The Rooster's Wife Book

This was the weirdest sh** I've ever read in my life, and it was hilarious! I read through the first few poems and thought, Oh boy, one of those poets I don't understand; what the heck is he talking about?

Until I read a few more to one that shocked me, and under the search for depth and meaning, the ludicrous humor broke something in my mind and I shifted into laughter. It's the kind of laughter when you don't know what else to do, "what-the-freak-was that" kind of laughter.

Then I understood. This strange looking man on the back cover pretends to be serious and deep but sneaks subtle humor into your mind that spins you like a push from a man hanging out a window of a passing vehicle.

Imagine sitting in a park with a close friend. You're on a bench and a skinny guy in a trench walks by, turns to you both, opens his jacket and he's wearing a one-piece women's swimming suit with a huge rubber-ducky strapped to his crotch. He says in a high pitched, nasal voice, "Hi. She wanted me to piss on her cake, but I like vanilla and she likes chocolate. Have a good day Ralphie." He closes the trench and walks away. You are shocked, look at your friend, and the shock subsides, your mind tries to settle, and you think, "what-the-freaking-heck-just-happened," and all you can do to react is release laughter together. This is the kind of humor I get from Russel Edson, in this, my first exposure to his work.

Look at these first sentences of short poems:
"He was creating a super monkey by grafting pieces of a dead parrot to a morphine monkey" (Super Monkey).
"An old man is dressed in lingerie to amuse his cat" (The Cat).
"A woman had a bowel movement. An attending doctor smiled and said, Yours will be the first baby born without a belly button" (The Great Abstraction, or the Unfinished Story of Everything).
"A doctor, keeping to his promise to do no harm, keeps a spare old man with a white beard in his medical closet in case someone should choke to death on a tongue depressor" (To Do No Harm).
"Rocking the baby in her arms its head falls off and rolls to the corner of the room and begins to cry" (The Wet Diaper).

For someone who reads this review, I hope this poem may settle and you'll "get it." It took several poems before the brain-gears matched up for me:
.Things.
A woman said that she had been feeling rather thingy of late, and had, in fact, just had a thing.
Her husband said, What thing?
That thing, it came out of my body as suddenly as not, like some presumptuous stool.
That's a baby, you silly thing.
Then is it to suckle at my thing?
Where else? You silly thing.
So the woman held the baby to her chest and said, Now the thing is attached to my thing. But I don't know if the thing is suckling my thing, or my thing is suckling the thing.
Her husband said, It's the thing suckling your thing, not your thing suckling the thing, you silly, silly thing….

I am learning about myself as I read literature. I love new, weird unique things. It opens to knowledge and understanding I've never experienced. I'm surprised to realize I like Russel Edson. Everything in me, reading at first said, this is too weird. But I must confess, I like this. It has that meatiness and resonance I like in literature and leaves me with something to think about, under the surface, a new understanding of humor and its link to sparks of confusion.

Thank you to my Goodreads friend for sending this to me. I've never experienced anything like this. It opened me up to a new kind of "knowing" - weird, fun, hilarious.