Short Stories Written by Poets
Poets & Authors ; Authors & Poets
Creative writing will always be known as flourish in the poetry community. The beautiful way words can be read, written or spoken helps craft meaning and emotion. Using those talents as a poet to expand to short stories can lead to a masterpiece. These short stories written by poets allow us to enjoy their passion and creativity in another format. Valued yet somehow under appreciated, these collections should be on everyone’s TBR.
After you finish that poetry collection you are currently reading, take one of these for a go. Venturing out to new things is half the fun of being an artistic person is it not?!
5 Collections Poetry Lovers Should Read:
Coexistence: Stories
by Billy-Ray Belcourt
A grieving mother calls out to her faraway son. A student forgoes the lurid appeal of dating apps in exchange for a painter’s love. The anonymous voices of queer native men converge amid violent eroticism. A man just out of prison balances the uneasy weight of family and freedom, while a professor returns home to conduct research only to be haunted by a dark specter. The stories and voices in Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut story collection are buoyed by philosophical undergirding, poetic demand, and the complex relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Belcourt pirouettes through the short story form in his signature staccato voice, imagining a range of characters from all walks of native life. He is an expert in celebrating the ways Indigenous peoples make total conquest impossible.
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil
by Ananda Lima
Strange, intimate, haunted, and hungry–Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is an intoxicating and surreal fiction debut by award-winning author Ananda Lima.
At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life and she writes stories for him about things that are both impossible and true.
Lima lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil where they’ll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of people who are not dead. Once there, she speaks to modern Brazilian-American immigrant experiences-of ambition, fear, longing, and belonging–and reveals the porousness of storytelling and of the places we call home.
A great next read for fans of Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties and V. E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
Recommended reading by Chicago Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Kenyon Review, and more!
Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories
by Gennarose Nethercott
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK
“Real magic, real delight, doled out generously in the shape of wistful, ferocious, this-world-but-better stories.”–Kelly Link, author of White Cat, Black Dog
The stories in Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart are about the abomination that resides within us all.
Two teenage girls working at a sinister roadside attraction called the Eternal Staircase explore its secrets–and their own doomed summer love. A zombie rooster plays detective in a missing persons case. A woman moves into a new house with her acclaimed artist boyfriend–and finds her body slowly shifting into something specially constructed to accommodate his needs and whims. A pack of middle schoolers turn to the occult to rid themselves of a hated new classmate. And a pair of outcasts, a vampire and a goat woman, find solace in each other, even as the world’s lack of understanding might bring about its own end.
In these lush, strange, beautifully written stories, GennaRose Nethercott explores human longing in all its diamond-dark facets to create a collection that will redefine what you see as a beast, and make you beg to have your heart broken.
Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere
by Anastacia-Renee Anastacia-Renee
In this bold hybrid collection of poetry, flash fiction, and Afrofuturism sci-fi, the award-winning interdisciplinary writer and author of Side Notes from the Archivist explores what happens when god is a Black woman in a town. What happens when there are multiple universes in the middle of nowhere?
And what if in each universe there reigned other Black woman gods? One million versions of god, and one million saints to watch over us? And this Black woman god has a place here on earth?
Moreover, These are just a few of the questions Anastacia-Reneé asks in this daring and mind-bending hybrid collection. Hers is a universe of striking variety. There are monsters, nontraditional saints, witches, zombies, the couple in the apartment next door. The wise elders from down the block, and gods watching over us all–as well as community and connectedness.
Ninetails: Nine Tales
by Sally Wen Mao
“A sumptuous and lively collection, leaping from story to story in much the same way a fox does — surprisingly, gracefully, and with impressive aim. I loved this book.” – Kelly Link, Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of Get in Trouble and The Book of Love
A fox spirit avenges a teen girl by seducing her abuser. A shapeshifting woman finds herself chased through the woods by fox hunters. Meanwhile, an assassination plot called Operation Fox Hunt unfolds against the last Queen of Korea. Chinese migrants hoping to make new lives as “paper children” in America find their pasts. As well as their hopes for the future. Embodied in the foxes that haunt the harbor in 1900s Angel Island. In the nine tales of Ninetails, acclaimed poet Sally Wen Mao reimagines the fox spirit from Asian folklore. The fox spirit as a shapeshifter, shaman, and seductress. All as an icon of vengeance, solidarity and liberation.
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