Suspiciously Specific #20: Poets Writing Fiction...
My Suspiciously Specific book recommendations have always been about niches in fiction that have a suspiciously high chance to capture my attention, or for me to love a book that lives within them. The latter is the case for this specific niche. I love the art of language and the various way that authors use it to tell their stories. A well-told story is one thing, but one that is told in prose that's an artform in itself is something on a completely other level. Leave it to poets to master the art of language. And leave it to poets who make the switch from poetry to fiction, to carry that art over with them.
Here are 10 of my favourite examples of fiction books written by poets, where the prose alone would be reason enough to pick them up.
genre: literary fiction
page count: 288 pages
synopsis: Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes palpably real, even rational—as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic.
genre: magical realism
page count: 304 pages
synopsis:
Nephthys Kinwell is a taxi driver of sorts in Washington, DC, ferrying ill-fated passengers in a haunted car: a 1967 Plymouth Belvedere with a ghost in the trunk. Endless rides and alcohol help her manage her grief over the death of her twin brother, Osiris, who was murdered and dumped in the Anacostia River. A stunning tale of a forgotten quadrant of Washington, DC, and the ghosts that haunt it, infused with element of both Afro-American an Egyptian mythology.
genre: magical realism
page count: 302 pages
synopsis: Mrs Death has had enough. She is exhausted from spending eternity doing her job and now she seeks someone to unburden her conscience to. Wolf Willeford, a troubled young writer, is well acquainted with death, but until now hadn’t met Death in person – a black, working-class woman who shape-shifts and does her work unseen. Enthralled by her stories, Wolf becomes Mrs Death’s scribe, and begins to write her memoirs.
genre: speculative fiction
page count: 432 pages
synopsis: A woman enters a tattoo-parlor with an unusual request: a final tattoo to be added to her already extensive collection of them; a single line that connects them all. Throughout the tattooing process, she takes the two female tattoo-artists working on her on a journey “across the map of her life”; each tattoo revealing a story of her past and weaving an integrate pattern of a turbulent life lived.
genre: autofiction
page count: 224 pages
synopsis:
Death and the Gardener is a very intimate and understated portrait of a father and son in the final days leading up to (and following) the formers passing. Our unnamed narrator recounts memories of his dad at various stages of his life, many of them taking place in the beloved garden that his father tended to.
genre: magical realism, horror
page count: 245 pages
synopsis: A female chemist returns to her childhood home after the death of her father. In the small town of Letort, Pennsylvania, her family has lived for six generations—bound by twisted folk wisdom and an uncanny kinship with the crows that loom over their land. Back in the grim farmhouse of her youth, Agnes is drawn into the strange legacy she tried to leave behind. When she discovers an abandoned nest in the barn, she becomes consumed by a scientific—and deeply personal— to breed a crow large and intelligent enough to carry her daughter, Mina, to a freedom Agnes has never known herself.
genre: literary fiction
page count: 246 pages
synopsis: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation.
genre: blend of autofiction and non-fiction
page count: 326 pages
synopsis: Doireann Ni Ghriofa sculpts essay and autofiction to explore inner life and the deep connection felt between two writers centuries apart. In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem. In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with its parallels with her own life, and sets out to track down the rest of the story.
genre: horror, dystopia
page count: 285 pages
synopsis: Though they hardly know each other, everything seems to be going perfectly—from the home they're building together to the ring on Norah's finger. But survival in this world is a tricky thing, the air is thicker every day and illness creeps fast through the body. And the earth is becoming increasingly hostile to live in. Fortunately, Easton Grove is here for that in the form of a perfect little bundle to take home and harvest. You can live for as long as you keep it—or her—close.
genre: literary fiction
page count: 332 pages
synopsis:
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.
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