"Something about the prose poem is already so French. Of course, anything having to do with the Prose Poem or the prose poem, more modestly put in lower case, has to begin with Aloysius Bertrand, and then we wanted it to go into the present, as it most surely does. What could be more appropriate to our own enthusiasm for the prose poem than our fascination with the ambivalent, the amphibian and the unfinished, our partiality to the partial and the paradoxical, our craving for the impossible union of opposites. We are hoping that the readers of this anthology will both encounter something new, and feel inspired to remember other texts admired and loved, perhaps more poetically than prosaically"--