Novels in Verse for Grown ups
In celebration of National Poetry Month, here are a wide variety of novels-in-verse for adult readers. (Created April 2023)
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Red Doc>
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing. A continuation of the author's previous verse novel Autobiography of Red, following the characters in later life, but in a different style and with changed names.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Watercolor Women, Opaque Men
A series of stories explores the lives of those neglected and denied by society's status quo.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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The Heart's Traffic
Here the father is temporary, the mother is dead-alive and girls are writing tiger-legends through sestina, haibun, and the lost letters that must be reinvented if we can understand this new American body.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Here Is the Beehive
After discovering that her married lover has been killed in an accident, estate lawyer Ana Kelly, alone and undone, seeks friendship with the person who she once thought of as her adversary and opposite, but who is now the only one who shares her pain--Rebecca, her lover's widow.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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The Last One
Drawn from the author's experiences growing up in a Paris banlieue, a powerful, lyric debut that explores the diverse, often conflicting facets of her identity-French, Algerian, Muslim, lesbian.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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The Call-out
Visiting all the fixtures of fashionable twenty-first century queer society--picnics, literary readings, health conferences, drag shows, punk houses, community accountability processes, Grindr hookups--The Call-Out os a modern novel of manners that gives readers access to a vibrant cultural underground.
Format: Book
Availability: No Longer Available
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Charlotte
A prose poem tribute to the tragic life and transcendent art of Holocaust victim Charlotte Salomon depicts a young World War II artist from Berlin who embraces life in the aftermath of a devastating suicide before escaping to France.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Deep Wheel Orcadia
Astrid is returning home from art school on Mars, looking for inspiration. Darling is fleeing a life that never fit, searching for somewhere to hide. They meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station struggling for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the community behind.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Hourglass
Exquisitely crafted, richly imagined, and as funny as it is moving, Hourglass is an unusual and uniquely told love story. Turning time upside down, it combs the wreckage of personal heartbreak for something universal and asks what it means to lose what you love.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Forgotten Work
A love story about fandom, an ode to music snobs, and a time-tripping work of speculative fiction--in verse.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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