Little Mr. Prose Poem: Selected Poems of Russell Edson

“Anyone who was fortunate to hear Edson read his poems is not likely to have forgotten the experience. He made his audiences roar with laughter or sit astonished at what they were hearing…the real surprise comes when we realize that despite all the joking we are reading or listening to, these are not the scribblings of a village idiot, but of a comic genius and a serious thinker.”— Charles Simic, from The Foreword

“Edson’s poems are deranged, oracular, logical, ecstatic, pellucid, desperate, filthy, fathomless, and deceptively simple. When I gave a reading with Edson in 2003 I said, ‘Tonight I am reading with one of my greatest heroes.’ He’s still here with me, always, like a god.”— Sarah Manguso, author of 300 Arguments

“Edson permitted himself to have it both ways, to write prose that reverses — each of his sentences simultaneously urges the reader forward into the action of Edson’s stories in miniature and also pulls the reader backward. Musical language, artfully loaded words, subtle twists in the plot, and all sorts of meaningful misdirections in Edson’s work demand that we reread, that we never quite finish reading any of these poems, which are ever in the midst of revising themselves.”— Craig Morgan Teicher, from The Afterword