Natasha Sajé's “The Art of the Novel” appears in her 2004 collection Bend. The poem's speaker is an intellectual literary critic with a longstanding love of literature who ultimately chooses not to allow literature to influence her personal romantic aspirations. In twelve free-verse couplets, she discusses love themes from novels, and she lists many of the heroines of classic fiction. Because she finds too much tragedy, turmoil, and unrequited love in literature, she chooses to bid farewell to the heroines and to novels in general. She decides instead to forge her own path in life.

The poem meditates on love, independence, self-assurance, and the appropriate place of fiction in real life. Sajé peers into the mind of a speaker who has come to a crossroad in her life and who chooses risk over familiarity. Despite having spent so much of her life immersed in the world of literature, she finds herself with a clearheaded view of the world around her, and she chooses to engage that world instead of retreating into the familiar but fictional literary world.