Chapbook; 1st edition of 500 copies.

Fables by Russell Edson and drawings by Ray Johnson.

This is the first book in the Pitt Poetry Series by this popular and enigmatic poet, considered the foremost writer of prose poetry in America. In eleven collections over thirty years, Edson has created his own poetic genre, a surreal philosophical fable, easy to enter, but difficult to leave behind. In The Tormented Mirror, Edson continues and refines his form in seventy-three new poems.

In this playfully complex novel of banter between master and servants, Russell Edson creates an allegorical narrative in which forbidden sexual desire meets rigid law and order.

“Edson's characters are doomed to rituals of re-enactment in a purgatory intimately reminiscent of our own. Mr. Peacock's rebellious maid claims, 'Loneliness builds many bridges,' and, indeed, the readers of this exquisite novella by the master poet Russell Edson will surely savor the stubborn dignity and mad pride that drives this cast of dotty characters forever deeper into their hopeless plight. An original masterpiece not to be missed.” —James Tate

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. 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.

A chapbook of 19 poems.

A debut collection of essays that address the intersection where black and white cultures and societies meet, ranging from presidential politics, literature, and cinema to sports, jazz, and the Miss America contest.