Genre Guide – Novels in Verse

In Northern Sámi, the word Ædnan means the land, the earth, and my mother. These are all crucial forces within the lives of the Indigenous families that animate this groundbreaking book: an astonishing verse novel that chronicles a hundred years of change: a book that will one day stand as an essential Scandinavian epic.

A Romeo and Juliet inspired story told across the changing seasons, “Angel & Hannah” holds all of the tension and cadence of blank verse while adding dynamic and expressive language rooted in a long tradition of hip-hop and spoken word, creating new and magnetic forms. The poetry of Angel and Hannah’s relationship is dynamic, arresting, observant, and magical, conveying the intimacies and sacrifices of love and family and the devastating realities of struggle and loss.

The award-winning poet reinvents a genre in a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present.

Anvi, Kate, Bette, Keiko, Gaia, and Day are six queer, mostly trans women surviving and thriving in Brooklyn. Visiting all the fixtures of fashionable 21st century queer society, The Call-Out also engages with pressing questions around economic precarity, sexual consent, racism in queer spaces, and feminist theory, in the service of asking what it takes to build, or destroy, a marginalized community. A novel written in verse, The Call-Out recalls the Russian literary classic Eugene Onegin, but instead of 19th century Russian aristocrats crudely solved their disagreements with pistols, the participants in this rhyming drama have developed a more refined weapon, the online call-out, a cancel-culture staple.

Rochelle wakes from cryostasis to take up her role as engineer on the colony ark, Calypso. But she finds the ship has transformed into a forest, populated by the original crew’s descendants, who revere her like a saint. She travels the ship with the Calypso’s creator, the enigmatic Sigmund, and Catherine, a bioengineered marvel who can commune with the plants, uncovering a new history of humanity forged while she slept. She discovers a legacy of war between botanists and engineers. A war fought for the right to build a new Earth–a technological paradise, or a new Eden in bloom, untouched by mankind’s past. And Rochelle, the last to wake, holds the balance of power in her hands.

In Dayspring, Anthony Oliveira brings to vibrant, glorious life the gospel according to the disciple Christ loved–his companion in the days before the crucifixion, the only instrument that remembers with fidelity his sound. Sacred, profane, and rich with explicit desire and a poetic attention to form, Dayspring weaves electric and heart-wrenching stories of passion, grief, destruction, and survival into a narrative unmoored in space and time.

A young Latinx poet grappling with loneliness and heartache decides one day to bring Tejano pop star Selena Quintanilla back to life. The seance kicks off an uncanny trip narrated by a Greek chorus of gossiping spirits as she journeys through a dead celebrity prom, encounters her shadow self, and performs karaoke in hell. In visceral poems embodying millennial angst, paragraph-long conversations overheard at her local coffeeshop, and unhinged Twitter rants, Lozada-Oliva reveals an eerie, sometimes gruesome, yet moving love story

A bracing novel of work, labor, and collective action, this vibrantly written debut is narrated by a man who runs a high-speed train in France–a story born out of the author’s experience as a real-life train driver. Driver begins as a contemporary apprentice tale: the narrator, a young man from the provinces, comes to Paris and enrolls in a course to become a train driver. As he discovers the train and its workings, from its internal machinery to its operative head, he is transported into a world both technical and poetic, with its own laws and codes, its own specialized language, its heroes and legends, its passions and boredoms, its dangers.

Told through memos, reports, and other detritus of everyday office life, the humans and humanoid crew of a starship narrate a story of mutiny.

Eugene Onegin is a comedy of manners, written in exquisitely crafted verse, about two young members of the Russian gentry, the eponymous hero and the girl Tatyana, who don’t quite connect. It is also the greatest masterpiece of Russian literature–the source of the human archetypes and the attitudes that define and govern the towering fictional creations of nineteenth-century Russia–and one of the most celebrated poems of the world.

In the year 2063, on the edge of the Crater formerly known as Montréal, a middle-aged man and his ex’s daughter search for a cult hero: the leader of a short-lived band named after a forgotten work of poetry and known to fans through a forgotten work of music criticism. In this exuberantly plotted verse novel, Guriel follows an obsessive cult-following through the twenty-first century. Some things change (there’s metamorphic smart print for music mags; the Web is called the “Zuck”). Some things don’t (poetry readings are still, mostly, terrible). But the characters, including a robot butler who stands with Ishiguro’s Stevens as one of the great literary domestics, are unforgettable.

The youngest daughter of Algerian immigrants, Fatima Daas is raised in a home where love and sexuality are considered taboo. Living in the majority-Muslim suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, she goes from unstable student to maladjusted adult, doing four years of therapy – her longest relationship. But as she gains distance from her family, she grapples more directly with her attraction to women and how it fits with her religion, which she continues to practice.

A queer anthem for doomed youth. On the longest night of a Berlin winter, two women sit side-by-side. Both fled the Soviet Union as children, one from Ukraine, and her girlfriend from Russia. As silence weighs heavy between them, decades of Ukrainian and Russian history resurface, from Yiddish jokes, Kyiv’s DIY queer parties, and the hidden messages in Russian pop music, to resistance in Odessa, raids in Moscow clubs, and the death of their friend. As the requiem inside the narrator’s head expands within the darkness of the room, she asks the all-important question: What does it mean to have hope?

This is the story of K: a child put into foster care, a boy brought back to the city, a man who must fight to make sense of his past. Is there hope to be found in a broken mind? Can the pieces of a life come together to reveal an image that’s steady? Episodic, fragmented, full of poetry’s coiled power, “That Reminds Me” is the story of one young man remembering.