Description

BOA Editions, paperback

Publication Date: October 25, 2022

Publisher Marketing: 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 the dreamlike prose poems of Russell Edson (1935-2014).

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.

Edited by Craig Morgan Teicher; forward by Charles Simic.