thaliarchus
@thaliarchus
spiders
@spiders asked:

is there anything else like cosmic warlord kin-bright out there that you know of? other cool queer stories told in the medium of longform poetry? modern stuff, not old stuff like beowulf, the odyssey, metamorphoses, etc?

after finishing book x, i am just so hungry for more stories told in this manner. and like the ancient epics are cool and all, i do enjoy reading them... but there's always the awareness that i'm only able to engage with it through the layer of a translator.

i want more things that feel a little more relatable, that i can engage with firsthand, that make me laugh or whimper sapphically or fill me with awe in the way CWKB does. and it'd be cool to venture outside of the realm stories about wars and battles, see long poems that focus on different topics.

but i have no idea how i would even go about finding more modern longform narrative poetry, let alone more queer epic poetry. itch's search is so difficult to use, just throwing words i'd hope bring up this sort of thing doesn't even bring up CWKB, which i only found by word of mouth

any reading (or finding) suggestions?

To be honest, I don't know many exercises in anything like the same vein; if lots of people were doing this sort of thing in high-profile ways, I wouldn't be writing, because I'd be busy reading everything else! I suspect that here and there, below the radar, others out there are beavering away, but this just isn't the sort of activity that makes it into our collective systems for publishing and promoting books. Also, the day job keeps my mind stuck in the past, and it's possible that someone who studies contemporary long-form poetry would know of more examples.

I can think of just a couple of recent things which might in some way be relevant:


pontifus
@pontifus

Maybe worth looking into Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red. Verse novels are also very much a thing in the YA space, so there's that, depending on how willing you are to read about teenagers.


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in reply to @thaliarchus's post:

This is making me ruminate on how the medieval corpuses (corpi? corpeuse?) that captivate me are all mostly in prose...would a story in modern style 'expanded realism' prose be inauthentic to them and be fundamentally modern, or would a story attempting to emulate their breezy, list-loving style come off as mere surface-level archaism or lose something in not having the devices of their original language at hand...this isn't a plea for you to immediately and perfectly have an answer it is just making me Ruminate, on what constitutes authenticity in homage