Evolution of the Bridge collects prose poems 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.

Maxine Chernoff's prose poems share the metapoetic extravagance of the likes of Henri Michaux, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar. Evolution of the Bridge should establish her as one of America's great fabulists. -- Michel Delville

from The Last Aurochs and A Vegetable Emergency (1976) The Moat A Vegetable Emergency The Broom In the Moonlight The Annual Picnic High Rise The Birth of a Chair The Last Aurochs from Utopia TV Store (1979) The Sitting Toothache His Pastime Sailing Water Music The Fan A Lesson in Cause and Effect Fred Astaire Top Hand with a Gun Body and Soul Van Gogh's Ear Hats Around the World Phantom Pain Vanity, Wisconsin The Inner Life The World of Ideas Evolution of the Bridge Subtraction Kill Yourself with an Objet D'art The Man Struck Twenty Times by Lightning The Dead Letter Office Rehearsal The Limits of Science The Fetus A Definition The Boat On My Birthday What the Dead Eat An Abridged Bestiary The Meaning of Anxiety The Insomniac's Notebook A Birth The Horizontal Brigade Utopia TV Store The Shoe and the City A Sense of Humor Anonymous Thoughts from Home The Woman Who Straddled the Globe In the Hospital The Time of the Plague The Stand-Up Tragedians New Year's Eve from New Faces of 1952 (1985) Lost and Found Biographia Literaria The Smell Convention Spring Prophecy Identity Principle A Name Sotto Voce Sayings of My Distant Uncle Miss Congeniality Hairdo Learning to Listen Animal Magnetism How We Went Anger The Edible Harp Beginning, Middle, End The Unzipped from Leap Year Day : New and Selected Poems (1991) How Lies Grow The Apology Store The New Money from World : Poems 1991-2001 Nomads Beauty Heavenly Bodies Wearing Moe Her Many Occupations Guilt Husband and Wife An Epiphany Killing Himself The Method The Sound Wash Uncollected Prose Poems Five Possible Moments Night Thoughts The Heimlich Maneuver A Valentine Loving a Short Man Simple Gifts Origin The Commonplace Quizzing Glass The Unbuilding