Prose or Problems

There is a new trend in the literature world. What's literature, you ask? Well, it used to be a form of entertainment and education where people used paper and pen and wrote their thoughts. Amazing, I know! So this trend, it's poetry. It seems, even with writing style, things go in and out of fashion. Poetry was created as a form of expression. There are many different types, but poetry, in it's simplicity, was created to write emotions. Good poetry has the ability to pack a lot of emotion into one line. For example, T.S. Eliot wrote, "ash on an old man's sleeve is all the ash that burnt roses leave" (Four Quartets). A reader could ponder a sentence like that for a lifetime.
As you can see, the use of poetry is important when it comes to the more serious subjects of life. Prose in YA have become popular for those writers who have a difficult story to tell. There is the novel "Sold," written about a young girl sold into postitution. There is "Crank," a mother writing about her daughter's addiction to meth. Neither of these tales could have been written in a story format and been successful. Poetry can be a useful tool for an author. That being said, I've started noticing a commonality between YA literature and poetry. It seems that poetry has started walking hand-in-hand with problems.
The use of poetry is a fashion that's wrapspeeding it's way back into literature, but the poetry, problem relationship is a new outfit. And, I am not shy in saying, I think this relationship is an unhealthy one.