Russell Edson

Russell Edson (1935- ) is an author highly regarded for his work with the prose poem. He’s received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and he National Endowment for the Arts. He currently lives in Connecticut with his wife.

The Falling Sickness

Theater by Russell Edson

The Falling Sickness, Russell Edson’s first collection of short plays, will be welcomed by the extensive and devoted readership he has gathered over the years. His turn to the theater reveals a new dimension in his work, a vein of dramatic satire that makes all the more vivid the nightmarish absurdities which underscore so much in our lives. As in his earlier books of illustrated fables, parables, and prose poems, the scale of events is small, though the decibel level is shatteringly high: in each of the four plays, the bewildering wail of a nuclear family giving vent to its pain.…
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The Very Thing That Happens

Poetry by Russell Edson

In her introduction to this remarkable book if fables and drawings, Denise Levertov describes Russel Edson as “one of those originals who appear out of the lonesomeness of a vast, throned country to create a peculiar and defined world . . . a world seen as through the wrong end of a spyglass, miniscule but singularly clear.” “Fable” is really too narrow a term for Russel Edsons’s writing. His brief, tightly-packed, highly-charged paragraphs are the crystallized essence of what could be long stories, and they are prose poems.…
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Edson is not merely an offbeat original but a profound contemporary poet deserving of wider recognition.
Rain Taxi
Russell Edson must be considered a major force in American poetry. It’s long past time that Edson’s underground following came to the surface, so we can give this poet the serious attention his work merits.
—Ira Sadoff, Seneca Review
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