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?
