How to Use prose poem in a Sentence

prose poem

noun
  • It is mostly written in prose poem with large spaces between phrases that act as line breaks.
    — Elizabeth Hoover Special To The Star Tribune, Star Tribune, 16 Apr. 2021
  • At times, the novel feels like a prose poem but also somewhat slow and overwritten.
    — Diane Scharper, National Review, 20 Aug. 2020
  • Sylvie tells her absent lover, in the prose poems of this startlingly intimate début.
    — The New Yorker, 15 Oct. 2019
  • His narratives are often closer to prose poems than to short stories, much less novels.
    — The New York Review of Books, 9 May 2019
  • Here are ten prose poems that showcase the exciting diversity of the genre.
    — Patrick Dundon, JSTOR Daily, 9 Apr. 2026
  • The decision to end the story with a kind of prose poem about the life of the lake was both intuitive and technical.
    — Willing Davidson, The New Yorker, 23 Feb. 2025
  • In some of Cook's 100 succinct prose poems, the flip-flopper is the poet's mind.
    — Jim Higgins, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 16 Oct. 2017
  • During the past few years, Rafferty has been focusing on prose poems.
    — courant.com, 18 July 2019
  • The prose poem is written as annotations to a diagram of a handgun.
    — Krys Malcolm Belc, Vogue, 3 Feb. 2026
  • Algren wrote a dreamy, unstable prose poem about the city, people, the corruption, the pessimism, his own most of all.
    — chicagotribune.com, 7 Sep. 2020
  • This prose poem by Laura Da’ juxtaposes the loss of land and Shawnee culture with the birth of the speaker’s son.
    — Laura Da’ Victoria Chang, New York Times, 1 Sep. 2022
  • This lyrical piece for soprano soloist with orchestra sets a prose poem by James Agee, in which a young boy recalls the sights and sounds of a lazy summer evening.
    — Jessica Rudman, courant.com, 9 June 2018
  • Enter the prose poem, a genre-defying form that emerged from the nineteenth–century French Symbolists.
    — Patrick Dundon, JSTOR Daily, 9 Apr. 2026
  • Janet Mock contributed a manifesto of sorts, while Yrsa Daley-Ward’s ad is a prose poem.
    — New York Times, 9 Mar. 2021
  • These starkly succinct poems and prose poems map a powerful constellation of becoming.
    — Diana Marie Delgado, New York Times, 5 Sep. 2019
  • Whatever the case, the letter by Melania that was made public in the wake of the Pennsylvania shooting was nothing less than a prose poem.
    — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 25 July 2024
  • Caldwell’s landscapes are paired with longtime collaborator Bernard Welt’s prose poem, a few snippets of which are printed on the gallery walls.
    — Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, 17 June 2022
  • This final collection is made up of headlong prose poems that amount to sly — and heartbreaking — metaphysical parables about mortality.
    — New York Times, 20 Aug. 2019
  • Still, Carney’s lyrical piece, a sort of prose poem-flash fiction hybrid, written from the point of view of an unborn baby, illustrates a womb space at once protective and cage-like.
    — Manuel Muñoz, Literary Hub, 11 Sep. 2025
  • Together, these pieces illustrate Harrison’s range and his ease with various formats, from lyric poems to meditative suites to prose poems.
    — Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post, 24 June 2019
  • The result is a book that reads like a prose poem, at once sublime, profane, intimate, philosophical, hilarious and, eventually, deeply moving.
    — New York Times, 30 Nov. 2021
  • This stunning arrangement of prose poems and short lyric essays constitutes both a memoir of the author’s life as student and teacher and an insider’s critique of our educational system.
    — David James, Anchorage Daily News, 28 Dec. 2019
  • Very quickly O'Meara's 113-word prose poem became a communal beacon of hope, attracting the attention of Oprah and opera and thousands more.
    — Nora Krug, Star Tribune, 8 Feb. 2021
  • Very quickly O’Meara’s 113-word prose poem became a communal beacon of hope, attracting the attention of Oprah and opera and thousands more.
    — Washington Post, 10 Dec. 2020
  • Much of Kaufman’s work was prose poetry, and Woodberry’s film, too, is a devoted, impassioned prose poem, in which biography and history are fused with imaginative and illuminating renderings of Kaufman’s life and art.
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 6 June 2020
  • Based on the Dylan Thomas prose poem of the same name, published in 1952, the film lovingly and mournfully depicts the boyhood Christmastime of an old Welshman, tenderly and a tad mischievously embodied by Elliott.
    — Sheldon Pearce, New Yorker, 21 Nov. 2025
  • The production was largely a collaboration between Rylance and prose poet Louis Jenkins, who wrote more than 600 prose poems during his lifetime, many of which were adapted into the film’s screenplay, written by Rylance and Lichtscheidl.
    — Andreas Wiseman, Deadline, 29 Apr. 2026
  • His 1987 prose poem, Memory for Forgetfulness, takes place during the 1982 shelling of Beirut, using the narrator’s personal experiences of fear and isolation as a stand-in for the historical experiences of the Palestinian people.
    — Kevin Dickinson, Big Think, 8 Aug. 2025
  • Idra Novey and Garth Greenwell team up on translations of Spanish poet Luis Muñoz, and Nightboat Books delivers Antonio Ochoa’s engaging bilingual prose poem sequence, Small Sargasso Mountains.
    — Literary Hub, 1 May 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'prose poem.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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