Introduction

If you ever edit an anthology of prose poems, people will ask you: “What’s the difference between a prose poem and flash fiction / micro-essay / other sub-genre?” For The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018) I had two rules: it had to be written without line breaks, and it had to have been published as poetry. The second was necessary because it stopped me, for example, weighing chunks of Virginia Woolf on the poetry scales.

In general, though, my attitude is: you tell me! To think of genre as the answer, rather than the question, takes the fun out of reading in-between things. So for this personal anthology, I thought I would choose ‘short stories’ that sit somewhere between prose and poetry…