Novel, Poetry, Both? Max Porter and "Grief is the Thing with Feathers"

Is Grief is the Thing with Feathers by British writer Max Porter a novel, a collection of poems, both a novel and poetry, neither one, or some new literary genre we haven’t seen before?

It’s officially classified as a novel, but it doesn’t read like any novel you’ve read before. It moves, jumps, shifts, and occasionally leaps between three narrative voices – Dad, Boys, and Crow.

Physically, the text looks like a poetry collection. Sort of. It’s divided into three parts (like Caesar’s Gaul?) but contains no chapters, unless you count a poem as a chapter (I don’t). It begins with a corrected version of an Emily Dickinson poem.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.