Featured Readers
Called the “godfather of the prose poem in America,” Russell Edson’s idiosyncratic body of work is populated with strange and intriguing figures: a woman fights a tree, a mother serves ape; in the poem “Let Us Consider,” there’s a “farmer who makes his straw hat his sweetheart” and an “old woman who makes a floor lamp her son.” The poems are surreal and fablelike, sometimes resembling brief plays. Donald Hall said of Edson’s poetry, “It’s fanciful, it’s even funny—but his humor carries discomfort with it, like all serious humor.” And Peter Schejeldahl pointed out that his poems have “the sustained wackiness of old Warner Brothers cartoons.”
Charles Simic was widely recognized as one of the most visceral and unique poets of his generation. His work won numerous awards, among them the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” a Griffin International Poetry Prize, a Wallace Stevens Award, and an appointment as US poet laureate. He taught English and creative writing for over 30 years at the University of New Hampshire. He emigrated to the United States from Yugoslavia as a teenager, Simic drew upon his own experiences of war-torn Belgrade to compose poems about the physical and spiritual poverty of modern life.