Novels by Poets

A selections of novels by writers known primarily for their poetry.
Updated October 2, 2022
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Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse
Anne Carson
Paper Book
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award Winner of the QSpell A.M. Klein Poetry Prize Award-winning poet Anne Carson joins the Vintage Canada list with this stunning work, both novel and poem, both...
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
Paper Book
A Special Hardcover Edition to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Publication of Sylvia Plath's Remarkable Novel "It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath's voice in The Bell Jar that make this book enduring in its appeal." -- USA Today ...
The Bone People
Keri Hulme
Paper Book
Integrating both Maori myth and New Zealand reality, The Bone People became the most successful novel in New Zealand publishing history when it appeared in 1984. Set on the South Island beaches of New Zealand, a harsh environment, the novel chronicles the complicated relationships between three...
The Tin Drum
Günter Grass
Paper Book
One of the greatest modern novels, The Tin Drum is the story of thirty-year-old Oskar Matzerath, who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and who, as the novel begins, is being held in a mental institution. Matzerath provides a profound yet hilarious perspective on both German history and the...
Fugitive Pieces
Anne Michaels
Paper Book
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Winner of the Lannan Literary Fiction Award Winner of the Guardian Fiction Award   In 1940 a boy bursts from the mud of a war-torn Polish city, where he has buried himself to hide from the soldiers who murdered his family....
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Rainer Maria Rilke
Paper Book
First published in 1910, Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is one the first great modernist novels, the account of poet-aspirant Brigge in his exploration of poetic individuality and his reflections on the experience of time as death approaches.  A young man...
Hot Milk
Deborah Levy
Paper Book
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, Hot Milk moves "gracefully among pathos, danger, and humor" (The New York Times). I have been sleuthing my mother's symptoms for as long as I can...
Azorno (New Directions Paperbook)
Inger Christensen
Paper Book
One of the men is a writer named Sampel, the other is the main character of his novel, Azorno. All the women are pregnant by Sampel, but which of them is really the narrator? Has someone been killed? Is someone insane? Is the whole story part of Sampel's book, or Inger Christensen's? ...
The Making of Americans
Gertrude Stein
Paper Book
In "The Making of Americans," Gertrude Stein sets out to tell "a history of a family's progress," radically reworking the traditional family saga novel to encompass her vision of personality and psychological relationships. As the history progresses over three generations, Stein also meditates on...
The Enormous Room
E. E. Cummings
Paper Book
In 1917 young Edward Estlin Cummings went to France as a volunteer with a Red Cross ambulance unit on the western front. But his free-spirited, insubordinate ways soon got him tagged as a possible enemy of La Patrie, and he was summarily tossed into a French concentration camp at La Ferte-Mace in...
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong
Paper Book
A New York Times bestseller * Nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction * Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century ...
Augustown
Kei Miller
Paper Book
11 April 1982: a smell is coming down John Golding Road right alongside the boy-child, something attached to him, like a spirit but not quite. Ma Taffy is growing worried. She knows that something is going to happen. Something terrible is going to pour out into the world. But if she can hold it off...
Deliverance
James Dickey
Paper Book
Released for the first time in trade paperback, this is the classic tale of four men caught in a primitive and violent test of manhood. The setting is the Georgia wilderness, where the states most remote white-water river awaits. In the thundering froth of that river, in its echoing stone canyons,...

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