Book Description
Russell Edson's prose poems constitute some of the most original American art of the 20th century. Like the boxes of Joseph Cornell, each is a miniature world, eerie in its logic, unsettling in its ruthless fun, dazzling in its invention. Much of Edson's corpus has been out of print or difficult to find for some time now. This new selection offers his own favorites from seven previous collections, restoring Edson to his large and international audience and introducing him to new readers who are committed to what is truly original and illuminating in language, imagination, and poetry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

My Bible
I refer to this book whenever I feel low, or seek inspiration, or just wish to bring some meaning into a numbingly humdrum day. I keep it on the back of the toilet so it will always be within easy reach. I have felt much more compassion for toilets since reading Edson's poem about a toilet sliding into a room like a snail, begging to be loved. (When it is denied, it slides back out, flushing with grief.)

My favorite is The Family Monkey. ("We bought an electric monkey, experimenting rather recklessly with funds carefully gathered since grandfather's time for the purchase of a steam monkey.")

Dip into this when you desire to be shaken free of the rut in which you find yourself. Unless of course, your rut is eccentric prose poetry, in which case, praise your hat and pass the ape!

An accomplished master of prose poetry
Russell Edson is an accomplished master of prose poetry. Each of his poems are complete presentations of his uniquely expressed verse that has earned him the respect of his peers, academia, and readers. "The Tunnel: Selected Poems" draws from the poet's own chosen favorites among the seven previously published collections of his work and will aptly serve to introduce his originality and expertise to a whole new generation of appreciative readers. 'The Large Thing': A large thing comes in./Go out, Large Thing, says someone./The Large Thing goes out, and comes in again./Go out, Large Thing, and stay out, says someone./The large Thing goes out, and stays out./Then that same someone who has been ordering the Large Thing out/begins to be lonely, and says, come in Large Thing./But when the Large Thing is in, that same someone decides it would be/better if the Large Thing would go out./Go out, Large Thing, says this same someone./The Large Thing goes out./Oh, why did I say that? Says the someone, who begins to be lonely again./But meanwhile the Large Thing has come back in anyway./Good, I was just about to call you back, says the same someone to the Large Thing.

Suicide Prevention Poetry
Suicide hotline operators should simply read from Edson. This is life affirming stuff. I insist you also get his new one, The Tormented Mirror, and anything by James Tate, especially Shroud of the Gnome. These two will startle even the most steadfast poetry-haters.

Great fun, and sometimes profound
Don't let yourself get all tangled in the arguments over what is and isn't a prose poem, or even if such an oxymoronic creature is possible.It doesn't matter what you call them, these things by Russell Edson are great fun and great reading.

Most of these pieces are about a page long, and many are considerably shorter.They are moments of dreams, newsreels from some surreal purgatory, portraits of impossibility.In this world, "Mr Is went into the woods to think about his wooden head," and "A woman had given birth to an old man."Within the oddity and amidst the strangeness are moments of tenderness, passion, horror.Read slowly and carefully, these words somehow seem to reflect the world we trudge through and the life we lead, and so add contours to our boring reality.There is a lot of melancholy here; it comes perhaps from the confusions and juxtapositions, but there is nothing to fear, and plenty to love, for, as Edson writes, "In such a world there is much sadness which, of course, is joy..."

Broadly accessible prose poems, rewarding, and unique.
I read this book with a poetry reading book club and it was one of the club's favorites.Edson writes often surreal philosophical fables which are easy to enter into because of their familiar, "There once was a woman who..." language.However, this river runs deep. ... Read more

Book Description

For the past 40 years, Russell Edson has been producing a body of work unique in its perspective and singular in its approach. He is, arguably, America's most distinguished writer of prose poems. Here are contorted Darwinian narratives of apes and monkeys exhibiting absurdly human behavior, along with his usual menagerie of elephants, horses, chickens, roosters, dogs, mermaids and mice. Along with his trademark humor, The Rooster's Wife finds Edson contemplating age, mortality and immortality as well.

Customer Reviews (2)

A decent book, but not his best.
I have long been a fan of Russell Edson for his unique and thoroughly abstract prosetry, but this book is not his top work. Although the poems do hold true to his usual surreal writing style, many of the pieces seem forced, almost as though they were included to stretch the length of the book. Russell Edson is a wonderful poet and truly underappreciated artist, but this book is not up to snuff. If you are interested in getting to know some of his work, I would start with one of his other books (like "The Tormented Mirror") before you pick up "The Rooster's Wife".

A Neglected American Master's Dazzling New Book!
If I could nominate a writer for the title of "Best Kept Secret in American Literature," my nominee would have to be Russell Edson.For more than forty years the reculsive prose poet has traveled on the margins of mainstream literature, establishing himself among a select group of readers as a master craftsman.His short phantasmagoric parables are at once sublime AND ridiculous, consistently entertaining, and boldly introspective.Edson uses the ordinary elements of daily life situations to launch us into a dimension of absurdist unreality that informs the reader as dreams inform the wakened dreamer.
In this, his newest book, Edson proves no less powerful, no less cunning, no less brilliant.There are new relationships between familiar objects, new objects born of familiar relationships, and acres of fresh imaginative terrain to discover.But, be warned, you who enjoy the bald "meaningfulness" so popular in American pablum-poetics (thanks, Billy Collins), THE ROOSTER'S WIFE requires all your intelligence, your full attention, and your sense of humor.So, push aside your presumptions of poetic form and meaning, and wander the impossible landscape of America's Most Neglected Master. Read Russell Edson's THE ROOSTER'S WIFE. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great Comedy, But Less Wonder
Russell Edson is my favorite poet. The Tunnel (his selected poems) is filled with genius. Almost every poem of his I'd previously read had something intriguing about it, something ranging from the merely curious to the truly wonder-evoking.

