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With Sincerest Regrets

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One of 500 copies. Printed by Rosmarie Waldrop on Barcham Green Charler Oak. Bound in original wraps with cover illustration by the author. Fine condition.

Paperback

First published October 1, 1980

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About the author

Russell Edson

49 books109 followers
Russell Edson (December 12, 1928 – April 29, 2014) was an American poet, novelist, writer, and illustrator. He was the son of the cartoonist-screenwriter Gus Edson.

He studied art early in life and attended the Art Students League as a teenager. He began publishing poetry in the 1960s. His honors as a poet include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Award, and several fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Russell Edson was born in Connecticut in 1935 and lived there with his wife Frances. Edson, who jokingly has called himself "Little Mr. Prose Poem," is inarguably the foremost writer of prose poetry in America, having written exclusively in that form before it became fashionable. In a forthcoming study of the American prose poem, Michel Delville suggests that one of Edson's typical "recipes" for his prose poems involves a modern everyman who suddenly tumbles into an alternative reality in which he loses control over himself, sometimes to the point of being irremediably absorbed--both figuratively and literally--by his immediate and, most often, domestic everyday environment. . . . Constantly fusing and confusing the banal and the bizarre, Edson delights in having a seemingly innocuous situation undergo the most unlikely and uncanny metamorphoses. . . .

Reclusive by nature, Edson has still managed to publish eleven books of prose poems and one novel, The Song of Percival Peacock (available from Coffee House Press).

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Profile Image for Glenn Russell.
1,501 reviews13.2k followers
February 6, 2018


A slim collection of delightfully quirky pieces by Russell Edson, an author who jokingly referred to himself as "Little Mr. Prose Poem." Here is the title piece. At the bottom, beneath the Gary Larson cartoon, is one of my own quirky micro-fictions I had published in years past.

WITH SINCEREST REGRETS
Like a monstrous snail, a toilet slides into a living room on a track of wet, demanding to be loved.
It is impossible, and we tender our sincerest regrets. In the book of the heart there is no mention made of plumbing.
And though we have spent our intimacy many times with you, you belong to an unfortunate reference, which we would rather not embrace ...
The toilet slides away ...



THE STIFFS
A cartoonist starts a new comic strip about dead people called The Stiffs. The humor is strictly deadpan, the action dead serious, and the Stiff family a bunch of real stiffs - stiff enough, that is, for all the readers to die laughing.
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