- Paperback: 88 pages
- Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd. (April 1 2005)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1929918631
- ISBN-13: 978-1929918638
- Product Dimensions: 23 x 17.6 x 0.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 141 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,518,331 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Booklist
Other American poets of Edson's now almost elderly generation have written and still write prose poems, but Edson has written precious little else. Perhaps his persistence accounts for him being the only American prose poet most readers can recall. Or perhaps his memorability stems from his reliability as a surrealist. Surrealism seems the literary manner best suited for prose poetry; others more readily make fables and mere story ideas, rather than poems, out of short prose pieces. Edson is a perpetual font of the incongruous scenarios, wordplay, and repetitive narrative and conversational forms typical of dreams, and dreams, after all, are the model surrealist texts. Like dreams, Edson's prose poems are directly and indirectly concerned with feelings customarily suppressed during wakefulness, whose content is violent, scatological, and, especially, sexual. An Edson prose poem, however amusing and ridiculous--however jokelike--it may be, is disturbing. The line between acceptable and forbidden appetites is definitely skirted. Laughter never blunts the edges of Edson's elegantly maculate conceptions. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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.
Of Memory and Distance
It’s a scientific fact that anyone entering the distance will grow smaller as he proceeds. Eventually becoming so small he might only be found with a microscope, if indeed he is found at all.
But there is a vanishing point, where anyone having entered the distance must disappear entirely without hope of his ever returning, leaving only the memory of his ever having been.
But then there is fiction, so that one can never really be sure if one is remembering someone who vanished into the distance, or simply who had been made of paper and ink . . .
Russell Edson has been called a surrealist comic genius, a magician of metaphor and imagination. He is all of these, and a philosophical poet whose zany expeditions into the twisted labyrinths of logic resemble Lewis Carroll’s adventures through the wonderlands of paradox and illusion. Perhaps that is why even people who do not read significant amounts of contemporary poetry can immediately appreciate the playful accessibility of Russell Edson’s writing. What he pulls out of the hat of the subconscious is always unpredictable, immediate and surprising.
Russell Edson’s books include The Very Thing That Happens (1964); The Childhood of an Equestrian (1973); The Tunnel: Selected Poems (1994); and The House of Sara Loo (Rain Taxi Chapbook Series, 2002). He lives in Darien, Connecticut.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.7 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Neglected American Master's Dazzling New Book!, April 15 2005
By Kenneth Anderson - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Rooster's Wife (Paperback)
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.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
A decent book, but not his best., Dec 2 2005
By Nate the Great - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Rooster's Wife (Paperback)
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".
0 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Loved it, July 9 2008
By artisus - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Rooster's Wife (Paperback)
An excellent book, but not for those who don't like surrealism or abstractness. I loved it. Wise, and inimitable.
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