As a novelist works with plot and characters, as a poet plays with words and metaphor, so Russell Edson in his prose poems tools images in oddball combinations. So, if we encounter a man sitting in his chair, the man’s hand could grow potato fingers, his hair stand up straight held in a magician’s trance or his chair could sprout chicken feathers, give birth to old women, play the harmonica or attack the man out of spite. Either this flavor of humor, subtle philosophy and continual metamorphosis speaks to you or it doesn’t. But if it does, you are in for a treat. This little book, The Tormented Mirror, is the plumb fruit of many years of Russell writing his prose poems. Here are three to roll around in your psyche like colorful marbles, intimate and private:

A LETTER FROM HOME
One night a man’s shadow died. Slumping, it groped its heart and dripped down the wall into a dark stain on the floor in the shape of a man who died in his bedroom alone.

The man writes home: Dear mom, my shadow is dead. I may have to be reborn, if you and dad are up to it, and have a new shadow attached . . .

His mother writes back: Dear Ken, please don’t count on it. In truth, dear, given another chance I think I would ask for an abortion . . .

POETRY
You will hear her, the muse; she knocks three times. Past that she knocks no more.

The password is nonsense.
This begins the secret which hides the final message.

You will sit in the dark waiting for the three knocks. Do not be fooled by the coming of the three little pigs, or the old man who hobbles on a cane. The one who slays the Sphinx at the end of the game.

The consummation is nonsense, without which the road of the final message is overgrown with meaning, and the vagueness of everything is everywhere. . .

ROUND
When there is no shape there is round. Round has no shape; no more than a raindrop or a human tear . . .
And though the organs that focus the world are round, we have never been happy with roundness; how it allows no man to rest. For in roundness there is no place to stop, since all places in roundness are the same.
Thus the itch to square something. To make a box. To find proportion in a golden mean . . .

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On the topic of images combining in oddball combinations, I’d like to share one of my own prose poems published years ago. And, yes, Russell Edson is my favorite poet, a true inspiration:

JACK-IN-THE-BOX
I find a jack-in-the-box and crank the handle. At the end of the tune out pops the jack-in-the-box. I stuff him back in the box and the jack moans.

In the darkness of the box the jack continues to moan as I crank the handle and the music plays. And again, at the end, the jack pops up, but he isn’t smiling this time. The jack screams when I stuff him back in.

Now when I crank the handle, a dirge plays. The jack-in-the-box pops up dead. The jack is silent when I stuff him in his box, which I notice for the first time, is a black box with all the gold trimmings, veiled in grief.