Sunil Iyengar, "The Colosseum Book of Contemporary Narrative Verse" (Franciscan UP, 2025)

Narrative verse, or poems that tell a story, has existed for millennia, yet the mode of writing has been neglected by literary publishers, editors, and critics in our own time. This anthology reestablishes the vital relationship of narrative verse to a contemporary readership of poetry. It presents a wide range of specimens from twenty-eight poets who were born since World War II and who published their narrative poems over the past fifty years.

Featured poets include Rita Dove, Christian Wiman, Alberto Rios, A. E. Stallings, Bob Dylan, Daniel Mark Epstein, David Mason, Mary Jo Salter, and Dana Gioia, and other exemplary practitioners of the form. In these poems, character, plot, and dialogue turn up as readily as in prose fiction. As John Dryden wrote of Chaucer’s works, “Here is God’s plenty.” Anecdote, fable, myth, biography, thriller, Western, ghost story―these are among the many different genres of tale collected by poet-critic Sunil Iyengar, who introduces each poet and the anthology itself.

Sunil Iyengar is the author of a poetry chapbook, A Call from the Shallows (Finishing Line Press). His poems and/or book reviews have appeared in such periodicals as The New Criterion, Literary Matters, New Verse Review, PN Review, Essays in Criticism, The American Scholar, The Hopkins Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Washington Post. He lives outside Washington, D.C., where he works as an arts research director.

Daniel Moran’s writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network.

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