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

Feb 13, 2026

Sunil Iyengar, poet, critic, and editor of The Coliseum Book of Contemporary Narrative Verse, talks about reviving narrative poetry for modern readers. He discusses how narrative verse differs from lyric forms, selection rules for the anthology, and surprising inclusions from Frost to Bob Dylan. Short, lively tales and the ethics of inhabiting voices also come up.

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INSIGHT

Disjunctions Versus Narrative Momentum

Iyengar locates a stylistic current—poets of disjunction like John Ashbery—that values non sequiturs over narrative momentum.
That tendency produces lyric brilliance but often avoids delivering the causal arc readers expect from stories.

ANECDOTE

Hardy As A Narrative Model

Iyengar highlights Thomas Hardy as a template: Hardy balanced narrative storytelling with careful line craft and irony.
He compares Hardy's narrative poems to Edwin Arlington Robinson and recommends revisiting Hardy's work.

INSIGHT

Frost As The Chief Exemplar

Robert Frost serves as a chief exemplar for many contemporary narrative poets because he combines conversational blank verse with cinematic scene-setting.
Frost's narrative poems lodge in the ear and model how poetry can sustain plot and character.

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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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