What I’ve Been Reading This Week:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Two books that, well, mess with form. One book I’ve read a couple times before, another book that I bought at AWP and had finished before I even got home. Two books by writers I admire a lot, writers who do punk shit like “be in bands” or “start zines.” Two books that really make me want to write, which is impressive, because one is creative nonfiction, and CNF does not usually inspire that in me. I’m talking, of course, about Dreaming Of You<\/em> by Melissa Lozada-Oliva and There Is News Along The Ohio River<\/em> by Beth Gilstrap. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Dreaming Of You<\/em> by Melissa Lozada-Oliva: <\/strong>this is my third time reading this novel in verse, which should be, like The House On Mango Street<\/em>, a signal that I am revising my own novel in verse. The more I read this book, the more it reveals itself to me. There\u2019s so much going on, but each character becomes clearer and clearer. This is a ghost story, this increasingly looks like a cautionary tale about Millennial Nostalgia. Hey, maybe Larry Ellison can buy Selena\u2019s back catalogue, too. Have Bari Weiss remaster it, have the AI team at Paramount insert her into Season 2 of Twin Peaks<\/em>. That\u2019s what people want, right? The 80s and 90s repeating over and over until we\u2019re dead?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyway. Thanks to AWP, I\u2019m now flush with a bunch of verse novels, prose poem novels, prose poem memoir, all sorts of hybrid books. So I want to semi-explore how the novel and verse forms are borrowing from each other. There is story here, yet each \u201cchapter\u201d is a poem of 1-3 pages. Sometimes, there are multi-paragraph prose poems. Different characters talk, there is a Melissa Lozada-Oliva narrator and an omniscient narrator, there is a poetic You who is a real character and also a composite of readers. This is a ghostly world, a world with blank space around the margins. A lot happens off-page, and sometimes that\u2019s because the Melissa narrator doesn\u2019t know what\u2019s going on\u2014she doesn\u2019t actually talk to Abraham Quintanilla, but his email tells months of story. The epilogue poems really expand on the universality that can be gained from getting hyper specific, which feels like something a good verse novel needs. That feels close to what I want to get at with my novel in verse: a lyric poem using detailed specificity to gesture at universality, but with each poem forming a plot with identifiable characters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There Is News Along The Ohio River <\/em>by Beth Gilstrap:<\/strong> a memoir told in prose\u2014what? Poems? Fragments? Single-page stories? The chapters all begin with \u201cthere is news along the Ohio River\u2026,\u201d which is an organizing sentence that always sets a scene. In terms of “how the poetic aspect and memoir aspect inform each other,” I really like this organizing sentence. It lends the feeling of reading a diary of nature walks. Of course, nature walks are often a jumping off point for thoughts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n No, our narrator is not a shore watcher for barges. Our narrator is a woman in her early middle age dealing with the first throes of being separated from her husband, moving 500 miles away from the only life she\u2019s ever known, and figuring out where to go from here. She\u2019s doing a lot of thinking by the river, a lot of observing other people. Don’t mistake her for passive. She plants a garden, the circus comes to town, she has a funeral for a baby bunny. She grows. She speaks with her husband\u2014I won’t spoil exactly how. <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"two](\"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/IMG_7080-1024x768.jpg\")