Edson studied art early in life and attended the Art Students League when he was 16. In the 1960s he began publishing poetry; since then, he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Russell Edson’s prose poems are often populated with strange and intriguing figures: a woman fights a tree, a mother serves ape. The poems are surreal and fablelike, sometimes resembling brief plays. He lived for many years in Stamford, Connecticut.
By Russell Edson
Let us consider the farmer who makes his straw hat his
sweetheart; or the old woman who makes a floor lamp her son;
or the young woman who has set herself the task of scraping
her shadow off a wall....
Let us consider...
By Russell Edson
A little girl made of sugar and spice and everything nice was eaten by someone with a sweet tooth the size of an elephant’s tusk.
Ah, he said, this darn tooth, it’s driving me nuts.
Then another voice is heard. It’s the...
