The book comprises three sections. ‘Beginnings’ reads like a potted history of modern Western poetry: French experiments in free verse; Whitman; Romanticism’s veneration of the fragmentary and the inexpressible; urban life’s sharded rhythms; postmodernism and the neo-surreal; the rise of our ‘prosaic age’. ‘Against Convention’ describes a form that has been and continues to be reactionary, hinging on compression, surprise, suggestiveness, subversion, and a ‘sense of completeness’ derived from an ‘appeal to incompleteness’. That it upsets conventional expectations of ‘lineated lyric poetry’ and narrative prose, the authors argue, earns the prose poem its power to confound. For example, Atherton and Hetherington compare the prose poem’s typically justified margins to a box, but a box that, as Gerry LaFemina puts it, ‘can be anything. Think of the rectangles in your life: the midway booth where you shoot water into clown mouths, the bed you dream in, the gift-wrapped box.’ The final section, ‘Methods and Contexts’, situates and analyses a wealth of contemporary work.

Accessibility need not preclude depth. Though the authors have to introduce fundamentals of criticism – Aristotle on beauty and proportion; Freud’s uncanny; Bakhtin’s chronotope; Kristeva’s intertextuality; Barthes’s punctum – they do so judiciously enough to engage a lay audience without alienating readers better versed in such concepts. What keeps the material absorbing are the examples from prose poems and their critics, many likely to be unfamiliar, even to working poets. Consider how the elementary observation that ‘texts with powerful imagery are, in general, more likely to elicit empathic responses in readers’ lights up in an excerpt from Jenny Gropp: ‘I give you all the trees in my heart, the will of children who curl like waves to lift a shell. Who lift dead fish for the same reason.’ Similarly, to illustrate the function of metaphor and metonymy in the prose poem, the authors quote Kyle Vaughn’s gorgeous ‘Letter to My Imagined Daughter’: ‘If I could fold this lonely year in half and then in half again, until it finally became next year, I would keep folding until I came to where you are.’

The book could have been titled How to Read Prose Poetry. Again, Atherton and Hetherington strike a balance between generic instruction – on empathy, for one – and more complex commentary about interacting with texts. Especially impressive is how, in understated prose, the authors borrow Immanuel Wallerstein’s term ‘TimeSpace’ to sketch the prose poem’s equal weighting of time and space, and the altered approach to reading this demands. One evocative analogy likens such an approach to ‘an intense and intimate encounter with another person’.

As a ‘protean and hybrid’ form, the authors argue, the prose poem lends itself to articulating ‘the kinds of experiences that are neither complete nor fully coherent – nor entirely resolvable’. One such experience is racial marginality and oppression: Atherton and Hetherington convincingly explain how, in Samuel Wagan Watson’s ‘Parallel Oz’, ‘the absence of line breaks … captures a sense of the pressing, almost claustrophobic nature of the postcolonial condition’. Another such experience is women’s sexuality: ‘In prose poetry, words and ideas often radiate or ramify outward, challenging the kind of traditional narrative structure that builds in a relatively linear fashion toward a denouement and conclusion. It offers different possibilities for readerly pleasure.’

Most broadly, the authors hold that the prose poem’s brevity, openness, and reliance on the sentence rather than the line make it an ideal contemporary form, well adapted to ‘broken encounters and fractured narratives, new technologies, and profoundly uncertain and sometimes opaque subjectivities’. From Rimbaud to Lyn Hejinian and on to Patricia Lockwood’s Twitter poems, Atherton and Hetherington chart a course to the present literary moment that installs the prose poem at the helm of innovation. Dozens of writers, helpfully categorised, are quoted or recommended; Prose Poetry: An introduction is a sourcebook for further engagement with the mode. Moreover, by featuring Australian and Anglo-American examples, the book represents a rare critical bridge between local poets such as Bella Li and Kevin Brophy and international luminaries like Maggie Nelson and Ocean Vuong.

Of course, affording prose poetry the ‘positive characterization’ it deserves can require the authors to label conventional poetry and prose as lacking. They claim, for instance, that the poetic line conveys a ‘sense of formal resolution and … closure’ unsuited to articulating contemporary life. In the same vein, the prose poem allegedly establishes ‘a new, secure place for poetry among the demotic and the vernacular’, as opposed to lineated poetry’s elevated, élitist overtones. Dissenters might reply that the line affords greater openness than the ‘boxed-in’ paragraph, or that entering an ostensible piece of fiction only to encounter a poem’s leaps, illogic, disjuncture, and compression may, ironically, be a less demotic experience than reading verse that holds true to expectation. But this is the point that Atherton and Hetherington make so well: the shoe has been on the other foot for a long time. Fresh perspectives beckon. How better to voice an era of misunderstanding, after all, than via a form that, since the beginning, has made misunderstanding a virtue?