An engaging and authoritative introduction to an increasingly
important and popular literary genre
Prose Poetry is the first book of its kind-an engaging and
authoritative introduction to the history, development, and features of
English-language prose poetry, an increasingly important and popular
literary form that is still too little understood and appreciated. Poets
and scholars Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton introduce prose
poetry's key characteristics, chart its evolution from the nineteenth
century to the present, and discuss many historical and contemporary
prose poems that both demonstrate their great diversity around the
Anglophone world and show why they represent some of today's most
inventive writing.
A prose poem looks like prose but reads like poetry: it lacks the line
breaks of other poetic forms but employs poetic techniques, such as
internal rhyme, repetition, and compression. Prose Poetry explains how
this form opens new spaces for writers to create riveting works that
reshape the resources of prose while redefining the poetic. Discussing
prose poetry' s precursors, including William Wordsworth and Walt
Whitman, and prose poets such as Charles Simic, Russell Edson, Lydia
Davis, and Claudia Rankine, the book pays equal attention to male and
female prose poets, documenting women's essential but frequently
unacknowledged contributions to the genre.
Revealing how prose poetry tests boundaries and challenges conventions
to open up new imaginative vistas, this is an essential book for all
readers, students, teachers, and writers of prose poetry.
