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Prose Poetry: An Introduction
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 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.
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 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.
- GenresPoetryNonfiction
344 pages, Hardcover
Published October 13, 2020
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December 17, 2022you may want to sign up for a writing course bc this is a bit of a flop
November 12, 2025
Great intro to prose poetry!
Also touched on poetic prose and lyrical essay.
Reviewers who complain they still don’t understand the conventions after reading this book – that’s the point. It’s a hybrid ambiguous form.
Also touched on poetic prose and lyrical essay.
Reviewers who complain they still don’t understand the conventions after reading this book – that’s the point. It’s a hybrid ambiguous form.
May 27, 2021
While not a bad book, it's not clear who this is an introduction for. It's a bit too academic in style to be for a lay audience, yet feels a bit undercooked to be a technical discussion.
To begin, it's broken into 3 that provide the history of the form ("Beginnings"), what distinguishes the form ("Against Conventions"), & the enactments of the form ("Methods And Contexts"). Yet the chapters don't really prove why it should be structured this way and, in fact, this tidbitting gets in the way of a more wholistic understanding of the form. By the time you get into their discussion of the relationship of urbanization (historically and now) to the structure/rhythm of prose poetry in chapter 3, you're already in Part 2 where that's forgotten for a new conversation about the prose poem's focus on a lack of closure.
This also leads to a fairly fundamental problem, imo: as soon as they provide a definition of the form, they have to erase it for another definition. Prose poetry is about a lack of closure - but so are these lineated poems. Prose poetry is demotic - except some of them aren't. Prose poetry is often defined by its box form - although not always. I get this is, per the authors, a protean form that's hard to pin down (except when they're semi-complaining about people on Tumblr misclassifying prose poems). But in an introduction that seems this bold, and which describes the form as "nothing less than the most important new poetic form to emerge in English-language poetry since the advent of free verse," I'd expect a definition not defined by its exceptions. The risk of classification.
For the optimal experience, I'd recommend not reading this book in order. How Hetherington and Atherton envision an introduction, it seems, is morsels for discussion. It's not a great introduction to prose poetry (read the anthologies and collections in the bibliography instead), but an introduction to the concept of prose poetry. In that vein I guess I've answered who Prose Poetry is for: English/Literature/Creative Writing classes. Otherwise, to their credit, they thoroughly summarize their theses in the end:
To begin, it's broken into 3 that provide the history of the form ("Beginnings"), what distinguishes the form ("Against Conventions"), & the enactments of the form ("Methods And Contexts"). Yet the chapters don't really prove why it should be structured this way and, in fact, this tidbitting gets in the way of a more wholistic understanding of the form. By the time you get into their discussion of the relationship of urbanization (historically and now) to the structure/rhythm of prose poetry in chapter 3, you're already in Part 2 where that's forgotten for a new conversation about the prose poem's focus on a lack of closure.
This also leads to a fairly fundamental problem, imo: as soon as they provide a definition of the form, they have to erase it for another definition. Prose poetry is about a lack of closure - but so are these lineated poems. Prose poetry is demotic - except some of them aren't. Prose poetry is often defined by its box form - although not always. I get this is, per the authors, a protean form that's hard to pin down (except when they're semi-complaining about people on Tumblr misclassifying prose poems). But in an introduction that seems this bold, and which describes the form as "nothing less than the most important new poetic form to emerge in English-language poetry since the advent of free verse," I'd expect a definition not defined by its exceptions. The risk of classification.
For the optimal experience, I'd recommend not reading this book in order. How Hetherington and Atherton envision an introduction, it seems, is morsels for discussion. It's not a great introduction to prose poetry (read the anthologies and collections in the bibliography instead), but an introduction to the concept of prose poetry. In that vein I guess I've answered who Prose Poetry is for: English/Literature/Creative Writing classes. Otherwise, to their credit, they thoroughly summarize their theses in the end:
Prose poems are fragments that resist closure, with a characteristic compression and brevity giving priority to the evocative and the connotative. Prose poetry functions analogically, metonymically, and metaphorically, and frequently explores unseen or unconscious forces. It is often dreamlike, it makes meanings glancingly—laterally indicating issues other than those it explicitly encompasses. It refashions prose for poetic ends, often exploiting the compressed, rectangular paragraph, and sometimes making use of a variety of typographical features to emphasize that it represents no ordinary species of prose. It presents many surprises and unsettles, or makes strange, the reading experience. It moves quickly through its themes, yet its poetic tropes have the capacity to slow the reader’s apprehension of time. Its complex rhythms invigorate its sentences, and it uses visual imagery to present scenes of great immediacy.
December 23, 2024
Having been told that my attempts at flash fiction were actually prose poems, I took this book out of the library to try to figure out exactly what a prose poem is. After finishing I'm really none the wiser.
The book encompasses the worst aspects of why students hate literature classes. The authors write in a dense over-complicated prose--they over label and over explain everything repeatedly until it all becomes meaningless. The technical jargon deprives the writing of its magic. Who cares what you call it? Does the prefix neo really add any insight?
Does the poem speak to you? Do you re-read it to savor the language, the images, the thoughts? They don't really discuss that aspect of the writing at all.
A lot of what they say, over and over with different words, seem obvious--how lineated poetry has become more prose-like, how any kind of prose can be poetic in its rhythm and language usage, and how the use of line breaks creates an appearance and experience that is different than that of a paragraph of sentences. Many of the prose poetry examples they provided to illustrate their points did not interest me all that much. They seemed to me to be neither good prose nor good poetry. Or maybe they were just too bogged down by the dissection and scrutiny to be clearly seen.
The book encompasses the worst aspects of why students hate literature classes. The authors write in a dense over-complicated prose--they over label and over explain everything repeatedly until it all becomes meaningless. The technical jargon deprives the writing of its magic. Who cares what you call it? Does the prefix neo really add any insight?
Does the poem speak to you? Do you re-read it to savor the language, the images, the thoughts? They don't really discuss that aspect of the writing at all.
A lot of what they say, over and over with different words, seem obvious--how lineated poetry has become more prose-like, how any kind of prose can be poetic in its rhythm and language usage, and how the use of line breaks creates an appearance and experience that is different than that of a paragraph of sentences. Many of the prose poetry examples they provided to illustrate their points did not interest me all that much. They seemed to me to be neither good prose nor good poetry. Or maybe they were just too bogged down by the dissection and scrutiny to be clearly seen.
August 2, 2021
For anyone wanting to understand more about prose poetry, this well organised, insightful book is a must. It gives readers a sense of how prose poetry evolved, and, more importantly, the prose poem's potential to express new ideas in new ways. A wonderful book!
March 24, 2025
This book sucked the joy out of prose poetry for me, and so I stopped reading it. I can see that a lot of work went into writing it, so I gave it two stars. However, it is dense and certainly not 'engaging' or 'highly readable'.
August 21, 2021
Though extremely dry, repetitive, and grueling to read, it was also very informative.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews