Do you know what month it is? | Working Other Genres into Crime Fiction by Faye Snowden

For the past several years I’ve waited with anticipation for April, and because this *age redacted* Grandma is twelve at heart, I go around asking everyone I encounter, ‘Do you know what month it is?’ in a riff off the old Geico commercial, the one with the camel talking about hump day. My husband groans. My sons pat me on the head and say, ‘That’s wonderful, Mom’ while furiously completing an application to Shady Pines. I’m quite sure those two are conspiring to put me in some version of a Shady Pines old folk home when I reach my dotage. (Yikes, maybe that’s now.)

Photo by Yana Yuzvenko on Unsplash

Let me see if I can explain my excitement every time April rolls around.

I’ll start with James Dickey’s poem, The Hospital Window. When I was first getting together with my husband, I recited this line on dates, or dinner at home, even in the movies (especially the soapy romcoms he made me watch): I have just come down from my father. My poor soon-to-be husband didn’t love it. He wasn’t the only victim. My sister-in-law got it, too. That line was just so damn good, the lilt of it. Okay, don’t like Dickey? How about the first line of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table. You read it and know this poem is about to take a serious turn.

Let’s not forget Ai (no, not AI. Come on, focus). I’m talking about Ai, the poet known for her stark and bloody monologues. Take a look at The Kid. When the poem opens, a young boy is smacking the flat tires of an old pickup with a tire iron. The monologue continues with him murdering his family. It ends:

In the house, I put on the old man’s best suit

and his patent leather shoes.

I pack my mother’s satin nightgown

and my sister’s doll in the suitcase.

Then I go outside and cross the fields to the highway.

I’m fourteen. I’m a wind from nowhere.   

I can break your heart.

 

There are more, of course, Gwendolyn Brooks’ The Bean Eaters, Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Mornings, Kim Addonizio’s What Do Women Want (hint: not a man), poems with images so sharp you’re bound to get cut. 

As for the question we’re answering this week: do I work other genres into my crime fiction? Absolutely, positively, most definitely yes. I love poetry so much that my main character Raven Burns can’t help but love it. Her serial killer father doesn’t love poetry, per se, but he does have a fondness for doggerel including The Owl and the Pussycat. And he is quite fond of quoting nursery rhymes. 

Coming, April 14, 2026

I’ve used poems as clues and in character development. I’ve turned to poetry to help me craft a mood or perfect an image or when my drafts start to sprawl and I need to be concise. Looking to explain something important in the story, but only have one or two lines to get it done? Read some poems. Having trouble showing and not telling? I head over to The Poetry Foundation at poetryfoundation.org where all of the poems I’ve discussed in this blog are hosted. I’ve downloaded the app and regularly use the spin feature to find poems on disappointments and celebrations, doubt and science, humor and aging. 

Have you guessed why I’m so excited about April? April is National Poetry Month! Every year, I delight in posting a poem a day on social media to celebrate.  So, I ask again, Do you know what month it is? If you do, join me. Read some unforgettable poems to improve your writing, and so you, too, can annoy your friends and family.