At first I thought that The Tormented Mirror was a book of throw-aways culled together by the editor of Pitt Press.I read the book four times, and each time I came away feeling disappointed.The poems in this book are a bit more crude, and on the average, less sophisticated than the best poems in The Tunnel.I tired of the over-emphasis on body parts and functions.In general I'm all for Edson's bizarre forays into the ultra-Freudian mentality, but I kept feeling that The Tormented Mirror was obsessed with the most overt and simplistic Freudian reactions while neglecting the complexities and depth that Freud himself, or classically, Edson, would have seen in the dark marshes of the unconscious. Then I heard Edson read the poems.There's a Real Video of an entire reading given at Arizona State University on line (http://www.asu.edu/clas/english/creativewriting/marshall/edson/).It was the first opportunity I had to hear Edson read his work, and I was very impressed.His voice is deep, resonant and filled with wickedly satirical drama. His ASU reading devoted about half the time to this book and half to old favorites (from The Tunnel).

With the benefit of Edson's voice and performance, I realized that the poems of the Tormented mirror are not deficient, but simply lighter than his best work.They are more comedic, and Edson's reading (complete with bouts of chuckling) demonstrates the comedy.When he read them in line with his older poems, they blended seamlessly, and the reading was truly a delight.

So I returned to this review, originally a rather mean one, to rectify my error.I had demanded too much of Edson originally, probably because his writing is so important to me.I sympathize deeply with his status as "Poet of the Unconscious."In some ways, he doesn't do the unconscious as much justice in this book as in the best efforts of his past.He draws more from the sexually repressed, id-terrorized personal unconscious in the Tormented Mirror than he did in some of his earlier poems, which carry more mystery, oddly-resonating logic, and deeper, more universal palpitations of the human animal and its beleaguered brain.Still, these poems are great fun, and definitely worth a read if you are familiar with and enjoy Edson's writing.If you are new to Edson, don't start here.The Tunnel is the book to get.The Tormented Mirror strikes me as more for the Edson aficionado.But, by all means, watch the ASU reading before you buy this book.At times, The Tormented Mirror lacks a lighted pathway to understanding Edson's voice, and the ASU reading will work as a starry night to navigate by.

Another weakness of this book in view of the poems in The Tunnel is a relative lack of wonderful language and linguistic pyrotechnics.Edson is a genius, but not just for his weird masterful manipulations of logic.He is also a master of metaphor and amazing phrases.The language in The Tormented Mirror is less electrified than the Edson poems I love most, which adds to its seemingly simplistic crudeness.My recommendation is to read these poems very slowly with a heightened sense of wry drama.In the past, Edson has utilized strange phraseology to send your tongue and ear tripping into the proper rhythm for the specific poem.Here, the very basic language would seem to encourage faster reading.You will have to trip your own tongue to best appreciate these poems, and after you become resigned to this, the poems will best expose their polymorphously perverse sensibilities.

There are some great bits where Edson's language is in classic form, though.In "Sleep," a neat little poem about insomnia, a man suffers from being an ýunprofessionalý sleeper in need of training.Edson writes:
"He needed a sleeping master, who with a whip and a chair could discipline the night, and make him jump through hoops of gasolined fire.Someone who could make a tiger sit on a tiny pedestal and yawn ..."

More frequently though, the language of the poems is more silly and humorous than magical.For instance, in "Sunset," a poem about a person who sits in a stranger's window eclipsing the stranger's view of a sunset with a large posterior.Argument ensues as the owner of the window tries to get the owner of the posterior to leave.The owner of the large backside says:
"I was tired and saw your open window and thought to sit on your sill until I was less tired.I even took my pants down to give my backside a more natural look.Experience has taught me that people prefer to see something almost as natural as a sunset in their windows ..."

Another poem, "The Reality Argument" opens with a wonderful line, "Who has not awakened in the night wondering if the illness called childhood was not borne by an infestation of dolls?" but degenerates by the end into infantile sexual curiosity, seemingly neglecting the other exquisite non-sexual possibilities.Almost all the poems are good for at least a laugh, though, and that is not a bad thing.A very short poem, "The Rule and Its Exception," is dumb, absurd, and hilarious at once, and serves as a good illustration of how the Tormented Mirror is best treated as a sweet little literary confection and not a multiple-course meal:
"The big toe located on each of the two feet of man (Homo sapiens, "man, the wise") has as its main function the growing of a toenail and the production of pain when stepped on ...
Death is the exception to this rule.
Goodbye, my friends ..." ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Russell Edson, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 1564 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Customer Reviews (1)

Too Lazy to Go To The Library?
I bought this electronic, so-called book, but I'm not sure I would buy another one.Basically, it consists of a page or two torn from the Gale guide entitled Contemporary Authors --available in virtually every library in America.

I wasn't expecting a lot for $4, but I did expect that they might have had something worthwhile to say on the subject.After a list of his works in print and a tiny snippette of biographical details, the real meat of the article turns out to consist of short clippings from Edson's various book reviews over the years.It's hard to get much information from a ten word quotation, and the citations are too vague to follow up to the original source with any ease.Oh...and it hasn't been updated for almost two years.

In general, I like the idea of downloading a book instead of wasting paper and postage, but I think this sort of rip-off gives the whole idea of electronic books a black eye. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

This book of poems is quite perplex.
I had read this book a few years ago, loaned to me by a great teacher.I was only able to read 1/4 of the book when I had to return it.If anyone that reads this knows of where I could retrieve a copy of this book, pleaseinform me. ... Read more