The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem

In The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Margaret Atwood rubs shoulders with Claudia Rankine; Lu Xun and Rabindranath Tagore take seats in the family tree above Seamus Heaney and Simon Armitage; and Czeslaw Milosz sits just pages from Eileen Myles.

'A wonderful book - an invigorating revelation ... An essential collection of prose poems from across the globe, by old masters and new, reveals the form's astonishing range' Kate Kellaway, Observer

'A superb anthology . . . it is hard to know how it could possibly be bettered' Daily Telegraph

This is the prose poem: a 'genre with an oxymoron for a name', one of literature's great open secrets, and the home for over 150 years of extraordinary work by many of the world's most beloved writers. This uniquely wide-ranging anthology gathers essential pieces of writing from every stage of the form's evolution, beginning with the great flowering of recent years before moving in reverse order through the international experiments of the 20th century and concluding with the prose poem's beginnings in 19th-century France.

Edited with an introduction by Jeremy Noel-Tod