Something In Nothing - a verse novel?

I was having coffee with a friend of mine this morning and she said “You don’t make it easy for yourself, Zoe. Every collection is so different structurally.” First there was Owl Unbound, a conventional poetry collection of distinct poems, then there was Fool’s Paradise a poem for multiple voices or verse play, and now there is Something In Nothing.

Something In Nothing weaves together the narratives of a number of fairytale characters to form a story. These narratives are made up of multiple poems spread through the collection. Something In Nothing is probably best described as a verse novel. This novel has a beginning, a middle and end.

I use the word “weave” carefully. There are two poems (towards the beginning and towards the end) called "Tapestry". The tapestry is both physical (a damaged tapestry in a locked room) and symbolic (the story itself made of several threads). The image above is of part of a spreadsheet I used in writing the collection. It plots the story’s threads, both of characters and of themes.

Someone told me the other day that having read the collection from beginning to end, they then read only the thread that features Baba Yaga. This fascinated me, because when first I conceived Something In Nothing, I wrote it as a piece with html links to allow readers to do just that – to follow the stories within the story.  

Nevertheless to see the whole tapestry the collection should be read linearly, like the fairy tales that so influenced me. If then you want to look closer, you can

take a thread and pull on it.