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 Authors

Russell Edson (1935-2014) was the author of many books of prose poems, including The Very Thing That Happens, The Reason Why the Closet Man Is Never Sad, The Rooster’s Wife (2005), and See Jack. He is also the author of a collection of plays, The Falling Sickness, and the novels Gulping’s Recital and The Song of Percival Peacock. He lived in Darien, Connecticut.

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.

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 MacArthur 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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