The Tormented Mirror

It is not surprising to discover . . . that Edson is an artist as well as a poet. His treatment of language is essentially plastic, verging at time on the cubistic.

Edson is the undisputed master of the prose poem. . . . though his poems are nearly always accessible, dealing with the commonplace and commonness of life, they do so in highly uncommon ways, and our assumptions are continually being put topsy-turvy.

His prose poems are brief glimpses into a visionary world with haunting analogies to our own. The tone ranges from weird humor through the poignant and melancholy to the genuinely scary. The images are hard and clear.

With 10 previous collections to his credit, Edson is the godfather of the prose poem in America. His work sets a standard for prose poetry that few other practitioners can meet. Most of them don't try, telling anecdotes and offering aesthetic and ethical musings in their prose poems instead of practicing the pure surrealism that is Edson's forte. An Edson prose poem proceeds like a joke, beginning with an odd situation . . . developing with skewed logic, and concluding with some kind of surprise. But Edson's jokes are dreamier than any stand-up comic's, full of sexual and scatological twists and weird metamorphoses. They can elicit laughter, disgust, or both simultaneously, and they defy easy interpretation, for they lack overt symbolism. They are disturbing but often, especially in this book, as dazzling as a good Dali or De Chirico painting.

Edson practices a surreal and often hilarious form of the prose poem, filled with elipses, talking animals, flying humans, contradictions, and coincidence. . . . The Tormented Mirror confirms Edson's artistry with the prose poem as a form; he continues to maintain a precarious balance between unfettered imagination and the observable world, both of which are often darker than they seem.

With "The Tormented Mirror", Edson once again shows himself to be a master of the prose poem ... Edson's competent hands ... make the genre of prose poetry his own by the using the history of a tradition and opening it up for a contemporary audience."

Edson's poems, as always, are odd, mysterious and funny ... (The Tormented Mirror) should expand and deepen contemporary knowledge of the prose poem.

There is no tortured confessional postulating here. There are only worlds undiscoverd until now revealing themselves.