The Best of Both Genres
The Rise of the Novel in Verse
Meg Eden Kuyatt, Hannah V. Sawyerr | April 2024
Outside the literary community, poetry is often seen as a strange beast: indecipherable, obtuse, irrelevant. Many believe they are not smart enough for poetry. Some students equate poetry with Shakespearean sonnets and approach writing in the medium with trepidation, afraid of doing it wrong. While misconceptions about poetry limit its readership, exciting experiments by some authors make poetry more accessible. One such experiment is the novel in verse.
Novels in verse bridge the gap between poetry and prose. Colby Cedar Smith describes the form as “a marriage between the brevity of a singular poem and the narrative arc of a novel.” Individual poems function as scenes, but together build an emotionally driven narrative. It is a form where character and imagery can hold equal precedence. As Gabriela Pereira, founder of DIY MFA, states, “it must be both verse and novel.”
While novels in verse are used by writers in all age categories, the form is particularly powerful—and rising in popularity—in the kidlit market, particularly targeting readers aged eight to eighteen. For educators, they are a tool to engage emerging readers with a lower word count and accessible white space. They help support Common Core curricula objectives and introduce readers to poetic concepts like line breaks, stanzas, and anaphora. For young readers, novels in verse are engaging with their themes of identity, emotionally charged subjects, and authenticity of voice. Novels in verse have received great merit in recent years, including Rajani LaRocca’s Red, White, and Whole being a 2022 Newbery Honor Book, and Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X winning the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, a Carnegie Medal, and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for Fiction and Poetry.
But don’t let the commercial appeal of these books deceive you. The kidlit market has been expanding, welcoming the intersection of both high-concept plots and literary craft. More and more writers in the kidlit field carry MFAs, and it shows on the page. Novels in verse are not just lineated prose—they are a craft challenge with literary merit, and an opportunity for writers to resonate with adult and younger readers alike. The intersection of prose’s narrative structure with poetry’s tight intimacy allows for uniquely resonant emotional journeys and sharp, powerful exploration of difficult or personal material. Kidlit novels in verse create an interesting space for writers to examine and reenvision one’s childhood with all the writing tools at their disposal.
A novel’s power is its strong narrative, but the power of poetry is its ability to recreate an emotional landscape and give an intimate understanding of the speaker’s world. Director and choreographer Bob Fosse said of musicals, “The time to sing is when your emotional level is just too high to speak anymore, and the time to dance is when your emotions are just too strong to only sing about how you feel.” The time for verse, it could be argued, is when the emotions are just too strong to adequately capture in prose. When asked how to determine whether a story should be told in verse or prose, writer Amber McBride explained that it depends on what is propelling the story. It is emotion, she says, that primarily drives her to verse.
As a teenager, I (Hannah) was initially drawn to the art form of poetry because of its ability to hold emotional vulnerability. As a performance poet, I often heard my coach encourage my teammates and me to find what it means to “get free.” The idea of getting free is commonly found in the world of slam poetry and refers to using your voice in order to speak fearlessly or critique the oppressive systems that bind us. By getting free, we wrote angry poems, sad poems, joyful poems, and used poetic devices including repetition, rhythm, and rhyme to tell our stories. Though all of our poems varied in tone and subject matter, they were consistently emotionally resonant, because poetry, especially free-verse poetry, allows an author to take creative risks on the page and prioritizes the emotional over the narrative, as opposed to prose novels that often demand traditional narrative arcs. Novels in verse challenge us to marry the emotion often carried in poetry with the long-form storytelling of novels.
Novels in verse are often compilations of the most emotionally resonant parts of a story. By leaning on poetry, these novels invite readers to go on an emotional journey with the character, rather than experience these stories as just a consumer. In Tami Charles’s Muted, Charles explores the #MeToo movement and exploitation within the music industry through the voice of seventeen-year-old Denver. In the novel’s opening poem, Charles writes, “I’m gonna say some stuff / you ain’t gonna like. / But you’ve done some stuff / I didn’t like either. / So maybe you’ll get it.” Although the use of the word “you” in this poem refers to Denver’s father, Papi, by deliberately choosing to begin the novel with short line breaks and the second-person point of view, Charles is able to directly draw the reader into the narrative and create a storytelling environment that is personal and intimate. In my (Hannah) debut novel, All the Fighting Parts, the opening poem begins, “The morning I spent in a police station, / remembering all that I have forced myself forgetful, / is a morning I felt smaller than a whisper.” By beginning the novel with an intimate first-person point of view description of Amina’s feelings, I am inviting the reader on an emotional journey with her.
