Under the Music by Maxine Chernoff

Under the Music is cause for celebration, as it gathers over forty years of Maxine Chernoff’s brilliant exploration of a single form: the prose poem. Chernoff, also a writer of fiction, is a marvelous storyteller with impeccable comedic timing. Her pieces abound in witty dialogue, absurdist jokes, sage advice, and a gallery of eccentric characters like “The Man Struck Twenty Times by Lightning,” or “The Woman Who Straddled the Globe.” There is even a poignant conversation between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. Brief as these poems are, there is a vastness to the project. By acquiescing to the modest confines of this form, Chernoff discovers a seemingly endless reservoir of curiosity, invention, and delight. —Elaine Equi In one of these wonderfully inventive, witty prose poems, a child says “words are the finest toys.” For Maxine Chernoff they are that, certainly, playthings that are moved—seem often to move themselves—into fields of imaginative possibility. The results are brief n