Truths, Falsehoods, and a Wee Bit of Honesty by Peter Johnson

Truths, Falsehoods, and a Wee Bit of Honesty: A Short Primer on the Prose Poemwith Selected Letters from Russell Edson Truths, Falsehoods, and a Wee Bit of Honesty is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the prose poem and is worth buying for Russell Edson’s correspondence alone. Peter Johnson’s essays and interviews are filled with imaginative insights on poetic form, the nature of humor and the grotesque in contemporary poetry, the problem of genre, the anxiety of influence, and the permutations of content and form arising from writing and reading prose poetry, an oxymoronic genre memorably defined by Edson as “a cast-iron aeroplane that can actually fly.” The volume also offers much to be learned about the political in-fighting in literary circles and the genre’s cultural and institutional position in American letters. Highly recommended! —Michel Delville, author of The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre In Peter Johnson’s Truths, Falsehoods, an