his persistence accounts for him being the only American prose poet most readers can recall. Or perhaps his memorability stems from his reliability as a surrealist. Surrealism seems the literary manner best suited for prose poetry; others more readily make fables and mere story ideas, rather than poems, out of short prose pieces. Edson is a perpetual font of the incongruous scenarios, wordplay, and repetitive narrative and conversational forms typical of dreams, and dreams, after all, are the model surrealist texts. Like dreams, Edson's prose poems are directly and indirectly concerned with feelings customarily suppressed during wakefulness, whose content is violent, scatological, and, especially, sexual. An Edson prose poem, however amusing and ridiculous--however jokelike--it may be, is disturbing. The line between acceptable and forbidden appetites is definitely skirted. Laughter never blunts the edges of Edson's elegantly maculate conceptions. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Product Description
For decades, Russell Edson has been producing a body of work unique in perspective and singular in approach. Here are contorted Darwinian narratives of apes and monkeys exhibiting absurdly human behavior, along with elephants, horses, chickens, mermaids and mice.
"Russell Edson is one of the most important and unique poets in the later part of the 20th century. Since the early 1960s, Edson has dazzled readers with his eerie logic, (ir)rational narrative gymnastics, and comic wisdom. He is certainly one of the preeminent writers of the prose poem in America today." -- Mark Tursi
"Russell Edson is one of the most important and unique poets in the later part of the 20th century. Since the early 1960s, Edson has dazzled readers with his eerie logic, (ir)rational narrative gymnastics, and comic wisdom. He is certainly one of the preeminent writers of the prose poem in America today." -- Mark Tursi
