The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem

A Penguin Classic The prose poem has proven one of the most innovative and versatile poetic forms of recent years. In the century-and-a-half since Charles Baudelaire, Emma Lazarus, Oscar Wilde and Ivan Turgenev spread the notion of a new kind of poetry, this “genre with an oxymoron for a name” has attracted many of our most beloved writers. Yet, even now, this peculiarly rich and expansive form is still misunderstood and overlooked. Here, Jeremy Noel-Tod reconstructs the history of the prose poem for us by selecting the essential pieces of writing, covering a greater chronological sweep and international range than any previous anthology of its kind. Noel-Tod even calls it “an alternative history of modern poetry.” In The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Patricia Lockwood and Claudia Rankine rub shoulders with Margaret Atwood and Adrienne Rich; Allen Ginsberg and Gertrude Stein appear with Lu Xun and Jorge Luis; Czeslaw Milosz sits just pages from Eileen Myles.

About the Author

Jeremy Noel-Tod is a lecturer in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. His literary criticism has been widely published, in the Daily Telegraph, the Literary Review, the Times Literary Supplement, Prospect, the New Statesman, the Guardian and the London Review of Books, and he has been the poetry critic for the Sunday Times since 2013. His books as an editor include the revised edition of the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry (2013) and the Complete Poems of R. F. Langley (Carcanet, 2015).