Novels in verse foster this power of vulnerability and intimacy not only in their individual poems but in their premises. In Dante Medema’s The Truth Project, the protagonist, seventeen-year-old Cordelia, grapples with her identity when she learns that her father is not who she believes he is after taking a DNA test for her senior project. Candice Iloh’s Every Body Looking amplifies the voice of university freshman Ada as she explores her sexuality and wrestles with her past and her mother’s addiction, all while adapting to her first year away from home. Both of these emotional, poignant novels have word counts significantly lower than traditional novels, but both possess engaging plots, backstories, and character arcs. Though condensed, novels in verse still give readers the emotional, impressionistic brushstrokes of story, even if they contain fewer details than prose novels.
Verse novelists must constantly ask themselves, How can I tell a novel-length story with one-third of the words used in a prose novel? Like prose novels, novels in verse vary in length. While prose novels in the kidlit space typically range from 30,000 to 60,000 words for middle grade and 60,000 to 100,000 words for young adult, novels in verse typically range between 15,000 and 40,000 words. While a verse novelist has fewer words at their disposal, they are still expected—and fully able—to tell a complete narrative from start to finish. This demands meaningful, precise economy of language and a focused, tight narrative.
Some novels in verse accomplish this by zooming into a specific, short window of time. Jason Reynolds does this in Long Way Down. The novel in verse follows Will, who contemplates revenge after witnessing the murder of his brother. The novel grapples with difficult feelings of grief and anger while taking place entirely on one elevator ride. On his way to the floor of his brother’s killer, Will is visited by a different person connected to his brother on each elevator stop, complicating his perspective and plan. Despite this compressed period of time, readers still get a satisfying narrative, engaging with Will’s emotional arc as he receives new information about his brother.
Others, like Nikki Grimes’s Garvey’s Choice and Reem Faruqi’s Golden Girl zoom in by condensing the literal real estate they use on the page. Garvey’s Choice is told entirely through tight tanka poems, and Golden Girl uses short poems that focus on only the most critical details of the moment. As Rajani LaRocca, author of the Newbery Honor Book Red, White, and Whole, describes, “Verse uses fewer words and leaves more space on the page, so readers have more space to process what happens emotionally.”
On the blog Project Mayhem, Caroline Starr Rose writes, “As an author who writes both verse and prose, one striking difference is how I experience the writing itself: Prose feels to me like a movie. Verse feels like a collection of related photographs grouped together in an album. Both tell stories, but in different ways.” Novels in verse include poems that form a full narrative, but oftentimes, the individual poems found in novels in verse can stand on their own. Photographs may foster their own independent memories, but when grouped together in a photo album, they encourage us to “fill in the gaps” by using our own memories and experiences. Similarly, novels in verse encourage readers to engage with a story by leaning on their own emotional experiences to create an interactive relationship to the text.
In my (Hannah’s) novel in verse, All the Fighting Parts, the protagonist, Amina, wrestles with her silence after experiencing an assault at the hands of a trusted and respected clergy member. The sparse language and curt line breaks in the poems after the assault carries the story of Amina’s “real-life silence” in the narrative. The poetry after Amina’s assault is sparse and uses more white space. This shows both the gap in her memory and serves as a break for the reader during the more emotionally heavy parts of her novel. One of the poems after Amina’s assault begins, “that night at the church / my spirit broke inside / all the quiet parts of me / a m p l i f i e d.” Although the lines in this particular poem are relatively short compared to others in the novel, this poem uses white space and sprawls across the page, mimicking my main character’s scattered thinking after the assault.
When I (Meg) describe the arc of a poem to my students, I tend to describe it as an upward trending diagonal line. In graduate school, my professor described it with a different image: a circle that, just as it’s about to close off, diverges into a new, surprising direction. Either of these models demonstrates the way a poem escalates and ends in an “aha” moment or realization. In both, the realization is “earned” through the earlier establishment of shape—the images, details, sounds, and patterns employed throughout the poem. The poem crafts a certain train of thought, a certain argument that we as readers follow, until seemingly dissimilar things are discovered to perhaps not be so dissimilar after all.
