The Books Briefing: When Poets Write Novels

Chloe Aridjis is not a poet, but her novel Sea Monsters functions much like a poem, gaining its meaning not from plot but rather from vivid images that blend together and shift in meaning as the book progresses.

​Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas.

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What We’re Reading

(Mengwen Cao)

Going home with Ocean Vuong

“In a way, Vuong works this same magic through his poetry, and now, his novel; he builds a world that draws from his own life and, in turn, makes the reader’s experience more real, more beautiful, and more our own.”

📚 On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong

📚 Night Sky With Exit Wounds, by Ocean Vuong

(SARAH BODRI / THE ATLANTIC)

Souvankham Thammavongsa on the inner lives of children

“Both poetry and fiction require discipline and rigor and attention. But when writing fiction, I try to make sure it doesn’t lean on what I’ve done in poetry. The fiction should be distinct. The writing is always a surprise.”

📚  “Edge of the World” from the collection How to Pronounce Knife, by Souvankham Thammavongsa

(MAKEBA RAINEY / STEPHANIE IFENDU)

Elizabeth Acevedo’s work is a welcome rarity in young-adult fiction

“Acevedo’s work, as a whole, is a project of rigorous, interdisciplinary citation. The author was a poet and an English teacher before she was a novelist, and an aspiring rapper before she found her way to poetry slams, but her first exposure to the comfort and challenge of storytelling came from the myths her mother recounted during Acevedo’s childhood.”

📚 The Poet X, by Elizabeth Acevedo

📚 With the Fire on High, by Elizabeth Acevedo

(ALEXEI VELLA)

Boy, uninterrupted

“The implicit bid of the book is that exploring myopic white male monologuists, simmering with rage in the Midwest in the late 1990s, might shed light on today’s America.”

📚 The Topeka School, by Ben Lerner

(CATAPULT)

The strange beach novel that would make Mallarmé proud

“Sea Monsters derives little energy from what happens to Luisa, or from how she changes during her travels. Instead, it works like a poem, gathering steam through image, repetition, and metaphor.”

📚 Sea Monsters, by Chloe Aridjis

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. The book she’s currently reading is Middlemarch by George Eliot.

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Kate Cray is an assistant editor at The Atlantic.