The Cat Inside by William S. Burroughs

I saw this one on a shelf at work. I love the collage style cover. I also love that it's a book about cats by William S. Burroughs. This series of prose poems, written when Burroughs was in his early 70s, shows a gentler side of the author of Junkie and Naked Lunch, as he reminisces about the many cats he has known, and ponders man's relationship to cats. It's a rather slim volume--I read it in a sitting.

The Tunnel by Russell Edson

My sophomore year of college my writing teacher distributed a packet of handouts consisting of xeroxed pages from various books. Among those were several poems by Russell Edson. I'm not the biggest reader of poetry but I was quite taken by his work.

His prose poems fuse bizarre with banal, subtly taking the reader into a strange alternate world, where it is not uncommon to paddle a canoe up the stairs,

or cultivate sheep in a test tube.

The Vermont Notebook by John Ashbery and Joe Brainard

A 1975 collaboration between the poet John Ashbery and painter Joe Brainard, who wrote the wonderful book I Remember.


Ashbery's prose poems, largely comprised of long and short lists and made-up diary entries, are accompanied with pen and ink drawings by Brainard.

The drawings bring out the beauty in simplistic, mundane objects such as a cup of coffee,

Or a toilet,

Or a letter.

The original 1975 Black Sparrow Press edition was long out of print, but Granary Books reissued it in 2001, happily.

I Remember by Joe Brainard

This book is an adorably tiny pocket size, which seems perfect for what it is--a series of recollections by the painter Joe Brainard. (For instance, "I remember how good a glass of water can taste after a dish of ice cream." Or, "I remember when, in high school, I used to stuff a sock into my underwear.") Painful, funny, wistful, blah blah blah. This was first introduced to me in college when I was assigned to write my own "I Remember," which proved to be an enjoyable and worthwhile experience. Once I got going I kept remembering more--one association led to another and another.

God Save My Queen by Daniel Nester

When I was in college I interned at Soft Skull Press, then in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. This book of prose poems (one for each song by Queen through the album Hot Space) was released that season. The author, Dan Nester, was an editor there at the time, and occasionally stopped into the office, which was also a small bookstore. I can attest that he is indeed a pretty huge Queen fan.

The book's trim size is the same as a 7" record (when the first boxes of books arrived at the store, Dan was there slipping them inside plastic record sleeves, which is how I still have mine stored). I innocently asked him if the 7" trim size was on purpose, the answer being, "uh, duh, yes." (Or something along those lines.)