Self-confessed ‘wise guy of the prose poem’ and also its unofficial laureate, Peter Johnson is one of America’s foremost practitioners and critics of prose poetry. The publication of his While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems provides an important opportunity to reflect on the reputation of a master of the form, who, according to poet and critic Chard deNiord, ‘almost singlehandedly revived the currency of the prose poem during the nineties and early oughts.’ Indeed, Johnson has been a major force in the development of the American prose poem for more than three decades and has contributed significantly to its prominence on the world stage…. But it is his darkly comic and often deeply poignant prose poems that have done most to advance the form. His own writing possesses many of the characteristics he prioritizes and supports as a critic and editor. These include a sobering directness, a persuasive and unostentatious intellectualism, and a powerful sense of the ironic and absurd….
Praise for While the Undertaker Sleeps:
“Peter Johnson is the poet of the collision of imagination and reality…. [His] prose poems return us to that world where our imagination was the hero setting out almost daily in a series of fabulous adventures under the dining room table, which, we might say, rests on the shaky legs of common sense.…The excitement of prose poetry is that it transgresses the rules to let the reader catch a glimpse of what could be called the true life of the imagination. This is what Peter Johnson gives us. What more can we ask of a book of poems?”
— Charles Simic
“[Johnson’s] prose poems are comic, sexual, and endlessly inventive; poems of appreciation and discovery; poems that prove there is such a thing as the American prose poem.”
— Russell Edson
“Because Peter Johnson does not guide himself either by the turns or counterturns of verse or the horizontal urge of prose, he must continually reinvent the wheel and its destination. He writes with a lover’s lavish extravagance and a yogi’s self-discipline. His funny poems are heartbreaking and his serious ones are hilarious.”
—Bruce Smith
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