A verse novel uses the form of a novel to tell a book-length story, but instead of being written in prose, it is written in poetic verse. Some of the oldest surviving pieces of literature are long verse stories. These ancient epics often told heroic myths about the civilizations the authors lived in. For example, Virgil’s Aeneid is a 2000-year-old epic poem about the founding of Rome. In the modern era, verse novels became more character-focused and critical of society. Alexander Pushkin’s 19th-century work, Eugene Onegin, follows a man’s slow moral corruption by society and wealth. The verse forms of these canonical works vary: The Aeneid is written in dactylic hexameter and Eugene Onegin is in iambic tetrameter.

Thomas and Beulah (1986), the collection in which “Dusting” appears, opens with instructions on how to read the book: “These poems tell two sides of a story and are meant to be read in sequence.” Thomas and Beulah has more in common with contemporary story-driven books of poetry than with the older canon of verse novels. The poems in Thomas and Beulah are unmetered and unrhymed, and they vary significantly in length.