While traditional fiction, in contrast, is often described by the bell curve of the three-act structure (starting with a problem, escalating to a climax, and resolving to a conclusion), the novel in verse allows for an interesting intersection of these two models. A novel in verse is still propelled forward by narrative beats: a protagonist is thrown out of their ordinary world into a new world, where they must make choices or face meaningful consequences. But a successful novel in verse cannot merely take on the form of the bell curve, focusing on action’s rise and fall. And perhaps it should be argued that no novel can solely rest on the laurels of the bell curve—it must also consider the protagonist’s arc, which can look more like a poem’s than a novel’s.
For much of a novel, what the protagonist wants shapes their choices and, in turn, the progression of their narrative. Typically, the way the protagonist goes about trying to get their want is flawed—the wrong solution to the problem. But at what the Save the Cat model describes as the “lowest of lows”—after the protagonist has made mistakes and as a result, seemed to lose everything—the protagonist has to reevaluate their choices. They begin to realize that what they wanted is not necessarily what they needed, and they redirect their goal. Act 3 then shows the protagonist going after what they need the right way, the revision to their previous plans of action.
This narrative realization—described in Save the Cat as the “Break into 3”—is a poetic “aha” moment. It is a moment that is arrived at from the buildup of purposefully placed details in the environment, choices, and characters around the protagonist. A good “aha” moment may initially be surprising, but it is earned, employed in such a way that we can look back to see how they arrived at this point. Both the protagonist—and we as readers—are challenged to interrogate and reconsider our perspective on the world. The power of poetry makes the reader’s participation in this “aha” moment even more poignant in the novel in verse.
Like prose, the poems in a novel in verse collectively create this narrative arc. Each individual poem contains the narrative arc of a traditional novel, leading to a moment of realization—and those realizations propel the protagonist to action, building to a collective narrative arc. Because of this, in a novel in verse, the writer must be careful to consider both arcs: the arc of the poem and the arc of the novel.
The narrative of the novel in verse also creates a situation and stakes for the emotion and interiority of the voice to shine. For the protagonist, Selah, in my (Meg’s) novel in verse Good Different to find her voice to communicate her needs as an autistic person, she needs the inciting incident of a sensory meltdown from a girl braiding her hair, and the resulting stakes of the school’s pressure to expel her for “acting out.” Without the external forces, Selah would continue solving her problem the wrong way: by wearing her normal mask and holding her feelings inside. But because of the school’s pressure on her behavior, and her inability to keep up with the expectations around her, Selah must stop and process what’s happening. She must realize that her bottling up isn’t working, and in this “aha” moment discovers that her poems are a way that she can communicate her needs with the world around her. It’s this synergy of narrative and verse that makes novels in verse so compelling to read and write, but also to explore.
In School Library Journal, Amanda MacGregor writes that “verse novels are voice-driven, often intimate feeling, and seem uniquely suited to tackling complex or emotional subjects.” Because of verse’s tendency toward emotional expression and realization, novels in verse are a particularly effective medium for exploring difficult subject matter and the highly personal.
While novels in verse sometimes employ third-person perspective—and occasionally first-person plural—they tend toward first-person, confessional modes. The intimacy of this perspective allows the reader to know the speaker from what they say, think, perform, and hide from others in ways that may not be as natural or possible from a more distant point of view. Nothing is hidden from the reader, and this vulnerability, when used effectively, can allow us as readers to deeply connect with the protagonist. This also allows readers to see the inner workings of a worldview or perspective that may differ from their own. Together, the vulnerability and intimacy invite empathy from the reader, which is particularly crucial and necessary for stories from marginalized experiences.
The first-person confessional mode invites the novel-in-verse writer to mine stories and details from their lived experience. Poetry thrives off the specificity of what Ezra Pound describes as “the natural object,” making personally inspired novels in verse particularly powerful. Both writers of this article came to writing as young people through poetry, a place where our emotions were not dismissed, but invited, encouraged, and validated. Through writing poetry, we have found a space to explore our personal and lived experiences—and connect to others who also resonate with those experiences.
