The Rooster's Wife

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

Monkey Gas

         I ordered ape, and was served monkey….

         I had dug right into the corpse curled on my plate like someone dreaming so deeply never to be awakened again, not even by death.
         So human, and yet not so much so as to make me out a cannibal....

         But, as I was picking ape out of my teeth, and belching what I thought were ape flavored belches, I discovered that I was actually belching monkey gas.
         I said to the waiter, why am I belching monkey instead of ape?
         You’ve probably got a case of monkey gas, he said.
         Monkey gas? But the menu said, ape.
         It’s the octopus, he said, he ran out of ink, and had just enough for ape; though monkeys are smaller, they take twice the ink.

         And so, being true to the above, I continued the belching of monkey gas for no better reason, save that an octopus had run out of ink....

© BOA Editions, Ltd 2005

Available editions:
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Cloth ISBN: 978-1-929918-62-1
Price: $22.00
Publishing Date: March 2005
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-929918-63-8
Price: $14.95
Publishing Date: March 2005