Russell Edson was a playwright, novelist, and poet. He authored eighteen previous poetry collections, including The Tormented Mirror, The Reason Why the Closet-Man is Never Sad, The Wounded Breakfast: Ten Poems, and The Tunnel: Selected Poems.

Edson . . . is the writer as sleight-of-word trickster, the prestidigitator of the soul who pulls not rabbits but meanings out of the darkness inside the hat we call the universe. Magician, shaman, mystic, call him what you will—through his words he brings us back to primal definitions we have forgotten, so we can rediscover a wholeness of vision and sense of self we have lost in our pursuit of material comforts and conscious-deadening technologies.