We come to verse when prose is inadequate—whether that’s due to the emotional level of engagement with the subject or because we as writers need a space to explore and seek answers for ourselves. The novel in verse allows the author to step away from plot toward introspection and interiority. Verse, in its pursuit of realization, privileges exploration. Individual poems that come after significant moments can allow space to breathe, for the protagonist to reflect on what they just experienced and figure out where to go next. While these moments exist briefly in fiction, they are given much more prominence in the novel in verse, letting the reader reflect and absorb the material for themselves. By using poetry as a vehicle for storytelling, novels in verse hold space for vulnerability and tackle difficult subject matter.
Novels in verse only work with characters thrown in situations that demand a poetic response. Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X centers on a young woman having to find her voice away from her well-meaning but controlling mother. Laura Shovan’s The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary follows a fifth-grade class that creates poems to speak out against their school’s demolition. Good Different follows Selah, an autistic girl who must learn to advocate for her accommodation needs after reaching a melting point and unintentionally hitting a fellow student. All the Fighting Parts follows sixteen-year-old Amina as she learns to reclaim agency after experiencing sexual assault within a church community.
Good Different started when I (Meg) wrote a poem in response to an overstimulating day. As an autistic person, I find poetry to be the sanctuary I go to when I need to slow down, process, and cope with confusing, overwhelming experiences. As I wrote, I remembered a time in grammar school when a girl began braiding my hair without my consent. But in the process of writing, the speaker diverged from my own memory and became her own character. In response to the braiding, she hit the girl. This moment surprised me, and made me start asking questions: Who was this girl? Why did she hit her classmate? What happens as a consequence of this? These questions made me realize there was a larger narrative beyond the single poem, and in exploring that narrative, I began to unpack the intense emotions and overwhelming sensory experiences of my everyday life as a neurodivergent person in a neurotypical world. I didn’t know I needed to write about my autism (I wasn’t even sure I was autistic—I was formally diagnosed later in the drafting process), but through exploring the personal in poetry, I found not only Selah’s discoveries and realizations but my own. Poetry became my mouthpiece.
Author Laura Shovan argues that children are drawn to novels in verse because “poetry mimics the way that children interact with speech and conversation , [and] is closer to the childhood experience of language. It is not filtered through the adult lens of expository prose. Everything is not spelled out or readily apparent.” It is this lack of precise answers or didacticism, the gaps that poetry leaves for us to think about long after reading, that makes this form so powerful.
Disaster and trauma can leave us speechless, unable to fathom what has happened or why. A prose narrative can’t simply explain or organize our hurt; what has happened can’t always be processed so linearly. But through the tools of poetry, writers and readers alike can find a way to put words to our emotions. The structural flexibility of poems gives space for finding one’s voice, and in turn to reflect, process, and begin finding healing and hope.
Kidlit novels in verse are not only critical for providing a space for kids to be introduced to poetry as a medium that can be personal, accessible, and meaningful to them, but for readers of all ages. With novels in verse, kids can see they are not alone in their experiences and, even more so, that poetry is for them. If the novel-in-verse structure can help make poetry accessible and engaging to readers —and writers—who might not otherwise reach for it, then we should hope it will continue to rise in popularity in the kidlit community and beyond.
Meg Eden Kuyatt is a 2020 Pitch Wars mentee and teaches creative writing at colleges and writing centers. She is the author of the poetry collection Drowning in the Floating World (Press 53, 2020), which won the 2021 Towson University Prize for Literature, and children’s novels, most recently the middle-grade novel in verse Good Different (Scholastic, 2023), a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selection. Find her online at megedenbooks.com or on Twitter at @ConfusedNarwhal and on Instagram at @meden_author.
Hannah V. Sawyerr was recognized as the youth poet laureate of Baltimore in 2016. Her spoken word has been featured on the BBC’s World Have Your Sayprogram, as well as the National Education Association’s “Do You Hear Us?” campaign. Her written word has been published by ESSENCE, gal-dem, and xoNecole. She holds a BA in English from Morgan State University and an MFA in creative writing from The New School. Sawyerr is an English professor at Loyola Marymount University and lives in Los Angeles, California. Her debut novel All the Fighting Parts was a 2024 William C. Morris YA Debut Award finalist and a Walter Dean Myers Award Honor Book.
