If you’ve read any of Russell Edson’s work, you’ll know precisely what and what not to expect from The Rooster’s Wife, a collection of prose poems that riff on far-out setups like “a woman had given birth to a small pink elephant” or “I ordered ape, and was served monkey.” These gambits then play out on the soundstages of barnyards, households, restaurants, and hospitals. Edson enjoys making animals talk, and dismembering his characters and sewing them back together; the poetry, for that matter, sews together children’s book writing and artsy-fartsy surrealism into a Frankenstein-like assemblage of Shel Silverstein and René Char.

I’m not sure if it’s meaningful to ask of Edson’s writing that it “evolve,” but the shtick is susceptible to stagnation, and the level of invention and wit feels generally at or below that of improv comedy. Here is all of “The Tree,” which sounds like it was overheard in a kindergarten:

They have grafted pieces of an ape with pieces of a dog.
Then, what they have, wants to live in a tree.
No, what they have wants to lift its leg and piss on the tree....

There is lots of peeing, lots of turds mistaken for babies, lots of “bowel movement,” “secondary sexual characteristics,” and “nasty genitals.” My weakness for potty humor is not enough to carry me over these spots in the diction, which, at once prudish and scatological, continually push the book away from light verse—as do the Frenchified phrasing (“subtle compliance to an atmosphere softly breathing from a distant meadow”) and abstractions (“tensions drawn from exacting boundaries”). The mass of the poems has no particular adaptation to humor, allegory, drama, or even absurdity, and too frequently the sentences drift off into ellipses, as if Edson were embarrassed at his teetering constructions and had no better distraction at hand by which to make his getaway.

Edson has written of prose poems that “the idea is to get away from obvious ornament, and the obligations implied therein. Let those who play tennis play their tennis.” Construing the form in terms of liberation, Edson exposes its lyrical disadvantages without following up on its obligations—expository, rhythmic, rhetorical. If poetry should be as well written as prose, then prose poetry has one more, not one less, master to serve.

— D. H. Tracy