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
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. Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the...
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
Paper Book
One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels A realistic and emotional novel about a woman battling mental illness and societal pressures written by the iconic American writer Sylvia Plath. "It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath's voice in The Bell Jar that...
The Bone People
Keri Hulme
Paper Book
The powerful, visionary, Booker Award-winning novel about the complicated relationships between three outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage "This book is just amazingly, wondrously great." --Alice Walker In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin...
THE TIN DRUM
Grass, Gunter
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....
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...
Leaving the Atocha Station
Ben Lerner
Paper Book
Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry...
The Enormous Room
E. E. Cummings
Audiobook
"Of all the work by young men who have sprung up since 1920 one book survives-The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings."-F. Scott Fitzgerald The most notable work of fiction from our most beloved modernist poet, The Enormous Room was one of the greatest-yet still not fully recognized- American literary...
Chelsea Girls
Eileen Myles
Paper Book
Available once again for a new generation of readers, the groundbreaking and candid coming-of-age novel in-real-time from one of America's most celebrated poets that is considered a cult classic. In this breathtakingly inventive autobiographical novel, Eileen Myles transforms their life...
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
"You're hooked, you feel every cut, grope up every cliff, swallow water with every spill of the canoe, sweat with every draw of the bowstring. Wholly absorbing [and] dramatic."--Harper's Magazine The setting is the Georgia wilderness, where the states most remote white...

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