Poetry

Little Mr. Prose Poem: Selected Poems of Russell Edson

by Russell Edson, Craig Morgan Teicher, Charles Simic

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, 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.

Praise for Little Mr. Prose Poem

"These off-kilter tales and tableaux balance the humorous and the serious, the macabre and the sweet, offering much beauty and endlessly startling turns to be explored." —Publishers Weekly, ★ Starred Review

Clouds

A husband and wife climbed to the roof of their house, and each at the extremes of the ridge stood facing the other the while that the clouds took to form and reform.

The husband said, shall we do backward dives, and into windows floating come kissing in a central room?

I am standing on the bottom of an overturned boat, said the wife.

The husband said, shall I somersault along the ridge of the roof and up your legs and through your dress out of the neck of your dress to kiss you?

I am a roof statue on a temple in an archaeologist’s dream, said the wife.

The husband said, let us go down now and do what it is to make another come into the world.

Look, said the wife, the eternal clouds.

FormatPaperback

Publication DateOctober 25, 2022

ISBN9781950774739

$17.00

About the Author

Russell Edson

Russell Edson was a poet, novelist, writer and illustrator. Called the “godfather of the prose poem” Edson began publishing poetry in the 1960’s and is the author of thirteen collections, including The Rooster’s Wife (BOA, 2005). Edson received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He lived for many years in Stamford CT, and died in 2014.

Craig Morgan Teicher

Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of four books of poems: Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey (BOA, 2021), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize; The Trembling Answers (BOA, 2017), which won the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; To Keep Love Blurry (BOA, 2012); and Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems (CLP, 2007), winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry. He also wrote Cradle Book: Stories and Fables (BOA, 2010) and the chapbook Ambivalence and Other Conundrums (Omnidawn, 2014). His first collection of essays, We Begin in Gladness, was published by Graywolf in November, 2018.

Teicher edited Once and For All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz (New Directions, 2016) and Little Mr. Prose Poem: The Selected Poems of Russell Edson (BOA, 2022) and serves as a poetry editor for The Literary Review. He writes about books for many publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The LA Times, and NPR.He worked for many years at Publishers Weekly and is now Digital Director of The Paris Review. He is a 2021 recipient of a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and children.

Charles Simic

Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. He was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. His first full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says, was published a year after his graduation from New York University. Since then, he has published over sixty books abroad and in the United States, for which he has received many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship and the Wallace Stevens Award. He is Emeritus Professor of the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 1973, and a past Poet Laureate of the United States. His translation of Serbian poet Novica Tadić’s Dark Things was published by BOA Editions in 2009.