Russell Edson's The Clam Theater is a volume of short prose poems, each of which very definitely has the quality of a "happy clam opening its shell" to reveal its delightfully hermetic inner workings. Edson's poems abound with puns, literary "sight gags", metaphors taken to their wildly illogical conclusions, and poem-within-a-poem architectures…. Every now and then, Edson's free-wheeling wit gets a little labored: "a funny thing happened to me on the way to the present." But at their best these prose poems are a happy marriage of French Surrealist techniques with a Marx Brothers-like insouciance and haplessness…. (pp. 295-96)

Gerrit Henry, in Poetry (© 1974 by The Modern Poetry Association; reprinted by permission of the Editor of Poetry), August, 1974.

Russell Edson has been shaking a bottle of cola some years now. With [The Intuitive Journey and Other Works] he lets the spray shoot out and cover the surrounding landscape, the...