5 Must-Read Books for Poets (That Aren’t Poetry)
Before we get to the good stuff, this month I’m hosting TWO workshops. I would love to see you there!
August 24 at 1 PM EST — Dream Interpretation poetry workshop. You can buy a one-time ticket at that link OR become a paid Substack subscriber and join for free.
August 31 at 2 PM EST — Monthly roundtable poetry workshop. These roundtables are for paid Substack subscribers only. Upgrade (to monthly or annual) to join.
While I’ve always written poetry, I actually started out publishing fiction and nonfiction (like this one-sentence story here or this essay that was originally published in Word Riot). So, I began my writing life mostly reading those genres, and in that time, I learned a lot about the architecture of a pretty sentence.
The truth is, your poems will thank you for wandering outside the poetry section. The world is full of books that can sharpen your language, deepen your imagery, and make your inner editor swoon—without a single stanza. Here are five you should bump to the top of your list.
1. Jesus’ Son — Denis Johnson
If you want to understand how to write a sentence that punches your reader in the gut and lingers forever, Denis Johnson is your guy.
This short story collection follows a drifter through addiction, county fairs, emergency rooms, and dive bars—all with syntax that sings nostalgia and longing like you’ve never heard before. Every line is so beautiful you’ll want to tattoo it on your arm.
2. Nobody Belongs Here More Than You — Miranda July
This is the book equivalent of finding a diary on a park bench and realizing it’s yours, but from another timeline.
July’s stories are awkward, wild, and quietly absurd—in other words, they understand you. Her earnest voice reminds you that sometimes the best way to reach the truth in your poems is to go in sideways, wearing a spandex leotard and pretending you don’t care.
3. Catching the Big Fish — David Lynch
David Lynch doesn’t explain things so much as drop them in your lap. This slim book is part memoir, part meditation manual, and part strange uncle giving you cryptic life advice over pie and black coffee.
It’s about creativity, intuition, and diving deep enough into the subconscious that the fish you catch aren’t sardines but leviathans. Poets, take note: the best lines are often swimming far below the surface.
4. The White Album — Joan Didion
Didion could write a grocery list and make it feel like a cultural epic. In this essay collection, she dissects California in the late ’60s and early ’70s with a scalpel made of glass.
Her sentences are cool and precise, her images devastating in their clarity, her perspective unmatched. Perspective should be mined from the deep well of the self but—here’s the hard part—still echo the universal. And the other hard part? Not being preachy or on the nose. Poets, Didion can help with that.
Fun fact: Some of the opening paragraph of The White Album is one of five epitaphs in my book, Good Girl and Other Yearnings.
5. To the Lighthouse — Virginia Woolf
Plot? Barely. Atmosphere? Enough to drown in.
Woolf’s novel is a shimmering portrait of time, memory, and the way people orbit each other like moons. It’s a lesson in the music of thought, how sentences can ebb and flow like tides, pulling you under without warning. If you want your poems to carry emotional weather systems inside them, this is your storm manual.
Poets and poetry lovers. what’s on your must-read list that isn’t poetry?
Oops I mean epigraph* 😆
I'm a big Claire Keegan fan, I'd recommend her quirky short story collection 'Antartica.'