Do you want to read more poetry but not sure where to start?
For April, poetry month, I’ll be sharing various poetry recommendations to help you find poetry you enjoy and just read more poetry.
Sometimes it can feel overwhelming to read poetry, especially if you’re not used to reading it. You may not know where to start or who to read first.
One easy way to ease yourself into reading more poetry is to start by reading poetical novels. These are books that may be written in a prose style poetry (looks like paragraphs not stanzas), or may just have very lyrical writing. These books may follow a story or may be a collection of vignettes/short passages that flow together.
Poetical novels can give you the rhythm and lyrical prose often seen in poetry, while also providing more concrete content or plot. This allows you to gain appreciation for how the words flow together without getting lost in trying to understand what is being said.
Sometimes poetry can be very abstract with much of the meaning left up to interpretation. This is both the beauty of poetry, and sometimes a huge source of frustration for those new to poetry. However, poetical novels can be a nice stepping stone into the world of poetry.
Keep reading for a list of five poetical novels that you can read this poetry month.
Five poetical novels
Here’s a list of five books considered to be poetical novels that span across the past 100 years.
- The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
- The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
- Bluets by Maggie Nelson
- Citizen by Claudia Rankine
- The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
I’ve listed them in order of their publication.
Keep reading to find out more about each one.
The Prophet (1923)
by Kahlil Gibran
- Year Published: 1923
- Storygraph Categories:
fiction, classics, philosophy, poetry, inspiring, reflective, fast-paced - Importance:
One of the most translated books
The Prophet is a collection of 26 prose style poetry fables written by the Lebanese-American poet and writer Kahlil Gibran.
This novel has been translated into over 100 languages, making it one of the most translated books in history. It has never been out of print, and is one of the best selling books of all time.
This year, the book turns 100!
Summary (from Goodreads):
Kahlil Gibran’s masterpiece, The Prophet, is one of the most beloved classics of our time. Published in 1923, it has been translated into more than twenty languages, and the American editions alone have sold more than nine million copies.
The Prophet is a collection of poetic essays that are philosophical, spiritual, and, above all, inspirational. Gibran’s musings are divided into twenty-eight chapters covering such sprawling topics as love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, housing, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death.
Links:
- You can find out more on:
- Access the book for free on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/58585
The House on Mango Street (1985)
by Sandra Cisneros
- Year Published: 1985
- Storygraph Categories:
fiction, literary, young adult, emotional, reflective, fast-paced - Importance:
Considered a modern classic of Chicano literature
This novel is considered a modern classic of Chicano Literature. It was met with much praise from the Hispanic community for the novel’s realistic portrayal of the Hispanic experience in America.
The novel won the American Book Award in 1985, and is commonly included in school curriculums across the USA. It’s an influential coming of age novel, with themes of race, sexuality, identity, social class, and gender integrated throughout.
However, due to the inclusion of sensitive subject matter (like puberty, domestic violence, sexual harassment and racism) it has been banned from several school curriculums.
Summary (from Goodreads):
Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught everywhere from inner-city grade schools to universities across the country, and translated all over the world, The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero.
Told in a series of vignettes – sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous–it is the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers.
Links:
- You can find out more on:
Bluets (2009)
by Maggie Nelson
- Year Published: 2009
- Storygraph Categories:
nonfiction, essays, memoir, poetry, emotional, reflective, medium-paced - Importance:
Hybrid prose and poetry, considered a cult favourite
This book by Maggie Nelson is a hybrid of prose and poetry (often called lyric essay or prose poetry) focused on Nelson’s experience with the color blue, and has been considered a cult favorite.
It’s a personal meditation on the color blue, along with Nelson’s experience of lost love, grief and existential solitude.
The work is a “formal experiment” whereby Nelson has arranged 240 “propositions”. Each proposition is a prose poem, that may be a sentence or a short paragraph, with none longer than 200 words.
Summary (from Goodreads):
Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color…
A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists.
Links:
- You can find out more on:
Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)
by Claudia Rankine
- Year Published: 2014
- Storygraph Categories: nonfiction, essays, poetry, race, challenging, emotional, reflective, fast-paced
- Importance:
Critique of racism and visibility in America, won multiple awards
This book by American poet Claudia Rankine is both a book-length poem and a series of lyrical essays considered a portrait of racial relations in America.
It’s also a form of mixed media, as the seven chapters include both text (poetry) and media (images & artwork). Rankine’s goal was to “render visible the black experience”through use of multiple mediums.
The book has won multiple awards, including the:
- 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry,
- 2015 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry,
- 2015 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award for Poetry,
- 2015 PEN Open Book Award
- 2015 Forward prize for Poetry Best Collection
- 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry
- 2017 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry.
Citizen also commercially successful as it was a New York Times Bestseller in 2015.
Summary (from Goodreads):
A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine’s long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.
Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named “post-race” society.
Links:
- You can find out more on:
The Poet X (2018)
by Elizabeth Acevedo
- Year Published: 2018
- Storygraph Categories: fiction, contemporary, poetry, young adult, emotional, inspiring, reflective, fast-paced
- Importance:
Winner of multiple awards: National Book Award, Michael L. Printz Award, Pura Belpré Award & others
A young adult fiction/poetical novel that follows a teenager coming of age in Harlem. This novel has been very well received and won multiple awards.
Summary (from Goodreads):
Fans of Jacqueline Woodson, Meg Medina, and Jason Reynolds will fall hard for this astonishing New York Times-bestselling novel-in-verse by an award-winning slam poet, about an Afro-Latina heroine who tells her story with blazing words and powerful truth.
Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking.
But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers—especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about.
With Mami’s determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. So when she is invited to join her school’s slam poetry club, she doesn’t know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out. But she still can’t stop thinking about performing her poems.
Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent.
Links:
- You can find out more on:
Final thoughts
These five books are obviously such a small selection of the options out there. But hopefully this gives you some suggestions of where to start and how to get started reading more poetry.
Have you read any of these books? Do you have any poetical novels that you would recommend?
I would love to hear your thoughts and recommendations in a comment below!
