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, Edson’s 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 Edson’s 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.
Edson’s 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.
About the author
Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and immigrated to the United States in 1954, where he later graduated from New York University. Since then, Simic has published over sixty collections of poems including The Lunatic, Master of Disguises, That Little Something, My Noiseless Entourage, The Voice at 3:00 AM: Selected Late and New Poems, The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems, and Classic Ballroom Dances. His work has won numerous awards such as the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, the Mac Arthur Foundation “Genius Grant, ” the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award. In 2007, he was appointed as the 15th Poet Laureate of the United States. He has taught English and creative writing for over 30 years at the University of New Hampshire, where he is Professor Emeritus.
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