Tick Talk

Five million people sleep “in stacks / of glass and steel” at the beginning of Daniel Cowper’s Kingdom of the Clock. It is six in the morning, and most of the city has not yet awakened to do its business of loving, chasing, and haggling. The novel in verse presents a day in its citizens’ lives parcelled out into twenty-four chapters, each of which encompasses one hour. It is a tight frame in which much happens. The plot includes sex, births, and deaths, to be sure, but also small gestures, like commuters flicking the screens of their phones and the careful unwrapping of a Babybel cheese.

Cowper’s blank verse couplets consist of lines that hover around ten syllables, like an iambic pentameter that has loosened its belt. They are enjambed and propulsive, and their forward motion is strengthened by another formal element: the last line of each chapter is echoed in the first line of the next. There is a breathing or wavelike aspect to the chapters as well, as...