Evolution of the Bridge: Selected Prose Poems collects work from Maxine Chernoff’s previous volumes written over the past thirty years. It features such classics as “The Last Aurochs,” “A Vegetable Emergency,” “Utopia TV Store,” “New Faces of 1952” and provides the reader with ample evidence that Maxine Chernoff continues to be one of the most significant practitioners of the prose poem in America today. As Michael Benedikt, editor of The Prose Poem: An International Anthology, said of her work, “Underlying all of Maxine Chernoff’s prose poems is the possibility of magic.” Writing in the fabulist mode, she explores the bizarre in everyday life and questions the very rules of engagement with language, social norms, and politics. The reader is jolted out of his complacency by the lens of her writing. “If the world could look through Maxine’s eyes for even five minutes every day, there would be no need whatsoever for the pompous self-righteousness that currently spoils the polis. Her views of human life are wise and corrective tales that cure by correcting perspective” (Andrei Codrescu). Her abiding interest in the prose poem has led to a collection that not only shows what she has done to revitalize the form but also where it may go from here. Witness the new prose poems in the section collected from World: Poems 1991–2001. As Rachel Loden notes, “The absurdist playlets-cum-vaudeville skits are some of the best fun ever vouchsafed to a poetry book. Each of these routines is a valiant attempt to limn the shape of human logic, a project that turns out to be both daunting and curiously satisfying.… What’s left is the spine of language and the rippled furrows of the human brain. And perhaps Groucho Marx and Margaret Dumont at war in a sort of paradise. “ Ethan Paquin, referring to the same dialogue-based prose poems states that “these comedic scenes are remarkable for their transcendence of comedy. It is as if the speakers were engaged in the world’s final debate. The only question is `Which world?’”

Table of Contents:
from The Last Aurochs and A Vegetable Emergency (1976) The Moat A Vegetable Emergency The Broom In the Moonlight The Annual Picnic High Rise The Birth of a Chair The Last Aurochs from Utopia TV Store (1979) The Sitting Toothache His Pastime Sailing Water Music The Fan A Lesson in Cause and Effect Fred Astaire Top Hand with a Gun Body and Soul Van Gogh’s Ear Hats Around the World Phantom Pain Vanity, Wisconsin The Inner Life The World of Ideas Evolution of the Bridge Subtraction Kill Yourself with an Objet D’art The Man Struck Twenty Times by Lightning The Dead Letter Office Rehearsal The Limits of Science The Fetus A Definition The Boat On My Birthday What the Dead Eat An Abridged Bestiary The Meaning of Anxiety The Insomniac’s Notebook A Birth The Horizontal Brigade Utopia TV Store The Shoe and the City A Sense of Humor Anonymous Thoughts from Home The Woman Who Straddled the Globe In the Hospital The Time of the Plague The Stand-Up Tragedians New Year’s Eve from New Faces of 1952 (1985) Lost and Found Biographia Literaria The Smell Convention Spring Prophecy Identity Principle A Name Sotto Voce Sayings of My Distant Uncle Miss Congeniality Hairdo Learning to Listen Animal Magnetism How We Went Anger The Edible Harp Beginning, Middle, End The Unzipped from Leap Year Day : New and Selected Poems (1991) How Lies Grow The Apology Store The New Money from World : Poems 1991-2001 Nomads Beauty Heavenly Bodies Wearing Moe Her Many Occupations Guilt Husband and Wife An Epiphany Killing Himself The Method The Sound Wash Uncollected Prose Poems Five Possible Moments Night Thoughts The Heimlich Maneuver A Valentine Loving a Short Man Simple Gifts Origin The Commonplace Quizzing Glass The Unbuilding